TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042489/04248900.003

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                                                                                LIVING, Page 58

COVER STORY: How America Has Run Out of Time


Workers are weary, parents are frantic and even children haven't
a moment to spare: leisure could be to the '90s what money was
to the '80s

By Nancy Gibbs


    All my possessions for a moment of time.

    -- Queen Elizabeth I, with her dying breath, 1603


    If you have a moment to read this story with your feet up,
free of interruption, at your leisure . . . put it down. It's
not for you. Congratulations.

    If, like almost everyone else, you're trying to do something
else at the same time -- if you are stuck in traffic, waiting
in the airport lounge, watching the news, if you're stirring the
soup, shining your shoes, drying your hair . . . read on. Or
hire someone to read it for you and give you a report.

    There was once a time when time was money. Both could be
wasted or both well spent, but in the end gold was the richer
prize. As with almost any commodity, however, value depends on
scarcity. And these are the days of the time famine. Time that
once seemed free and elastic has grown tight and elusive, and so
our measure of its worth is dramatically changed. In Florida a
man bills his ophthalmologist $90 for keeping him waiting an
hour. In California a woman hires somebody to do her shopping
for her -- out of a catalog. Twenty bucks pays someone to pick
up the dry cleaning, $250 to cater dinner for four, $1,500 will
buy a fax machine for the car. "Time," concludes pollster Louis
Harris, who has charted America's loss of it, "may have become
the most precious commodity in the land."

    This sense of acceleration is not just a vague and spotted
impression. According to a Harris survey, the amount of leisure
time enjoyed by the average American has shrunk 37% since 1973.
Over the same period, the average workweek, including commuting,
has jumped from under 41 hours to nearly 47 hours. In some
professions, predictably law, finance and medicine, the demands
often stretch to 80-plus hours a week. Vacations have shortened
to the point where they are frequently no more than long
weekends. And the Sabbath is for -- what else? -- shopping.

    If all this continues, time could end up being to the '90s
what money was to the '80s. In fact, for the callow yuppies of
Wall Street, with their abundant salaries and meager freedom,
leisure time is the one thing they find hard to buy. Their
lives are so busy that merely to give someone the time of day
seems an act of charity. They order gourmet takeout because
microwave dinners have become just too much trouble. Canary
sales are up (low-maintenance pets); Beaujolais nouveau is
booming (a wine one needn't wait for). "I gave up pressure for
Lent," says a theater director in Manhattan. If only it were
that easy.

    More seriously, this shortcut society is changing the way
the family functions. Nowhere is the course of the rat race more
arduous, for example, than around the kitchen table. Hallmark,
that unerring almanac of American mores, now markets greeting
cards for parents to tuck under the Cheerios in the morning
("Have a super day at school," chirps one card) or under the
pillow at night ("I wish I were there to tuck you in"). Even
parents who like their jobs and love their kids find that the
pressure to do justice to both becomes almost unbearable. "As a
society," warns Yale University psychology professor Edward
Zigler, "we're at the breaking point as far as family is
concerned."

    The late Will Durant, the Book-of-the-Month Club's
ubiquitous historian, once observed that "no man who is in a
hurry is quite civilized." Time bestows value because objects
reflect the hours they absorb: the hand-carved table, the
handwritten letter, every piece of fine craftsmanship, every
grace note. But now we have reached the stage at which not only
are the luxuries of time disappearing -- for reading meaty
novels, baking from scratch, learning fugues, traveling by sea
rather than air, or by foot rather than wheel -- but the
necessities of time are also out of reach. Family time.
Mealtime. Even mourning time. In 1922 Emily Post instructed
that the proper mourning period for a mature widow was three
years. Fifty years later, Amy Vanderbilt urged that the bereaved
be about their normal business within a week or so.

    So how did America become so timeless? Those who can
remember washing diapers or dialing phones may recall the
silvery vision of a postindustrial age. Computers, satellites,
robotics and other wizardries promised to make the American
worker so much more efficient that income and GNP would rise
while the workweek shrank. In 1967 testimony before a Senate
subcommittee indicated that by 1985 people could be working
just 22 hours a week or 27 weeks a year or could retire at 38.
That would leave only the great challenge of finding a way to
enjoy all that leisure.

