Let's not even throw childcare into consideration here. Childcare blows your energy and time out of the water all by itself, yet we still ask 8 hours a day from parents.
People miscount calories like you're saying with time, so I'd say that's accurate, but no one is really forcing you to eat the overportioned, oversalted and oversugar'd foods from restaurants these days (USA perspective). Work is definitely forcing you to spend the time you do otherwise you quickly go homeless.
I work 9-10 hours a day. Could I physically squeeze in an Another hour and half of chores or socializing than I do now? Sure. Is that going to make my life better and more fulfilling? No.
But for many people I know, the answer would be yes. They want to do PTA or whatever.
Unfortunately the answer I've come to is "I don't know how to stop, and I have nothing else valuable to replace it with."
I have made great strides in the last 12 months on the second part, but the first part is still hard to move past.
In what context? At work? If a more established coworker was "mentoring" me about how much work I was getting done and wanting detailed info about how I spend my time outside of work, I'd lie and act confused about it too.
The time is there, if you're willing to use it. You have 16-18 hours every week day (depending on how much you sleep).
I wake at 6am, work out until 6:30 or 7 (depending on the day) then cleanup and head to work, where I arrive around 8am. I leave around 4:30pm and get home no later than 5:30pm (if there's an accident on the route home). So this is the largest portion of my day and eats up 11.5 hours on a bad day, but 11 normally.
That leaves me with 4.5-6.5 more hours in the evening for everything else. That's actually a lot of time if you're not wasting it. 2-3 hours with my family every night and 1-2 hours doing school work or TA'ing. And since I go to bed at midnight, that leaves me with 1.5-3.5 hours to do whatever else (more time with the family or wife most likely, or housework).
And weekends there's a glut of time. In 18 hours of waking time, I can do a 2 hour ride, 2 hours of yard and house work, and say 4 hours (max) of school work. I still have 10 hours for family, friends, or myself.
Modern people are just spoiled and largely delusional.
I had a bad work day yesterday but compared to anything else I would have been doing 50 years ago it was absolutely nothing in terms of stress or energy.
I hear this repeated a lot on the Internet, but in real life I do things during the week and meet up with a lot of other adults with jobs and commutes for them.
This came up a lot when I was mentoring younger engineers. Every time we did a deep dive into their daily routine, they had a lot of unaccounted for time. They’d list their work day and commute, obviously, then add things like getting ready in the morning and eating dinner at night. Then one of two things happened: Either they’d start to exaggerate their daily routine chores (getting ready in the morning, making dinner at night) until they took 6 hours every day, or they’d be confused about how they couldn’t get the numbers to add up.
Upon further gentle pushing, they almost always realize that they’re spending hours and hours watching TV and on their phones every time. Some times they’d pull out a phone with screen time tracking, be stunned by the number of hours, and tell me it must be broken.
There are some job and commute combinations that won’t leave time for anything during the week, but most people don’t have those. They just have poor time management and their revealed priorities differ from their stated priorities. People will tell you that reading books and going to the gym is a priority for them, but then they’ll spend 3 hours watching Netflix every night and scroll social media for 90 minutes every morning.