TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT1055> <title> Apr. 24, 1989: How America Has Run Out Of Time </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Apr. 24, 1989 The Rat Race </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> LIVING, Page 58 COVER STORY: How America Has Run Out of Time </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>