    And not only would the office be transformed. The American
household soaked up microwaves, VCRs, blow dryers, mix 'n' eat,
the computerized automobile that announces that all systems
work and it is getting 23 miles to the gallon. The kitchen was
streamlined with so much labor-saving gadgetry that meals could
be prepared, served and cleaned up in less time than it took to
boil an egg. Thus freed from household chores, Mom could head
off to a committee meeting on social justice, while Dad chaired
the men's-club clothing drive, and the kids went to bed at
10:30 after watching a PBS special on nuclear physics.

    Sure enough, the computers are byting, the satellites
spinning, the Cuisinarts whizzing, just as planned. Yet we are
ever out of breath. "It is ironic," writes social theorist
Jeremy Rifkin in Time Wars, "that in a culture so committed to
saving time we feel increasingly deprived of the very thing we
value." Since leisure is notoriously hard to define and harder
to measure, sociologists disagree about just how much of it has
disappeared. But they do agree that people feel more harried by
their life-styles. "People's schedules are more ambitious,"
says John Robinson, who heads up the Americans' Use of Time
project at the University of Maryland. "There just isn't enough
time to fit in all the things one feels have to be done."

    A poll for TIME and CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman found
this sense especially acute among women in two-income families:
73% of the women complain of having too little leisure, as do
51% of the men. Such figures produce no end of questions for
sociologists, and everyone else, to stew over. Why do we work so
hard? Why do we have so little time to spare? What does this do
to us and our children? And what would we give up in order to
live a little more peaceably?

    Experts tracking the cause and effect are coming to see how
progress has carried hidden costs. "Technology is increasing the
heartbeat,'' says Manhattan architect James Trunzo, who designs
"automated environments." "We are inundated with information.
The mind can't handle it all. The pace is so fast now, I
sometimes feel like a gunfighter dodging bullets." In business
especially, the world financial markets almost never close, so
why should the heavy little eyes of an ambitious baby banker?
"There is now a new supercomputer that operates at a trillionth
of a second," says Robert Schrank, a management consultant in
New York City. "What's a trillionth of a second? Time is being
eaten up by all these new inventions. Even leisure is done on
schedule. Golfing is done on schedule. My son is on the run all
the time. I ask him, `Are you having fun?' He says, `Hell, I
don't know.' "

    The pace of change and the explosion of information mean
that professionals are swamped with too many new facts to
absorb. Meanwhile, the drill-press operator discovers that the
drill comes with a computer attached to it. Workers find that it
takes all the energy they have just to remain qualified for
their jobs, much less have time to acquire new skills that
might allow for promotion. "There is no question that the
half-life of most job skills is dropping all the time," says
Edward Lawler, University of Southern California professor of
management. "People are falling by the wayside, just as
companies are."

    There is an additional irony: all the time-saving devices
may actually make people work harder. Sometime in the early
'80s, suggests futurist Selwyn Enzer, Americans came to worship
career status as a measure of individual worth, and many were
willing to sacrifice any amount of leisure time to get ahead.
"Social scientists underestimated the sense of self-esteem that
came with having a career," he observes. These days, if an
entrepreneur has not made his first million by the time he is
30, his commitment to capital accumulation is suspect. And in
the transition from an industrial to a global service economy,
many of the white-collar "servants" -- lawyers, bankers,
accountants -- are pushing harder than ever to meet their
clients' inexhaustible needs.

    For these hardy souls, there is no longer any escape from
the office. Simply to remain competitive, professionals find
that their lives are one long, continuous workday, bleeding
into the wee hours and squeezing out any leisure time. "My wife
and I were sitting on the beach in Anguilla on one of our rare
vacations," recalls architect Trunzo, "and even there my staff
was able to reach me. There are times when our lives are
clearly leading us." There are phones in the car, laptops in the
den, and the humming fax machine eliminates that once peaceful
lull between completing a document and delivering it. "The fax
has destroyed any sense of patience or grace that existed,"
says Hollywood publicist Josh Baron. "People are so crazy now
that they call to tell you your fax line is busy."

