Busyness 201: A Brief History of Work & BUSY in America

Sloww

6 min readSep 25, 2018

This is the second post in the 3-part series on busyness. You can read the other two posts here:

The first post took a look at the current state of busyness. But, how did we get here?

How did we get to the point that other countries call our busyness and long working hours “the American disease”¹?

The Atlantic summed up “the conundrum” as follows:

“Writers and economists from half a century ago and longer anticipated that the future would buy more leisure time for wealthy workers in America. Instead, it just bought them more work. Meanwhile, overall leisure has increased, but it’s the less-skilled poor who are soaking up all the free time, even though they would have the most to gain from working. Why?” — The Atlantic²

A Brief History of Work & Busyness in America

But first, let’s go way, way back (before America) to try and understand work and busyness:

“We speculate that the concurrent desires for busyness and for justification are rooted in evolution. In their strife for survival, human ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources; expending energy without purpose could have jeopardized survival. With modern means of production, however, most people today no longer expend much energy on basic survival needs, so they have excessive energy, which they like to release through action. Yet the long-formed tendency to conserve energy lingers, making people wary of expending effort without purpose.” — Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness³

Even in the 1st century, Seneca the Younger observed how wealthy people rushed through life:

“Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them — how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. ‘People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy,’ he observed in ‘On the Shortness of Life’, perhaps the very first time-management self-help book. Time on Earth may be uncertain and fleeting, but nearly everyone has enough of it to take some deep breaths, think deep thoughts and smell some roses, deeply. ‘Life is long if you know how to use it,’ he counselled.” — The Economist4

Fast-forward thousands of years. In the 18th century, time began being used to coordinate work:

“The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.” — The Economist4

With the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), time became money:

“With the Industrial Revolution, minutes and seconds became a pervasive measurement of time for the common person. The rise of manufacturing regimented time with worker output. Productivity was king, and time translated to money…When time became money, our relationship to relaxation also changed. It used to be that the mark of accumulated wealth was leisure — restorative moments away from the toils of labor to enjoy other pursuits. Today, productivity is our top priority. Even the wealthiest among us toil away, packing schedules and squeezing every ounce of value from every second.” — Johns Hopkins5
“During the Industrial Revolution, 10-to-16-hour days were normal. Ford was the first company to experiment with an eight-hour day — and found its workers were more productive not only per hour, but overall. Within two years, their profit margins doubled.” — BBC6

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French diplomat, political scientist and historian, released Democracy in America:

“Americans are ‘always in a hurry,’ observed Alexis de Tocqueville more than 150 years ago.” — The Economist4

The Theory of the Leisure Class, written by Thorstein Veblen in 1899, acknowledges leisure-as-status:

“In his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote that ‘conspicuous abstention from labor … becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement.’ In other words, the richer one gets, the less one works and the more likely one is to try to show off one’s ample leisure time.” — The Atlantic7

Over the last 100 years alone, leading economists, political scientists, and business billionaires have predicted shorter workweeks:

1930: John Maynard Keynes predicted “three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week” by 2030 in his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
1932: Bertrand Russell says a 4-hour workday should be enough work for everybody in his essay In Praise of Idleness

1965: Gary S. Becker observes “time is used more carefully today”:

“The relationship between time, money and anxiety is something Gary S. Becker noticed in America’s post-war boom years. Though economic progress and higher wages had raised everyone’s standard of living, the hours of ‘free’ time Americans had been promised had come to nought. ‘If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago,’ he noted in 1965. He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.” — The Economist4

1970: Staffan B. Linder, a Swedish economist, coins the phrase “the harried leisure class”:

“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 Atlantic8
“The unexpected product of economic progress, according to Linder, was a ‘harried leisure class’.” — The Economist4

1971: Wayne Oates, an American psychologist, coins the term “workaholic.”

The evolution of work in a nutshell:

“There’s definitely been a transition, if you look at the composition of the economy and the fact that most of the work that we’re doing right now is in services. These are jobs that require our intellectual capital, which require more thinking than the type of economies that Veblen was writing about, in which the primary sectors were agriculture or industry. Those used to be the larger part of the economy.” — The Atlantic7

Roughly 2,000 years after Seneca’s observations, we seem to still be in the same place. Peter Drucker, known as the “father of modern management” said:

“One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.” — Peter Drucker

Continue the the last post in the series:

Busyness 301: The Future of BUSY, Work & Leisure

Sources:

Originally published at Sloww | Slow Living in a Fast World | Design a Lighter Life.

Busyness 201: A Brief History of Work & BUSY in America

A Brief History of Work & Busyness in America

Written by Sloww