This Holiday, Consider: Americans Are Drunk on Work

"Americans have a kind of insane relationship with time, in which we are in a sense being used by time and trapped by it." "Many potentially satisfying leisure skills are off limits because they take too much time: participating in community theater, seriously taking up a sport or a musical instrument, getting involved with a church or community organization." Thus: "The fact is that shopping is the chief cultural activity in the United States." "Perhaps people are just too tired after work to engage in active leisure."

In 1992 Harvard economist Juliet B. Schor wrote these words, during the first wave of anxiety about the stagnation of wages and living standards since 1973. (The same macroeconomic trends led to the landmark 1988 Forgotten Half report, co-authored by AYPF founder Samuel Halperin.)

Thirty years on, these trends have worsened: wage stagnation despite productivity increases, more work despite arguably less work that needs doing. Many of us toil in what David Graeber categorized as “bullshit jobs.” These are knowledge-economy jobs that contribute largely to maintaining hierarchies of control within organizations and society: Managing corporate images, contouring public perceptions, keeping customers satisfied, and making knowledge workers feel like they are doing something. The pandemic has underlined one of Graeber’s insights, that executives need to see underlings in the office to feel important. As amazing writer on work culture Anne Helen Peterson put it: “People who are in power in organizations, whose job really is to kind of walk around and just check on people - they want to feel that power again. They want to feel like they are doing a good job, and the way that they know that they are doing a good job is by walking around.”

In future posts, I’ll explore how our workaholic culture can enter recovery. It’s been done before. In fact, the archaeological evidence increasingly suggests our approach to work is the exception, not the rule.