How did we get so busy?

Reminds me of this article, which was also here on HN ages ago: <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_php=true&amp;_type=blogs&amp;_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;30&#x2F;the-busy-tra...</a><p>&quot;Busyness&quot; is a social defense against other people making us do things we don&#x27;t really want to do and a mechanism for coping with feeling guilty about things we know we should do, but don&#x27;t. My intuition is that people have had to project themselves as busier and busier over the last couple decades as technology has made us more efficient in order for this strategy to continue working.<p>If you&#x27;re always &quot;so busy!&quot;, your boss is less likely to give you more work; your spouse is less likely to ask you to do more around the house; you&#x27;re not going to feel as guilty about only seeing grandma once a year or refusing to help your friend move; you can feel a little better about yourself when a friend lands an awesome new job or plans a cool vacation and you haven&#x27;t really done anything. When you haven&#x27;t seen someone in a long time and they ask how things are, you can give them the impression that things must be even better than the last time you saw them, because you&#x27;ve clearly been so busy improving your lot in life. Well, that&#x27;s the idea, at least.<p>After I read that article I decided to try to be more honest with myself and the people I know about how busy I really was (which is often &quot;not very&quot; - I, like the author, am the &quot;laziest ambitious person I know.&quot;). It&#x27;s a very hard habit to break, and it forces you to be more honest about the things you really <i>want</i> to spend your time on and the things you&#x27;re avoiding.

Or we could look to Marx, who predicted exactly this state of affairs succinctly by showing that, at the most basic, there are three traditional ways to increase competitive advantage:<p>1. Work more intensely over the course of a fixed working day (eg. the 8 hours most people normally work in the United States)<p>2. Work longer hours thereby generating more surplus value while only being paid for a smaller proportion of your overall work. Today, this typically involves creating a culture that incentivizes overwork and disincentivizes the normal working day.<p>3. Revolutionize the means of production thereby gaining an ephemeral advantage over the competition. Think the Japanese in the 80s with just-in-time production which allowed them to dominate the automotive industry. Automating work would also fall under this category. Notice this can require (1) or (2) as a pre-requisite to such innovation.<p>Under this analysis being busy would be a natural byproduct of the reigning economic ordering of society.

&gt; <i>“There is so much to learn and produce and improve that we should not spend more than a dribble of time living as if we were in Eden. Grandchildren, keep trucking.”</i> - Richard Freeman, of Harvard<p>...somebody shoot this guy. Please.<p>When will we realize that so many great thought were thought because <i>smart people</i> have had <i>free time</i> to &quot;let their minds wonder around&quot;. Think Darwin, the leisure-class naturalist with lots of time to travel, and the <i>theory of evolution.</i> Think Einstein, the underachiever working in a patent office with too much free time to think and the <i>theory of relativity.</i> Who will have time to integrate all the knowledge that we &quot;mine&quot; into useful theories, when we&#x27;ve build a society where the smarter we are, the less time to think you have?!<p>This became obvious since the &#x27;30s, when Bertrand Russel realized the direction we were heading (<a href="http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zpub.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;idle.html</a>), despite the fact that thinking about such things was not his job, and most likely <i>because</i> at that point in his life he had a lot of free time to think around. As opposed to Keynes, whose job was to think at this, but was probably to &quot;busy&quot; to see the big picture and totally ignore the &quot;red queen effect&quot; of consumerism.<p>EDIT+: oops, I always forget that Americans can take any invitation to violence seriously :) I toned it down <i>a bit.</i>

We do have a lot more leisure, but it is distributed at the tails of our lifespan, the times of lowest productivity. We sure don&#x27;t start full-time work at the age that kids on the farm do. And even a century ago, most kids outside of big cities did live on a farm. On the other side of a career, many of us will spend a decade or two in retirement and good health.<p>But inbetween... well, the typical young upper-middle-class couple (as usual, the real point of fascination here) has committed themselves to huge expenditures of interactive time with their kids. That&#x27;s really where the time went.<p>Today, highly-educated parents bring their kids home from soccer or tae kwon do practice, pick up dinner on the way home and read to each of them for a school-mandated half-hour after helping them with homework. This is crazy different from a few generations ago. Ask even your grandparents how much time your parents spent in a &quot;play pen&quot; as toddlers, or roamed their neighborhood after school when they were older. Now there&#x27;s a competitive cultural expectation that you need to invest in your children&#x27;s development daily, so they become socially self-realized and not economic roadkill.

