Posting times don't give away Spain's NEETs

Posting at odd hours: a NEET marker or cheap prejudice?

Does the time someone posts on social media reveal whether they work or not? A widespread forum theory holds that anyone posting on weekday mornings or in the small hours is, almost certainly, a NEET (not in education, employment or training). But the argument falls apart on its own.

Shift workers, night-shift employees, people on sick leave, on holiday or simply suffering from insomnia also post at those hours. What looks like a pattern of idleness is in fact an X-ray of the diversity of working and personal lives. The belief reduces the complexity of the labour market to an office-hours cliché that bears no relation to the reality of millions of workers.

The myth of the regular schedule

The mental schema is simple: anyone not working at 10 a.m. is unemployed. It overlooks the fact that 15% of employed people in Spain work shifts (according to INE data), and that many others have flexible hours, are self-employed or work atypical schedules. It also hides the fact that the digital leisure of retirees, students and remote workers takes place across a wide range of time slots.

The content creator paradox

It is striking that some of the most active users at odd hours have produced discussion threads that, according to participants, "changed the world as we know it". Whether that is an exaggeration or not, creativity and productivity do not keep office hours. One might ask whether the real NEET is the one who judges the value of a message by the time it was posted.

It is hard not to see some irony in trying to assess someone's maturity or labour-market integration from the timestamp on their posts. Reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to fit that mould: there are employees who post at four in the morning and idlers who only write at two in the afternoon. Perhaps the sensible thing is to judge the content, not the stopwatch. But that requires, precisely, stop watching the official narrative and starting to read.