There is no shortage of statistics detailing how much time the average human spends on a given activity. The most reliable tend to be established along national boundaries: Americans spend around two hours per week in a grocery store; Austrians 82 minutes per day visiting friends; and the Irish lead the world in time spent volunteering and caregiving, doing so for roughly 132 minutes each day.

It’s tempting to think that these statistics can give an image of the values and priorities of a given culture. Americans, for example, spend only 63 minutes per day eating and drinking, while the French spend more than twice that time at the table and consume far fewer calories. But other national truisms don’t really bear out: Yes, Americans lead the developed world in hours worked annually (1,757), but that is only about three more hours per week than the famously balanced Swedes.

Similar surveys—many of which are commissioned as a form of viral marketing—promise to reveal something essential about the way we spend our free time. The annual Nielsen Total Audience Report, with relentless punctuality, informs us that we spend far too much time in front of screens (the average has risen to 12 hours, 20 minutes per day in the US). Reebok tells us that we will spend around 117 days of our lives making love. Kodak, bending their brand identity to a curious place, found that British men spend roughly 45 minutes each day gazing at women. Even something as innocuous as saying goodbye to people at parties has been totaled up (two days a year).

It is hard to read some of these statistics without a sense of protest. Some seem to cement clichés, and all of them can reduce the ebb and flow of daily pleasure, pain and meaning to a simple number. Averaged statistics about sleep cannot tell us who is dreaming richly, just as “screen time” cannot account for the difference between playing Candy Crush or watching Citizen Kane.