Hi, I&#x27;ve been a lurker here for some time now. I rarely ever comment on stories because, well, I have better things to do. But now, I really need to broaden my perspective. I just don&#x27;t get it.<p>*Disclaimer : I am young (23), broke but happy.<p>This past year, I spent four months in Asia travelling. I rock-climbed for a while, tried bungee, canyon swing, diving, trekking and the motorcycle. I was able to afford all that on my student&#x27;s salary working and studying for my degree. I met amazing people and I&#x27;m just excited about everything since.<p>There&#x27;s been a lot of discussion lately about the 80 hours work weeks and quite frankly, I just don&#x27;t get it! I did work 66 hours work weeks this past fall for my honours thesis. I started getting anxiety attacks. It wasn&#x27;t healthy.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to make a point. I want to hear some. I want to understand how some of you do it, and, more importantly why. I keep thinking that &quot;Hey I was able to have this experience with less than 20k a year. Imagine what I could do with the salary of a `real` job! (Or freelancing)&quot;<p>Why do you do it?

By way of Andreas Schou at G+: Malthusianisms<p><a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=418</a><p><i>Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,000-mile one.</i><p><i>Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.</i><p><i>Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock would become a Genghis Khan....</i> [See Aldus Huxley&#x27;s <i>Island</i> for a particularly depressing exploration of this concept.]<p><i>Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium. Clearly, then, I haven’t yet gotten good enough at Malthusianizing my daily life—have you?</i>

&quot;Suppose that a Walmart clerk and a hedge-fund manager both decide to take the afternoon off to attend their kids’ baseball game. For the clerk, a half-day’s forfeited pay could come to less than forty dollars. For the hedge-fund manager, an afternoon’s worth of lost trades may cost millions, which is a lot to give up to watch little Billy strike out looking.&quot;<p>This is bullshit. If you are working at Walmart you can&#x27;t just take the day off on a whim nor would you because you can&#x27;t afford it.<p>This quote from the article pulled me out of whatever fantasy bullshit land the authors are writing from.<p>People are busy because they want meaning in their lives. Doing things gives you a sense of purpose.

I like this idea:<p><i>Change your language. Instead of saying &quot;I don&#x27;t have time&quot; try saying &quot;it&#x27;s not a priority,&quot; and see how that feels. Often, that&#x27;s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don&#x27;t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: &quot;I&#x27;m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it&#x27;s not a priority.&quot; &quot;I don&#x27;t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.&quot; If these phrases don&#x27;t sit well, that&#x27;s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don&#x27;t like how we&#x27;re spending an hour, we can choose differently.</i><p>src: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203358704577237603853394654" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;online.wsj.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;SB1000142405297020335870...</a>

I like the winner-take-all hypotheses best. A lot of people are employed in advertising, marketing, PR, sales, lobbying, law, etc. and even those who are not might be required as part of their job to do some of those things from time to time.<p>The problem is that it&#x27;s more lucrative to manipulate people to buy things they don&#x27;t need or to trick them to pay more. Note that there are industries where marketing costs are outrageously high, sometimes higher than production and&#x2F;or R&amp;D. A company that doesn&#x27;t spend the same amount on marketing or lobbying might make less profit (e.g. due to network effects, other scaling effects, special protections or subsidies) and thus seem like a bad investment.<p>This leads to a sort of arms race: everybody needs to hire more and more marketers, patent lawyers, etc. and donate more to political campaigns.<p>Solution: Heavily regulate advertising and lobbying. Some kinds of advertising could just be outlawed, and the rest could get (time or space) limits. Anonymous electronic cash would also help to make internet publications independent from corporate advertising money. Tax money could be used to support independent institutes or publications that try to spread actually helpful consumer advise.<p>I think some winner-take-all mechanics might also be at play on a personal career level. Note that there are actually lots of people with nothing but free time, though usually not by choice. Many governments deny those people a decent standard of living (some even a home, food or medical care), forcing them take shitty, low-paying, insecure jobs. The constant threat of losing your income to someone else who will work harder or for less money kind of naturally creates a situation where you either work long hours or not at all.