    Add to that a work ethic gone mad. "Work has become trendy,"
observes Jim Butcher, a management consultant for the Boston
Consulting Group. But he and other professionals acknowledge the
toll that such a relentless pace takes on creativity. No
instrument, no invention, can emit an utterly original thought.
"I flew 80,000 miles last year," says economist James Smith of
the Rand Corp. "You start losing touch with things. My work is
research, which at its best is contemplative. If you get into
this mode of running around, you don't have time to reflect."

    The risk is that the unexamined life becomes
self-sustaining. Attention spans may be richly elastic, but
little in this rapid life-style conspires to stretch them. In
fact the reverse is true, as TV commercials shrink to 15-second
flashes and popular novels contain paragraphs no longer than
two sentences. "I do things in a lot of 3 1/2-minute segments,"
muses UCLA anthropologist Peter Hammond. "Experience just sort
of rolls by me. I think it affects the quality of my work."

    Technology alone, however, bears only part of the
responsibility for the time famine. All the promises of
limitless leisure relied on America's retaining its blinding
lead in the world's markets and unfolding prosperity at home. No
one quite bargained for the Middle-Class Squeeze, what Paula
Rayman, a sociologist at Wellesley College's Stone Center,
calls "falling behind while getting ahead." The prices of houses
have soared, inflation erodes paychecks, wages are stagnant,
and medical and tuition costs continue to skyrocket. So now it
can take two paychecks to fund what many imagined was a
middle-class life. "The American Dream is very much intact,"
says Rayman. "It's just more expensive."

    Keeping a home and raising 2.4 children, as anyone who has
ever done it knows, is a full-time job. The increasing rarity of
the full-time homemaker has done more to eat away everyone's
leisure time than any other factor. If both mother and father
are working to make ends meet, as is the case in 57% of U.S.
families, someone still has to find the time to make lunches
and pediatrician appointments, shop, cook, fix the washer, do
the laundry, take the children to choir practice. Single-parent
households are squeezed even more.

    On the surface, families are coping by teaching children to
put the roast in the oven after school, enrolling them in day
care, hiring nannies, making play dates, sending out laundry
and ordering in pizza. "We spend a lot of time buying time,"
observes economist Smith. "What we're doing is contracting out
for family care," notes Rand demographer Peter Morrison, "but
there's a limit. If you contract out everything, you have an
enterprise, not a family."

    Like the ever expanding white-collar workday, this stage of
family evolution defies all the expectations of a generation
ago. For years, stress research tended to focus on men, and so
the office or factory floor was viewed as the primary source of
tension. The home, on the other hand, was a sanctuary, a benign
environment in which one recuperated from problems at work. The
experts know better now.

    Listen to the families:

    "Tired is my middle name," says Carol Rohder, 41, a single
mother of three in Joliet, Ill. She works days as a medical
technician and four nights a week as a waitress. "I'm exhausted
all the time. I didn't think it would be this hard on my own. I
thought once I was divorced the pressure would be off."

    "You get addicted to overworking," says Nancy
Baker-Velasquez, a partner in an insurance brokerage in
California, whose husband is a sheriff's deputy on the night
shift. "At the same time, you have so many more obligations as a
parent now. These days, you have to start brushing their teeth
even before they have teeth."

    "It's not so much that we need to make ends meet," says Jon
Hilliard, his three-year-old at his side. Hilliard works for the
Street Department in Crown Point, Ind., and as a self-employed
carpenter. His wife Sharron is a gym teacher, and together they
earn something over $60,000 a year. "It's the way we get extra
things. I grew up in a poor family with four kids, and we had
no extras. There's no way my kids are going to be like that. We
want to make sure that if they're not good athletes or smart
academically, they can still go to college."

    "The most precious commodity to us is time," agree architect
Trunzo and his wife Candace, both 41 and parents of two. "We
have tried to simplify our lives as much as possible." Candace
believes she and her husband are living "better lives than our
parents. More hectic. But fuller." James wonders about that.
"It's dangerous to use the word fuller. Where is that sense of
spirituality that we talked about in the '60s? Where is the time
to go up to the mountaintop? Technology is a diversion from
life. You can be transfixed. I'm not sure that technology
doesn't remove us from each other, isolate us. In architecture
we're seeing demands for media rooms. What ever happened to the
kitchen as a gathering place?"

