More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I considered the fact that I did things rarely for their own sake, but in service to my drive to constantly improve and be productive.
We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling. We search
Technology can do many things for us—extend our lives, keep us safe, expand our entertainment options—but it cannot make us happy. The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.
Essentially, we are working our way out of happiness and well-being. We’ve lost the balance between striving to improve and feeling gratitude for what we have. We’ve lost touch with the things that really enrich our lives and make us feel content.
Part of the problem is that we’re cutting out expressions of our basic humanity because they’re “inefficient”: boredom,
long phone conversations, hobbies, neighborhood barbecues, membership in social clubs. We smile indulgently at the naivetés of the past, when people had time for things like pickup basketball and showing slides of Hawaiian vacations to their friends. How quaint, we think, that our grandparents had time for things like sewing circles and lawn bowling.
I think we have engineered our way further and further from what we do best and what makes us most human. In doing so, we’ve made our lives harder and infinitely sadder.
the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something.
Yet leisureliness to me suggests slowing down and milking life for all it is worth.”
“We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.”
Most of us instinctively keep pace with our environment.
Going back as far as 4,000 years ago, to the days of ancient Greece, we find that Athenians had up to sixty holidays a year. By the middle of the fourth century BC, there were nearly six months of official festival days, on which no work was done. Work for the ancient Greeks was carried out in spurts: intense activity during planting or harvest, followed by extended periods of rest for celebrations and feasts.
Prior to the dawn of the industrial age, most people were self-employed or worked as contractors and so were able to make their own schedules.
There are a variety of surviving examples of wealthy people complaining that workers were lazy and took too much time off.
It’s impossible to overstate how significantly the Industrial Revolution changed every aspect of human life, including the kind of food people ate and how long they slept at night.
When those farmers became factory workers, they lost the variety in their working days and ended up performing the same mindless, monotonous task while standing in the same position for ten to fourteen hours a day.
The move to cities drained power and wealth from the working classes.
Business profits were suddenly based more on volume of sales and less on profit margins.
Craftsmen were respected and mostly independent.
Because of this shift, the world lost many of its specialized artists and woodworkers and sculptors and metalsmiths.
All of these changes were significant, but something else shifted at this time, something truly momentous: Time began to equal money.
Even our vocabulary reflected this change.
Remember this: The fight over working hours has, from the start, been about returning to the kind of life we had for millennia.
“An alarming number of workers, both intellectual and manual, surrender nearly all their waking and even dreaming hours to labor….The notion of free time is as distant from most people’s everyday experience as open space.”
When employers lost the political fight, they moved to a new field of battle: culture.
In the end, this story is about how the industrialist desire to have fewer workers doing more hours of work merged with the religious belief that work is good and idleness is bad, along with a capitalist faith in constant growth. When time became money, the need to get more time out of workers became urgent if profit targets were to be met.
This is the philosophical underpinning of all our modern stress: that time is too valuable to waste. We don’t pass time, we spend it. It’s no wonder that we don’t really have pastimes anymore.
I would argue that work began to replace religion. In fact, experts predict that by 2035 those with no religious affiliation will outnumber Protestants in the United States.
How is it that we produce so much wealth with our labor and yet most of us feel we are barely hanging on to our standard of living, let alone creating a situation in which our children will do better than we’ve done? Why do I have more to do than my grandmother, despite owning a dishwasher, microwave, and portable computer?
First, many workers started using their extra income not to work less but to buy more.
While the costs of goods went down for everyone, the profit from the sale of those goods has gone to a fraction of the populace.
The benefits of their hard work are accruing in someone else’s account.
The only difference is the income gap is wider today between CEOs and their workers than it was between the fictional Earl of Grantham and his valet.
The sense that time was too valuable to be spent at a barbecue or baseball game started to make people feel anxious about what they did in their off-hours. Leisure began to feel stressful. In the back of their minds, people worried about the money they weren’t making.
In the end, it all comes down to time: our relationship with it, our understanding of it, the value we put on it. Before the industrial age, time was measured in days or seasons.
What those study participants felt was time scarcity. As something rises in value, it begins to seem rarer and more precious.
“Polluted time,” writes Josh Fear, the deputy director of the institute, “is one of the many consequences of a labour market which has become increasingly ‘flexible’ over the past few decades. All too often the benefits of such flexibility have flowed to employers.”
When time became an acceptable currency, it also became common to pay people and reward them according to how many hours they worked.
Technology has advanced so quickly that at this point most of us could have the same standard of living as our grandparents while working only half the year. “We actually could have chosen the four-hour day,” Juliet Schor writes. “Or a working year of six months. Or, every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work—with pay [emphasis is Schor’s].”
Sadly, we’re not usually allowed to choose what to do with the benefits of increased productivity. Most of us have no say in how companies spend the growing profits earned by our labor. It’s generally the CEO or board of directors who make that decision, and the increases are often seen in stockholder dividends or bonuses for executives.
The office can “feel” like a second home to some, and managers make the mistake of saying “We are all family” in order to promote a feeling of camaraderie. But the office is not your home and your coworkers are not your family.
Creating a homey environment for our jobs has confused us, leading many to believe they can fulfill their need for social connection and belongingness through their employment, though that’s not usually the case.
“Work has become more than work,” the Columbia professor Silvia Bellezza told me. “Work now fulfills some of the needs for socialization that before only time with family and friends would satisfy.” As our personal lives have become lonelier and more isolated, lots of people would rather stay at work, where they at least have some social contact.
The idea that spending is good for a nation’s health is a very recent one. Not all that long ago, overspending was considered immoral and indebtedness was seen as a character flaw.
Remember that collectively, we chose to take the benefits of productivity and
invest them into more product instead of shorter working hours.
Again and again in research studies, when presented with a choice between two similar individuals, we say that the busier person is the more important person.
So while Keynes predicted that we’d all be working very little by now, the rise in unnecessary consumption was part of what made him wrong.
We skimp on our personal lives in order to have more time for our careers, but we don’t get the return on our investment that we expect.
There are effective ways to counteract all that brainwashing. One solution is to take up