I don&#x27;t understand how you can expect to work less hours in a capitalist economy. Basically the whole point is to make money and if you&#x27;re freeing up time that means you&#x27;re more productive for other work.<p>If my job is to do a, b, and c and using technology I make it so I only have to spend time doing a, then an employer is going to find something for me to do. Could be busy work, could be letting someone go and giving me their job to save money.<p>If I don&#x27;t they&#x27;ll find someone else who will.<p>Technological advances that were suppose to help the employee work less, has only helped business run at lower operating costs.

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parkinson%27s_law</a><p>My hunch is that we&#x27;re so busy because capitalism seeks to find local maxima in the possible space of all profits, and because so many people are involved in it, it works pretty well (as far as hill climbing algorithms go).<p>What keeps me up at night is knowing that there is a higher point that can only be found by going down the descending side of the hill, potentially for an extended period of time.<p>So here I am at the bottom, wondering if I should turn back or try another hill. It was a lot more work walking downhill than I thought it would be. I keep wondering if there’s some other search function I could employ that would reveal where the peaks are or even transport me to them. Sometimes I picture where a hill would be but nobody listens. They are too busy climbing their own hills. Then it vanishes and reappears under someone else, and people admire how hard that person climbed. Lately the best strategy seems to be doing as little as possible and riding the hills as they grow around me. As someone born and raised to climb, I don’t know what to make of this.

I&#x27;m surprised that nobody has mentioned one of the key components of busy-ness for the average worker: unemployment. Labor force participation is down even though productivity for the average worker is historically way up. Owners of capital get can more done with fewer workers today than ever before for many different kinds of businesses, so it is not surprising that people work harder and are busier while more folks are finding themselves unable to find work in traditional ways.

I think it&#x27;s a combination of many reasons, many of which the article cited, but then from other articles I&#x27;ve read as well.<p>At least for myself, I&#x27;ve noticed that I have used busy-ness as an excuse to not do something I dislike. A rapidly growing synonym by the way, is I&#x27;m &quot;tired.&quot;<p>As for why people stay &quot;busy&quot; beyond the excuse factor, I buy most into the argument about keeping up with the Joneses. We live in a very consumption-driven society and people are always scaling up their &quot;needs&quot; rather than being happy with what they have. Consider the consultant that buys a house upon making manager, and then a bigger house upon making partner. Were any of those upgrades truly necessary for the 2-person couple? No, but they&quot;felt&quot; necessary because that&#x27;s what we do. We climb ladders and scale up.<p>I&#x27;m less inclined to buy the argument that people stay busy because working provides meaning. It&#x27;s not that I don&#x27;t think work provides meaning, it&#x27;s that I don&#x27;t think most people find meaning in their work today. Rather, work is the tedium that you experience so that you can climb a ladder and get stuff, and continue the up-and-to-the-right cycle.