    Lynne Meadow and Ron Shechtman, both 42, dote on their son
Jonathan, 4. "And there's maybe 30 minutes every day," says Ron,
"when we don't discuss having another child. But where would the
extra minutes come from?" Lynne runs the red-hot Manhattan
Theater Club; Ron is a partner in a midsize law firm. They live
in a home where the telephone cords stretch into every room, and
the nanny starts work at 7:30 a.m. "You can imagine what getting
out the door in the morning is like," says Ron. Are there
regrets? He ponders, "Can we take the added pressure that a
second child would bring?" For the moment, the answer is no.

    Parents know all too vividly the effects of the stress they
endure in order to keep up with their lives. Addiction to a
speeded-up schedule can lead to a physical breakdown from
hypertension, ulcers, heart disease, or dependence on alcohol,
cocaine and cigarettes. The effect on the psyche is subtler and
more insidious. People find themselves growing impatient and
restless, and it seems harder to think logically about a
problem. Even if two hours miraculously open up one evening,
they may be spent watching TV, since people are too tired to do
much else.

    More ominous are the effects on children. "Making an
appointment is one way to relate to your child," says UCLA
anthropologist Hammond, "but it's pretty desiccated. You've got
to hang around with your kids." Yet hanging-around time is the
first thing to go. The very culture of children, of freedom and
fantasy and kids teaching kids to play jacks, is collapsing
under the weight of hectic family schedules. "Kids understand
that they are being cheated out of childhood," says Edward
Zigler at Yale. "Eight-year-olds are taking care of
three-year-olds. We're seeing depression in children. We never
thought we'd see that 35 years ago. There is a sense that
adults don't care about them."

    Adults may care a lot, but in ways that are often distorted
by their own zealous professional lives. Eager parents arrive
home late and pour a day's stored attention onto a child who is
more ready to be tucked in than talked at. "It may be that the
same loss of leisure among parents produces this pressure for
rapid achievement and overprogramming of children," argues
Allan Carlson, president of the conservative Rockford Institute,
an Illinois think tank. If parents see parenting largely as an
investment of their precious time, they may end up viewing
children as objects to be improved rather than individuals to be
nurtured at their own pace.

    Children are scuttling from karate classes to play dates
scheduled by Mommy's secretary. Their social lives out of
nursery school may rival those of their parents in complexity.
Meanwhile, the parents must work even harder to pay for it all.
When Arlie Hochschild studied working couples in the San
Francisco area for a forthcoming book, Second Shift, she found
that "a lot of people talked about sleep. They talked about
sleep the way a hungry person talks about food."

    Thus for many exhausted American families, the premium
placed on free time is bringing about both subtle and sweeping
changes. In some cases, it means a new division of labor
between husband and wife, parents and kids; a search for more
flexible professional schedules; or an outright rebellion
against the rat race. Any or all of these may force a family to
make some hard and intriguing choices. Which is most important?
A challenging and fulfilling job? A bigger house? A college
education for a gifted child? A life in the big city?

    The glib answer most often boils down to women withdrawing
from the work force and returning home, thereby easing the time
crunch for the whole family. But it is almost never that easy.
After 20 years of studying women and stress, Wellesley College
researcher Rosalind Barnett has found that alcoholism and
depression in women are less frequent among those who work. Nor
could most families afford to have one spouse give up working.
And the American economy could not stand the hemorrhage of so
much talent from its work force.

    So the interesting reactions of families and individuals are
more daring than simply "dropping out." In 1986 the advertising
firm of D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles released a poll: If you
could have your dream job, it asked, what would it be? The most
popular choice among men was to own or manage their own company,
followed by being a professional athlete, the head of a large
corporation, a forest ranger and a test pilot. The favorite
among women? To own and manage their own business, but in their
case followed by tour guide, flight attendant, novelist and
photographer.

    "Running your own business means you are controlling your
own destiny," says M.I.T. research director David Birch, who has
studied entrepreneurship. While starting a company rarely means
more free time, it can promise greater satisfaction, autonomy
and flexible working conditions. Freedom-minded men and women
alike have recognized that technology and the restructuring of
the economy, which so often work against individual peace of
mind, can actually work for the small entrepreneur. The same
computers and fax machines that torment corporate drudges allow
small businesses access to world markets.

