LIVING, Page 58COVER STORY: How America Has Run Out of TimeWorkers are weary, parents are frantic and even children haven'ta moment to spare: leisure could be to the '90s what money was tothe '80sBy 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
