Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Why Can't We All Just Relax?" by Verlyn Klinkenborg, which appeared in the magazine Civilization (©1997 by Capital Publishing L. P.)

The sense that leisure time has steadily diminished in recent years and is now disappearing altogether is not just an illusion, a prank of perspective. It's a fact nearly everyone feels. Work—and the time it takes to get to and from work—spills into corners of the day and night that used to belong to community and family life, to sleep, to oneself. What leisure there is comes in smaller and smaller increments and is increasingly overshadowed by the specter of economic strain and personal stress. Working hours declined throughout the first half of the 20th century, but they have been on the rise again since 1969, totaling an extra month of work per year for each "labor force participant" by the beginning of the 1990s, according to Juliet Schor, a Harvard economist and author of The Overworked American. Equally important, leisure is no longer folded continuously into the contours of the year in a pattern that reflects the rhythms of season and holiday. We work just as hard in winter as we do in summer, as hard by night as we do by day, as hard at home as we do at the office. Leisure time has been containerized in the weekend and the vacation, resulting in what can only be called the pressure to unwind.

What is illusory is the widely held assumption that humans have toiled miserably throughout history, only to be freed from labor by 20th-century technology. "The claim that capitalism has delivered us from excessive toil," Schor writes, "can be sustained only if we take as our point of comparison eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America—a period that witnessed what were probably the longest and most arduous work schedules in the history of humankind." In fact, she notes, ordinary people in premodern times led lives that, though not always pleasant, were often quite leisurely. Before the industrial revolution, laborers' time was not yet calibrated by the clocks of factory owners. The rhythms of work and rest were intricately patterned by a rich calendar of holidays and—on farms and in some trades—wide seasonal variation in the intensity of work. Medieval records show that even for peasants, the working year may have been as short as 120 to 150 days.

The industrial revolution completed with dramatic rapidity a process that had been going on for several centuries: the transformation of labor into a salable commodity. For this to occur, time itself had to be turned into a commodity, a means of measuring the sale of one's labor. The result was a very different, less elastic sense of what might be called the ownership of time, an ownership that employers took quite seriously and were able to measure with increasing, almost fanatical precision by the mid-18th century. But leisure was something that manual workers did not know they possessed until after they had exchanged agricultural jobs for industrial ones.

In the early 20th century, leisure began to undergo a broad social redistribution and, in fact, a shift in category. In a 1935 essay called "In Praise of Idleness," mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell declared that modern technology "has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community." And yet if leisure indeed became a right, it was one that people virtually stopped fighting for during the manufacturing boom that followed World War II, when “workers” became better known as "consumers." The last significant congressional legislation pressing for reduction in the length of the workweek (to 30 hours) was scuttled by President Franklin Roosevelt after being passed by the Senate in 1933.

From a philosophical perspective, it's not hard to understand why leisure has evaporated in this country. Economically speaking, Americans are the heirs of economist Adam Smith, who viewed leisure as merely therapeutic. In The Wealth of Nations, he acknowledged that relaxation is a "call to nature" that follows on "great labour, either of mind or body." But in Smith's opinion, leisure, like sleep, is valuable mainly because it keeps Homo economicus healthy. He takes it for granted that human existence is meant to be economically productive, a principle that lies at the root of American society. When the pressure's on, Americans tend to cut back sharply on the elements of their lives that appear to be solely therapeutic. Sleep, good food, he bonds of community and family, leisure itself: These are the things that get squeezed.