I was surprised that the author did not include the Puritan American work ethic as a possible explanation. That is, the idea that work = virtue.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protestant_work_ethic</a>

Why are we busier?<p>Go here <a href="http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;productivity</a> change the start of the graph to 1959. I would argue that technology has radically helped our productivity but at the end of the day, people are always expected to get better.<p>Honestly I don&#x27;t know if this is sustainable but the idea of always growing from a gut check doesn&#x27;t seem to be. The question could be what is the breaking point and what will break?<p><a href="http://www.bls.gov/lpc/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;lpc&#x2F;</a>

My guess is that we as humans tend to look at what we&#x27;ve missed out on rather than what we&#x27;ve gained. During Keynes&#x27;s time there wasn&#x27;t quite as much competition for one&#x27;s time and attention, and whatever they had probably wasn&#x27;t as cheap. Now we just have so much entertainment at our disposal that we can&#x27;t feel satisfied with what we have.<p>I&#x27;ll call it the <i>Deal or No Deal irrationality</i>. Essentially, if you go on that show hoping to win $1,000,000 but end up with just $100, you probably feel pretty disappointed. The $999,900 you didn&#x27;t win ends up eclipsing the fact that you won $100. $100! A free night out with your friends! A nice fancy dinner! Who doesn&#x27;t want that sort of bonus?!<p>[I might have accidentally stolen the above example from a Dan Ariely book. If I did then I do apologize]<p>Now in our society we have competing forces of remaining sociable, watching TV, browsing the Internet, maintaining hobbies, going on vacations, and (as the article notes) trying to work and more more in the process. I mean, I&#x27;ve had to <i>sacrifice</i> watching TV and playing video games just because I need to to have &#x27;more productive leisure.&#x27; Board games, lifting weights, going out with friends, and programming are things that I like to do, sure, but that doesn&#x27;t quite fill in the gap a video game may do in the same way. At the same time I&#x27;d like to do more biking and get into other more artistic hobbies, but the time cost to learning is so great and the ROI relative to what I already have on my plate.

Why is there no consideration of unemployment in this exploration? In order for leisure time to be evenly-distributed, in an anti-freeloader society, work would have to be evenly-distributed as well. That means having two employees working 20 hours, instead of one working 40. However, employers would need to be able to supply the workers the same salary they now pay the 40-hour worker, or else the workers would have to be willing to consume less.

I was reminded of something written by George Bernard Shaw, a contemporary of Keynes and as well as a playwright, a co founder of the London School of Economics, saying the harder he works the more he lives. Maybe people are busy because, to some extent, they want to be. The finding mentioned in the article that the richer people are the busier would fit with that. Quote below:<p>&quot;This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.&quot;

Awesome article. I don&#x27;t have much to add, but it&#x27;s interesting how &quot;funny&quot; we are as a species in that we&#x27;re never fully content. What we think of as a &quot;perfect life&quot; today will be trivial in 100 years and that society 100 years from now will yearn for their own perfect life.

An evolution-based theory is that we are genetically programmed to ensure our offspring&#x27;s survival. This means that whatever tools, knowledge and experience parents have picked up along the way are improved and applied to raising their children. Parents will therefore observe and learn from other parents and their own research for healthier foods, better education tracks, both leadership and teamwork development activities, and whatever else we are convinced will help.<p>That drive then gets co-mingled with the need for acceptance and competitiveness (also evolution-based). The soccer mom satisfies all those drives concurrently: Improved survival rate for offspring, need for acceptance by a group, competitiveness for resources.<p>Thanks to evolution, we are pretty much spring-loaded to drive ourselves crazy busy in our 21st century world.

Email+IMs+notifications, everywhere, anytime, that&#x27;s how.

I&#x27;m a naturally competitive individual and I like to out-compete my peers at work - in other words, to win. I don&#x27;t think this part of human nature will ever lessen no matter how far technology advances.

You are only busy if you choose to be in this country. However, how you make the choice is implicit by your level of consumption. I am happy to live on 30k&#x2F;year even though I make almost 200k, because in 5-10 years, I don&#x27;t want to be so busy.<p>You can make the choice--either live an extravagent lifestyle and remain busy, or live modestly for a decade or less and then do whatever the fuck you want 24 hours a day.

That &quot;Overwhelmed&quot; book is excellent. Halfway through it now and it&#x27;s really altered my perspective on everyday life.

