I came across an interesting paper “Time as a Network Good” which looks at how both employed and unemployed people feel about the weekends.
Intuitively we might expect people working the standard Monday-to-Friday routine would enjoy not having to go to work. But actually both employed and unemployed people apparently report looking forward to, and being happier during, weekends a similar amount.
So it’s not just “I don’t have to go to work” that makes weekends fun.
The authors' hypothesis as to the explanation relates to happiness being a product of spending time with other people, and in general more people have time free to do that at weekends . Both employed and unemployed people spend more time socialising at weekends.
I read this also as another nail in the coffin of sentiments along the lines of “employed people are right to be jealous of all the time not at work that unemployed people have”. Whatever the media or political myths may be, on average, unemployed people are less happy than those in work, at least in societies such as the US and UK today.
(Caveat: so far I only read the abstract.)