The Sabbath World (6 page)

Today, work has grown even more portable, so that the work addict need never turn off her mobile communications device as she interacts with her family. This image of the workaholic may be a caricature, but caricatures only exaggerate the satirizable features of everyday life. And if there’s one thing we know about everyday life,
it’s that we don’t have enough time to finish our work and get our chores done and be with family and friends.

We don’t actually work more than we used to, but we think we do. In 1991, the economist Juliet Schor advanced the now conventional thesis that global competition forced Americans to toil longer and rest less. She based this on rough estimates that people gave during interviews with U.S. census takers over three decades. Meanwhile, two sociologists, John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, were asking people to fill out time diaries noting exactly how much time they spent on each activity of the day right after they’d done it. They concluded that Americans work less than they did in the 1960s. How do you reconcile what people said with what their time diaries showed? You acknowledge that Americans
feel
more pressed for time, whether they’re working harder or not.

Many theories have been advanced to explain the perception that we’re overtaxed. Some cite evidence that it’s mainly highly educated white-collar workers who put in those legendary fifty-, sixty-, seventy-hour weeks, even as blue-collar or service workers struggle to cobble together enough work to live on. Others interpret our feeling of being overwhelmed as a function of the fact that, even though as employees we work no more than we used to, as family members more of us are saddled with more of the burdens of domestic life. The women who used to stay home and take care of everything now leave their houses for offices, so that chores must be more evenly distributed throughout the family. People have that nagging sense of never having finished with the housework, even though if you added up all the hours we collectively devote to housework, you’d find that the number is smaller than it was thirty years ago (down from slightly more than twenty-seven hours a week to twenty-four).

Time
has
become more fragmented. More Americans work during the off-hours than they did half a century ago, the heyday of the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday workweek. According to the sociologist Harriet B. Presser, as of 2003, two-fifths of American workers were working non-standard hours—“in the evening, at night, on a rotating shift, or during the weekend”—and she wasn’t
counting those who bring their work home and do it on their off-hours, or who are self-employed. Some people have enviable flexibility. They’ve won flextime from their bosses, hold non-traditional jobs, or are self-employed. Others have no choice but to work late shifts at companies that measure time by overseas clocks, or else they’ve found employment in the service sector, to which the bulk of American jobs have shifted. There they wait on everybody else in the evenings and on weekends.

Shift work, it is now clear, disrupts circadian rhythms, fosters insomnia, and induces inattentiveness, memory loss, and depression, especially when the shifts are irregular. This is because different parts of the body’s ecosystem—temperature, hormones, the heart, the digestive system—adjust to disrupted sleep schedules at different rates, causing parts of the body to be at war with others. Flextime workers don’t have the same physical problems, but their irregular work hours nonetheless upset their psychological equilibrium. With a moment snatched here and there, it’s hard to achieve that feeling of being in the swing of something, the self-forgetfulness that psychologists call flow. Moreover, when friends and family no longer follow the same schedule they’re less likely to get together. According to Presser, couples who have children and work separate shifts are more likely to get divorced than those who don’t—as much as six times as likely when it’s the husband who works the late-night shift, or on a rotating schedule, and three times as likely when it’s the wife.

But we tend not to see these problems as the result of living in a temporally discombobulated society. We blame ourselves. We say that we’re too busy to do everything we want to do and see the people we want to see, and isn’t that a shame. Besides, even if we aren’t working more than we used to, we don’t get as much done during our non-work hours as we wish we did. The time-diary studies suggest that we feel as if we’re falling short because we devote just under half of our free time to media: at the time of the study, mostly television; to a lesser degree newspapers, radio, and books; and now, one assumes, iPhones, computer games, and the Web. And though we squander more hours on television and computers, we ask more of ourselves in
the hours remaining. We try to train ourselves to use our free time more efficiently: to master more kinds of time-saving technology; to become more proficient skiers or chess players or home decorators; to maximize face time with our loved ones; to live up to ecological mandates for a more handcrafted domestic life.

W
HAT IS HAPPENING
to us? Nothing to get worked up about. This is life in an industrial and postindustrial and post-postindustrial society. “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,” Lewis Mumford wrote. Ever since the early fourteenth century, when Italian churchmen and city fathers began adorning their towers with publicly visible clocks, we have been governed by increasingly precise instruments of time measurement. It was public clocks, then household clocks, then watches, then stopwatches, and, ultimately, the atomic clock, that made it possible to coordinate and schedule more and more complex networks of manufacturing, labor, and trade.

One weirdly delightful fact about clocks is that they made possible a new crime: time theft. According to the British social historian E. P. Thompson, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century masters and managers stole time from their workers. They put the factories’ clocks forward in the morning and back at night, so that workers had to come in earlier and leave later without being paid for more work. One English worker told an investigating committee about a clock with a weighted minute hand that, as soon as it started on its downward slope, dropped three minutes at a time. It was used to shorten the dinner hour. Time was money, as Benjamin Franklin said, and had to be made to pay. The sharp use of time became the moral obligation of the businessman. “The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty,” Max Weber declared in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
.

Two giants of temporal thrift, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, pushed us into the modern era at the turn of the twentieth
century. Taylor invented time-and-motion studies. Ford standardized and quickened production by breaking down tasks for the assembly line. Postwar “post-Fordism” brought, among other things, “vertical disintegration”—subcontracting and outsourcing—as well as small-batch and just-in-time and globally networked production, electronic banking, computerized trading, and the more rapid pace of consumption that follows from a switch from a commodity-based to a service-based economy. (It takes less time to see a movie than to wear out a coat.)