One analogy to consider is that peoples with argiculture had much worse living standard than hunters-gatherers. Yet, given that they were tied to a patch of ground, they&#x27;ve drove the hunters-gatherers out of their traditional hunting-gathering grounds and eventually took over the world.<p>The progress doesn&#x27;t necessarily prefer better standard of living.

Am I naive to believe that we&#x27;re on a good way of fulfilling Kenyes&#x27;s prediction and that it&#x27;s all thanks to capitalism? The world is a much better place today than it was 100 years ago.

<a href="http://idler.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;idler.co.uk&#x2F;</a><p>It is <i>possible</i> to make a business out of being idle, although I suspect Tom and Victoria are quite busy really.

tldr. I&#x27;m basing my below comment on the title of the article.<p>I think it&#x27;s just an out growth of our evolution. I mean throughout human history we&#x27;ve had to be &#x27;busy&#x27; to survive. Now there is a small historical ripple in that pattern where we empirically don&#x27;t have to adhere to the same ethic to survive, but it&#x27;s still ingrained into us from our history.

Why people need boolean logic as in &quot;Keynes was right OR wrong&quot; ?<p>Contrary to computer science you can be right AND wrong.

Usury. The only way money is generated is by debt. Debt, by definition is encumbered by interest. Thus, the only way to generate money to cover the interest is to generate more debt, this is a feedback cycle, requiring accelerating borrowing just to stay where you are. I think this is a large part of why we are so busy today. We are always behind the eight ball, at every level.

I really can&#x27;t help but read the diaereses, they insist on using, as umlauts.

Offtopic, but the date on the article says 6 days from now..

Greed.

If you look at corporate employment (the situation of the lower classes is a different matter) people <i>are</i> doing about 5-10 hours of real work per week. Real work is so rare that it&#x27;s a political token allocated as a favor. If you pay your dues and make your bosses happy, you <i>might get a real project</i> after a couple of years.<p>The rest of that time is spent acquiring and maintaining social status.<p>Under corporatism, you don&#x27;t get a leisure society. You get total disenfranchisement of those who lose in (increasingly noisy and degenerate, over time) political tussles and end up with &quot;the wrong kind&quot; of resume, and a frenetic but wasteful contest in which those who are still in contention beat the piss out of each other to make themselves eligible for the (dwindling) supply of real projects.<p>When you have such a large number of people with nothing better to do but jockey for social status, you have a lot of cheap labor and it&#x27;s easy to assign pointless grunt work that doesn&#x27;t need to be done, and that does little for a person&#x27;s career or general employability-- and people will do it.<p>That, above, is what happened. Also, read nlawalker&#x27;s post, because (s?)he nailed it.

How did we get we busy? (or did we?)<p>Average American watches 5 hours of TV per day: <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch.." rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nydailynews.com&#x2F;life-style&#x2F;average-american-watch...</a>.<p>Perhaps people spend more time at work then they used to, but while not at work they spend way less time working on things like mowing the lawn, cooking, washing clothes, ETC.<p>Women blaming men for them being too busy need to weight their options IMO. If you are too busy, quit your job and stay home. To maintain the quality of life that existed while Keynes wrote this book, a single income is often adequate. It&#x27;s not worth killing yourself over.<p>I think what much of what explains the wealth gap is free trade and illegal immigration. We import everything from China today. We would not allow these sweat-shops in our country with children working in dangerous conditions for pennies an hour. We wouldn&#x27;t allow it here, but we do support it by buying these products. This breaks the whole premise that Keynes was basing his predictions on (Illegal immigrant employment as well). People can get rich paying illegal workers almost nothing, or importing a product from China and marking up it&#x27;s price by 8-10x.<p>This throws things out of the balance that he envisioned.

Of course they blame men. Never mind blaming misguided feminism, pushing women to endlessly new heights of perfectionism, elitism and competition both within and across their fairer sex.<p>And strangely its not OK that the man knows how to relax, minimizes extraneous work and does a sufficient job...<p>Hits a nerve for me if you can&#x27;t tell.