How the Leisure Class Became the Busy Class
Efficiency was supposed to give us time. And that time would allow us to be less busy. For a while it worked; and then we got busy again. Economist Thorstein Veblen described in his 1899 treatise “The Theory of the Leisure Class” how the wealthy signalled status by not having to work. Today, however, an overworked lifestyle is a sign of competence and importance. What connects a pothole in Italy with a teenager’s summer job, is an observation about progress and the consumption of time
In Contrast
In the morning, at breakfast, I see the people walk past our house. They’re on their way to the bus stop, to school, to work; to wherever they’re supposed to deliver whatever is asked of them, or to the things they chose to spend their time on, or feel forced into. I see the same people every day, doing the same thing, with the same numb routine. And a growing number of them are fully absorbed in a phone while they do it. A hasty, solitary, occupied movement, living in their own reality.
I can’t see what’s on those screens. A route, perhaps, a podcast, a message from school, or a last-minute project update. However useful or important, seen from a distance behind the breakfast table, it looks like a stream of detached individuals moving through our neighborhood, passing other people they hardly seem to notice. They might all think it’s highly efficient, doing more things at the same time, but they don’t seem present in that particular moment in time.
And then there are the few who seem to actually, consciously be where they are.
The neighbor who walks everywhere, on purpose, and whose walking pace is the only thing going faster than her being in the moment; her kind nod and smile when she encounters others sit in contrast with those whose focus is elsewhere. The businessman on his bike with a laptop bag in the basket, pedaling in a steady rhythm, sitting upright like a regal horseback rider, with the posture of a British gentleman, the punctuality of a German and the timetable of a Swiss. He’s aware of his surroundings and anticipates the possible collisions with the inattentive individuals. He’ll be where he has to be when he’s supposed to be there.
And the gardening crew, looking after the many little parks and playgrounds in our neighborhood. They take their time to rake the leaves and shovel the sand. And yes, they also seem to take the time for their many breaks. But they move deliberately and calmly, without the distraction of a secondary attention grab.
Output
The gardeners remind me of a summer job I had as a student. A temp agency had found me a vacation-time position at a production company that needed to cover for their holiday absences. I arrived on time, got a tour and some basic instructions, was handed a pair of safety shoes and an overall, and was placed at a machine. The task: pick up a small metal part from one box, dip the tip into a fluid, place it in the machine, and once the machine had done what it needed to do, take it out and put it in another box marked “done”. Not a very demanding job, let’s say.
By the first coffee break, I had finished the boxes assigned to me. So at the cafeteria table I asked the team leader what my next task would be. And all conversation stopped. People looked at me in disbelief. I wasn’t supposed to be finished before noon. What was I thinking? Why would I make it harder for the regular crew to keep their pace? What kind of example was I trying to set? I would leave when the holidays were over, and they would be left with the burden of higher productivity, or at the risk of someone getting fired. It didn’t quite register with my youthful enthusiasm. And then it was made clear, not unkindly, that I wouldn’t be welcome for much longer if I insisted on working harder than I was supposed to.
This kind of situation has been written about since at least the 1950’s, when sociologist Donald Roy described a machine shop where the work group restricted its own output, day in and day out (“Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop”). I didn’t know that at the time. And I had never heard of “Banana Time” until much later in life.
Productivity
A couple of weeks ago I commented on a LinkedIn post about pacing ourselves. My point was that we’ve made things so efficient over the last century that we should have gained plenty of free time to enjoy a proper lunch; instead we’ve filled it with more tasks, being busy all the time, connected and “on” 24/7, and now think we have to apologise when we switch off our mobile phone for an hour and sit down for a croissant and a coffee.
John Maynard Keynes saw the first half coming. In 1930 he wrote that technology would bring us to three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week, and that the real problem would then be how to occupy the leisure that science and compound interest had won for us (“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”). He called that “a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents”. He was right about the productivity. He was wrong about what we’d do with the abundance of that precious resource and what it meant to the value of an hour’s work.
Economist William Stanley Jevons had noticed something similar with coal in 1865 (“The Coal Question”): using it more efficiently didn’t reduce consumption, “the very contrary is the truth”. British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson, tongue in cheek, did the same for time: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” (“Parkinson’s Law”).
And the gains of progress went somewhere all right, but not where Keynes may have assumed. In the United States, productivity has grown 93,7% since 1979, while hourly pay for the typical worker grew 32,7% (Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity–Pay Gap”). Sure, these are American numbers; I suspect they are different in a country that negotiates its way toward compromise, or in one that measures success and pride by other things than occupation. But the reality isn’t hard to recognise: efficiency freed time, but that time got consumed by busyness.
The Business of Busyness
Nobody sat down and decided society had to replace the newly gained leisure with other forms of busyness. Rather, everybody decided it a little, every day. Busyness has turned into a signal: marketing researchers Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan found that people perceive a busy, overworked lifestyle as a sign of competence and of being in demand (“Conspicuous Consumption of Time”). Their research also concludes that this plays out differently between North America and Europe. Nonetheless, we see this busyness everywhere. And when you listen to a common conversation, you’ll hear a “How are you?” being answered by a “Good, busy!”.
Harvard researcher Leslie Perlow followed a software engineering team at a large corporation for nine months and saw how it works from the inside (“The Time Famine”): long hours and crisis-solving got rewarded, the crises created the interruptions, and the interruptions created the time pressure. When she introduced quiet time, productivity went up. When she left, it slid back, because nothing about what got rewarded had changed. In other words, the gained time space gets filled with whatever we feed it. The result? Money is one way. Looking busy is another.