    Some fast-lane veterans who are fed up with their harried
working conditions are trying other escape routes, including
climbing down the corporate ladder. Trading in a big salary for a
lower-level job with more vacation time, flexible hours,
improved maternity or paternity leave, even weekends off may
seem a luxury, but it is one that many people are choosing.
Dann Pottinger, 42, nephew and grandson of Florida bank
presidents, was CEO of Commercial State Bank of Orlando, one of
the most profitable independent banks in central Florida. This
winter he chaired the search committee to select his
replacement. "It is all too time-consuming," he says of his job.
Pottinger has spent a total of eight days out of the office in
the past year. So he will give up a six-figure salary to go on
commission for State Farm Insurance Companies. "I'm not naive
enough to say that money doesn't matter," Pottinger says. "But
I want my children to know me as something besides their
provider."

    Such sentiments help explain why the high-draw cities in the
U.S. are not the metropolises of New York and Los Angeles but
the smaller and more habitable climes of Albuquerque, Fort
Worth, Providence and Charlotte, N.C. To many working families, a
higher quality of life, and more of it, compensate nicely for
the absence of the Metropolitan Opera or the Hollywood Bowl.
When Equitable Life Assurance Society summoned Jim Crawford,
43, back to Manhattan from its Des Moines office, he would not
relinquish his Iowa life-style. "We based that decision on the
quality of the environment," he says. "People do work hard
here, and there is a deep appreciation for family life." He
traded a higher salary and a two-hour commute for better schools
and more free time. "We wonder how we did it, went through the
routine," he says now.

    For families who cannot handle such a radical departure,
there are alternatives. What was once a cottage industry of
people providing household services is currently a booming
business in cities all across the country. Anyone who can
protect a family's free time is a sure success. "The hot new
family commodity is `off time,'" says Heloise, the syndicated
oracle of household hints. "If I can give them another 20
minutes, even if it costs them $4 in dry cleaning, then I'm
successful."

    Four dollars for 20 minutes is cheap. Two corporate
dropouts, Glenn Partin and Richard Rogers, founded At Your
Service last year in Winter Park, Fla. They are typical of the
growing number of entrepreneurs who will perform any service
within their expertise, for anywhere between $25 and $50 an
hour. They chauffeur people to airports, return video tapes,
cater parties. "I can pick up the phone and ask them to do
anything," says Debbie Findura, 35, a part-time real estate
agent who has called them to fix a light bulb that broke off in
the socket, remove a live lizard she found in her oven, and
deliver a package of hot-dog buns for one of her family
picnics. "We charged $20 to deliver 59 cents worth of hot-dog
buns," says Rogers, "but she had them there, and that's what
these people expect."

    Professional organizers are also in demand. Stephanie Culp
of Los Angeles is a pleasant, schoolmarmish woman who seven
years ago turned her personal inclinations ("I was neurotically
organized") into a career. "If I said I was a professional
organizer seven years ago, people would have laughed," she
says. "Now the idea is accepted." Culp's golden rule is to set
priorities, and she's not kidding. "When you die, what do you
want people to say at your funeral?" she asked California
businesswoman Baker-Velasquez. Answer: "I didn't want my
children to say, `My mother was a wonderful businesswoman.'"

    Among the tactics Culp's clients are testing: watching less
TV, shopping by phone, buying low-maintenance clothes and
appliances, screening calls on the answering machine and taking a
more lax attitude toward housekeeping. "I'm not so immaculate
anymore," Baker-Velasquez explains. "There are spots on the
carpet, and things are broken. But I'd rather sacrifice my home
than my husband's or children's needs."

    No combination of innovations, inventions or timely hints
will restore the American household to its imagined bygone
tranquillity. Only a dramatic change in both attitudes and
economics would offer a genuine respite. And, anyway, who
hasn't felt the exhilaration of running this race, which many
might actually miss if they slowed to a trot. But at some point
individuals must find the time to consider the price of their
preoccupation and the toll on the spirit exacted by exhaustion.
With too little sleep there are too few dreams. And for
children, especially, being eight years old should include some
long, ice-creamy afternoons of favorite stories and grassy
feet. Some things are just worth the time.