In a world where AI is taking on an increasing share of repetitive tasks, there’s a higher premium on the unique perspective, identities, and experiences that knowledge workers bring to their jobs from outside of work. However, Americans are participating less in the activities that enrich these attributes.
Research suggests that engaging in a hobby or activity after hours can improve workplace creativity, a key competitive differentiator for workers in the age of AI. However, Americans are spending more free time watching TV and scrolling social media than socializing, playing games, reading or playing sports.
There is also ample research to suggest that a healthy family life and strong community can contribute to workplace skills, knowledge and values, yet we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic where over a fifth of Americans report feeling isolated. Research also shows that psychologically detaching from work improves mental health and well-being, yet work is expanding beyond the traditional nine-to-five boundary.
Finally, research has found that establishing a strong personal identity separate from your job title contributes to workplace resilience, yet the majority of workers define themselves through their work.
Despite the evidence that a robust personal life can help develop certain professional capabilities—and a broad acknowledgement that those capabilities are increasing in value because of AI—most workers are engaging in less of those activities.
Work-Life Symbiosis
The conversation surrounding the relationship between work and life often focuses on the potential challenges they create for each other, but researchers are coming around to viewing the relationship as more symbiotic.
Ravit Heskiau-Ludwig, an associate professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, says there are three main categories of resources that carry over from the workplace into the home, and vice versa.
“One is knowledge and skills . . . when you engage at work you learn new skills and expertise that you can utilize outside of work,” she says, adding that the same transfer happens the other way round. “If you engage in some type of volunteering, or even a family experience, you acquire different types of skills that you can utilize in a work setting.”
The second attribute that tends to spill over is emotional well-being, whether positive or negative. “It’s not just the stress and the anger and the frustration; it’s also when you’re happy and cheerful,” Heskiau-Ludwig says. “When you go to work, you bring that [attitude] with you.”
Finally, Heskiau-Ludwig says both work and home can help build up or break down our self-esteem. “When you engage in different experiences and you do things successfully, it really strengthens your self-esteem, your self-perception, and that can help you in another life domain,” she says.
Mastering Your (NonWork) Domain
Spending hours achieving a new high score in a video game, competing in a trivia night or finishing a crafts project might seem entirely separate from your professional ambitions, but the two may actually be linked.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte say there could be a strong connection between nonwork accomplishments, or “mastery experiences,” and improved workplace performance.
“We’re looking to see if people who have more of these experiences in the evening feel more confident the next day at work and whether that allows them to perform better,” says Ryan Grant, an assistant professor of psychological science at UNC Charlotte. “The preliminary unpublished data suggests that it does.”
Researchers have already established that mentally detaching from work improves recovery and next-day performance. Grant’s forthcoming research suggests that engaging in activities after hours that not only distract from work but also foster a sense of accomplishment can have an even greater positive impact on the job.
“If it’s providing you this sense of achievement or makes you feel confident—or you just enjoy the activity, and it gives you positive emotions—that helps restore some of the energy you lost at work,” Grant says. “Depending on the hobby there could also be social benefits—for example, if you’re in a run club or playing a team sport—because doing things with other people satisfies that need to feel connected and related to others, which is really critical.”
Doing activities with others also helps develop interpersonal and communication skills, Grant says.
Engaging in hobbies after hours may be even more beneficial to workaholics, who tend to struggle the most with leaving work at work, Grant says. “The idea is that doing more activities that subsume your attention—that are more active and require you to focus on them—help workaholics stop ruminating, detach, disconnect from work. And that actually forces them to recover.”
Being More Than Your Job
When your sense of self-worth, social life and purpose are tied to your job, minor career challenges can feel existential. Having hobbies and interests, strong social ties, a healthy family life and/or a supportive community can improve your workplace resilience.
In a 2023 Pew Research study, however, 39% of workers said their career is extremely or very important to their overall identity, and another 34% said it is somewhat important.
Today, this resilience is particularly important, given the changes AI has wrought to the job market. According to research from the global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI has been the primary driver behind 101,743 job cuts, or about 23% of all terminations thus far in 2026.
Grant explains that workplace disruptions will fall harder on those who tie their sense of self-worth to their jobs. “People aren’t doing things outside of work to cultivate those identities,” says Grant. “I think that’s going to become even more important because of AI.”
He also fears that increasing workplace expectations caused by the rapid pace of AI innovation makes it harder for knowledge workers to establish a sense of self unrelated to their careers.
“As AI becomes the norm these work outputs become more homogenized, so it’s a question of how I can put my unique spin on things to make my work outputs better, and that’s cultivated by just doing things outside of work,” he says. “I think it’s going to be more important for people, especially as technology progresses, to really cultivate that identity outside of work, and be intentional about it.”
At the same time, many of the institutions, activities and spaces where people build those nonwork identities are in decline. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend just 35 minutes a day socializing, down from 41 minutes a decade ago. By comparison, they spend more than two and a half hours watching TV.
Americans are also less likely to be married or have children than at any other point in the nation’s history. Volunteerism rates are also down despite high levels of interest, with most Americans citing a lack of spare time; as is religious participation and interaction with neighbors. These declines ultimately make Americans more reliant on their jobs for more than just a paycheck.
“One clear message from the research is that when your sense of self isn’t entirely fused to your work, it is easier to weather setbacks at work, because you have all these other sources of self-worth to draw on,” says Brent Reed, an assistant professor of psychological and organizational science at UNC Charlotte. “It’s not just the self-worth, but greater confidence, higher levels of energy—the research is pretty clear that those resources you build fulfilling those nonwork identities have benefits on your performance and engagement at work.”
Nowhere To Hide
American workers are likely investing less in their lives outside of work—and overall well-being—at least in part due to growing work demands and blurring work-life boundaries.
According to a recent study by Miro, an AI-powered workspace provider, a third of American knowledge workers frequently attend after-hours meetings, up from 23% in 2024, and roughly 60% attend after-hours meetings at least once a month. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index also found that the average worker sends and receives more than 50 messages outside of business hours, nearly 20% work on weekend mornings, and 5% respond to emails Sunday evening.
“Even your watch now gets pings from work, so there are more opportunities for work to seep into your nonwork spaces, which would suggest that detachment is more difficult than it has been in the past,” says Reed. “The fact that we see more municipalities and countries either considering or implementing these ‘right to disconnect’ policies suggest that detachment is becoming more challenging.”
Studies have found that organizations that are subject to “right to disconnect” laws—which prohibit employers from requiring employees to work after hours—enjoy increased employee satisfaction, productivity and profitability.
But it’s not just the rise of remote work and the proliferation of digital communication tools that have made it harder for workers to enjoy their downtime; it’s the combination of these capabilities with a work culture that equates presence with effort.
According to a 2025 study, managers believe workers are more productive after they’ve detached from work. Those same managers, however, deem workers who are less responsive after hours as less committed and less promotable, in what the authors refer to as the “detachment paradox.”
“The things that AI still does not do quite as well—creative work, original work, judgment—you need more mental capacity to do those tasks, so being able to detach and restore your resources are going to become more important,” says Reed. “There’s a scarcity happening simultaneously with an increase in value.”