Drifting Away
Something did change, though: what we fill the time space with. I don’t have a study that says board games at the family table used to be the norm; I do have research on what came instead. In 1981, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and media researcher Robert Kubey sampled the moods of 104 adult workers (“Television and the Rest of Life”) and found television linked to relaxation, passivity and drowsiness, “a relatively unchallenging activity requiring little cognitive investment”. Political scientist Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) put about a quarter of the decline in civic participation since 1965 on electronic entertainment, television above all. More recently, economists Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst (“Leisure Luxuries”) estimated that gaming and recreational computing account for about half of the increase in leisure among younger men. From interaction to being entertained. From shared to individual.
And the phone changed where it happens. In two experiments, psychologists Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein (“Can You Connect with Me Now?”) put strangers together for ten minutes of conversation, with or without a phone in view. The mere presence of the phone reduced closeness and trust, most clearly when the topic was personal.
That brings me back to my breakfast observation. What I see isn’t a verdict on what’s on people’s screens, because I don’t know. It’s the street, it’s the neighborhood, it’s our society. People walking the dog, pushing a pram, moving from home to the bus stop, each in a bubble of their own while the immediate world goes by unnoticed. And what fills the bubble is often somebody else’s polished, hyped, influencer-driven version of success. A meta-analysis of 48 studies (7.679 participants) by McComb, Vanman and Tobin (“Social Media Exposure to Upward Comparison Targets”) found that looking up at such comparisons online tends to leave people feeling worse. The time we earned drifts further and further away from our personal surroundings, and, at the same time, seems to push us toward a version of our lives that may never be reachable, nor sustainable.
Upkeep
And it brings me back to the gardening crew. Most people shake their heads at them, comparing their own pace to the crew’s, and ignore that the result of that “slow” work is why the neighborhood is such a pleasant place to live. Historian Andrew Russell and technology scholar Lee Vinsel made the broader case in 2016 (“Hail the Maintainers”): maintenance and repair “has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations”. Nobody records it, nobody counts it, but everybody notices when it stops.
I came to realise that we sometimes confuse efficiency with requirement. When I lived in Italy, I couldn’t ignore the difference between the roads there and how the Netherlands approaches them. The number of potholes I had to slalom past was ridiculous. People would notice a pothole and complain; perhaps someone lost a car’s axle because they noticed the size of it too late, and the municipality was supposed to fix it. Instead, someone would drive up and place a sign next to the hole. The sign would fall over, and another car would get a flat tyre, barely missing the dangerous spot. A few days later, a second sign and a pylon would appear. And only after weeks would the hole get fixed, in a way that would survive until the planned road upgrade, maybe next year, or sometime in the future, perhaps. And if the pothole would reappear before that upgrade, you could be sure of a sign being placed alongside it for too long.
In the Netherlands, we fix it in no time. We have an efficient system, dedicated equipment, calculated planning, and a cost structure that lets us move fast; roads, shoulders, roadsides and crash barriers are all designed and sized for efficiency, and the upkeep is largely automated, with less human involvement and more predictability. Which sounds very logical, until you realise that in Italy, several jobs are still being kept alive that efficiency would have removed long ago. Whether we call that respect for what has become obsolete, or an annoying byproduct we keep alive, depends on who you ask. Japan has a word for something similar: “madogiwazoku”, loosely translated as “the window seat employees“; older workers kept on the payroll, but moved to a desk by the window with little to do. They have a job. Whether they have a purpose is another question. Which takes us back to the machine in that factory, and to the social contract between the regulars whose workforce fabric I unknowingly disrupted.
Ambition
In the movie “Good Will Hunting” (about a highly intelligent young man who’s not using his mental capabilities to improve his life), Chuckie tells Will that it would be an insult to his friends if he were still around in twenty years. Then he says the best part of his day is the ten seconds between pulling up at the curb and reaching Will’s door, because maybe, when he knocks, Will won’t be there.
Movie Still “Good Will Hunting”, © Miramax (1997)
It’s not a critique of ambition, or of the lack of it. It’s a heartfelt wish for someone to find purpose and satisfaction in whatever fits their capabilities and nurtures their existence. And it cuts both ways, I think. It isn’t an argument for going faster, and it isn’t an argument for going slower. It’s about balance. A lot of the people walking past our window seem to be stuck in a routine and a pace set by others, defending the status quo of what they do by accepting the rules and limits imposed on them, filling the time space not with leisure or purpose, but with being busy. And the crew with the rakes might well have found exactly where they belong, working at a pace that may not seem efficient, but that simply fits the requirement.
Not that I want to persuade anyone to move slower just to frustrate progress, or to stop improving life. But it would be good to reach for actual progress, not the perceived kind that’s measured only in economics and efficiency. Instead of expressing it in terms of GDP, the Bhutanese Gross National Happiness philosophy might give a better indication of human-focused progress. The commission led by economist Joseph Stiglitz, with Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, asked for a broader dashboard than GDP back in 2009 (“Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress”). And improvement, I’d say, deserves more criteria than a narrow view of what’s directly in front of us.
Because: what is progress, when we get caught up in a system that no longer sees the human component in it? What is improvement, when those who enable efficiency and progress don’t benefit from it, but have to adapt and start a new cycle of activities to fill up what’s been freed? And what is it that makes us want to accelerate, even if that is counter-productive to how we have to design our lives around it?
Maybe we just need some more potholes in our own neighborhood, so as to get all the quasi-busy people to look up from their phones and prevent them from falling into the busyness trap.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conspicuous-pace-prestige-roland-biemans-rssxe
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