It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that anyone noticed that all this time-saving didn’t make us feel less rushed. On the contrary. “We had always expected one of the beneficent results of economic affluence to be a tranquil and harmonious manner of life, a life in Arcadia,” the Swedish economist Staffan Linder wrote in his 1970 book
The Harried Leisure Class
. “What has happened is the exact opposite. The pace is quickening, and our lives in fact are becoming more hectic.” Linder’s theory was that as labor becomes more specialized and productivity increases, two things happen. First, each hour of work increases in value, which jacks up the value of hours spent not working. Non-work time has a higher “opportunity cost”—each minute not spent completing one’s work assignments equals more money squandered. Second, there are ever more products to consume.

Linder realized that these outcomes cancel each other out. He was the first to point out something that has since become obvious: To calculate the real cost of consumption, you have to factor in the real amount of time spent consuming. Consuming is not just buying. Not only do we need time to make smart decisions about our new cars, high-definition televisions, and lawn mowers; we also need time to read the instruction manuals or call the help desk in order to learn to use all our increasingly complicated gadgets. And we need to keep them in good shape or get them repaired. In short, as time becomes more valuable to us, our consumer goods become more expensive to us.

One solution to the problem of maintenance is to outsource it. In
the decades since Linder’s book, outsourcing has expanded to include not just the upkeep and the repairs we used to do ourselves (laundry, lawn work, home repair, child care) but chores and roles once considered too personal or trivial to hire someone to do, from organizing garages to filling in at social occasions for the spouses we don’t have time to court and marry. From a financial point of view, though, outsourcing is not the answer. The price of personal services rises as more people buy them, which means those same people have to work more to foot the monthly bill for their in-house or subcontracted support staffs. The grueling hours endured by handsomely paid professionals, it turns out, don’t necessarily reflect work addiction. Putting in those hours may be the only way to stay ahead of the bill collector.

The other solution to the time famine is to cram more activities into the same span of time. Not long after Linder’s book appeared, Erwin Scheuch, a German sociologist who had conducted a time-diary study in twelve countries, noticed that the more industrialized the country, the more likely a person was to crowd more activities into the same twenty-four hours. Scheuch called this “time-deepening,” by analogy to the economic concept of “capital deepening”—getting the same output from a production process at a lower cost.

Time-deepening spares our pocketbooks, even if it reduces the intensity of our pleasure. In that sense, Scheuch’s phrase is misleading, because stuffing life with more things and distractions makes time feel shallower, not deeper. “Time-stretching” may be a better term. Whatever you call it, Linder accurately predicted how it would affect the texture of our lives. He anticipated the rising preference for fast food, quickie sex, drive-through banking, and so on, as well as the predictable rejection of such things by those élite contrarians who could afford slow food, old-fashioned courtship, and personal bankers.

Linder also foresaw subtler impacts. Lacking the leisure to research all the goods and services that we feel compelled to purchase, we rely more and more on what Linder calls “ersatz information,” or advertising, which lets people feel they’re still getting enough input to make a good decision. (Linder wrote his book before the explosion of
“branding,” but he would have seen brand identification as yet another form of overreliance on ersatz information.)

Home is the place where we dream of escaping the time-and-motion calculus. Family time is best measured by the activity, not by the clock. You serve your stew when it’s ready, not when it has cooked for an hour. You put away your sponges and cleaning fluids when your bathroom is clean, not after five minutes. You nurse a baby until she’s full, whether that takes ten minutes or forty. This form of time measurement is known as task orientation, and it is the kind of time that is kept in less industrialized societies. Task orientation is also characterized by a tendency not to make overly fine distinctions between “work” (doing chores) and “life” (chatting, eating, relaxing).

People used to working a set number of hours often find the task-oriented approach to time scandalously wasteful, an attitude that can contribute to misunderstandings not only between industrialized and non-industrialized cultures but also between spouses, especially when one works out of the home and the other stays in it. “Despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women’s work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock,” E. P. Thompson wrote. “The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of ‘pre-industrial’ time.”

But time in the home is still money. Feminist economics has taught us that the domestic sphere floated above the sordid dominion of the dollar only because it relied on the free labor and the forgone opportunities of women. Ever since women grew weary of the unwritten rule deeming their time worth what they were paid for it, it has gotten harder to find anyone—Linder would say, to pay anyone enough—to invest the time to meet our most intimate physical and emotional needs.

We all know what it feels like to give short shrift to ourselves, our families, and our children, not to mention the stranger in our midst. It feels disgusting. Our bodies, our houses, and our relationships spiral toward disorder and decay. Our nails lengthen because we forget to
cut them. Our eyesight blurs because we can’t be bothered to visit the eye doctor. Slime accumulates on pantry shelves. The tone in our spouses’ voices hardens. Children mutiny at times seemingly calculated to be inconvenient. Too busy to attend to our own needs, we lack sympathy for the needs of people who seem less busy than we are. That, too, has consequences. Before long, the underemployed become the unemployable, then the menacing mob.

T
HE
S
ABBATH
—God’s claim against our time—implies that time has an ethical dimension. We rest in order to honor God and his creation, which suggests that not to rest dishonors both. So must we say that the speeding up of everything is not only psychologically harmful but
morally
wrong? What about the contravening benefits of super-productivity—the wealth, health, democracy, and philanthropy that come with it?

In 1973, the social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson performed an experiment that was meant to explore a dimension of the human personality, but along the way they stumbled onto something important about the ethics of time. Their question was, What makes a passerby decide whether to stop to help someone in distress? Is it personality, cultural conditioning, or the situation at hand? Darley and Batson wanted to know which of these variables had the greatest influence on whether a person acted like the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable of that name: