Why Do We Feel So Busy?

Derek Thompson shows us some charts about time spent on leisure vs. work. The charts compare leisure/work numbers between countries and between education groups in the US. But then he says that even among the Harried Leisure Class, there is little real evidence that we are spending more time at work or doing chores. (I do love this new word, “Harried Leisure Class.”) So, why do we feel busier.

Thompson offers some theories:

1. The irony of abundance. Keynes predicted that the age of abundance would make us all relax, because it would be easier to get everything we need, like food, clothes, and entertainment. But maybe knowing that there are 10 great TV shows you should watch, nine important books to read, eight bourgeois skills your child hasn’t mastered, seven ways you’re exercising wrong, six ways you haven’t sufficiently taken advantage of the city, etc., fosters a kind of metastasized paradox of choice, a perma-FOMO. Knowing exactly what we’re missing out makes us feel guilty or anxious about the limits of our time and our capacity to use it effectively.

2. The fluidness of work and leisure. The idea that work begins and ends at the office is intuitively wrong. We laugh at animal pictures on our work computers, and we answer emails on our couches in front of the TV. On the one hand, flexibility is nice. On the other, blending work and leisure creates an always-on expectation that makes it hard for white-collar workers to escape the shadow of work responsibilities.

3. The curse of wealth. Linder, who coined the term “harried leisure class,” says that rich people feel more anxious because they feel more compelled to maximize their free time. The idea is that rich people have a real, even rational, sense that their time is more valuable—in the non-spiritual sense, of course—so that their wasted time feels more wasteful. If this is right, it suggests that wealth buys an expectation to maximize productivity leisure time. Which ultimately means that wealth buys anxiety. Ick.

4. Maybe rich people just like working more. “High pay is highly rewarding,” Kolbert writes, and in a winner-take-all economy, we’re motivated to put in extra-long hours to, well, win. Maybe people who don’t like leisure are richer in the first place because many of them just like working more, and a permanent sense of busy-ness is the psychological price they agree to pay.