Why you never have enough time, a history
There’s just not enough time. You’re busy, hurried, harassed by What’s Next and by What Else. As you struggle to keep up, you vacillate between subscribing to more life hacking and throwing your hands up when faced with what you ironically call “the futility of life.” The nervous laughter you expend when you hear such a grand expression come out of your mouth does little to alleviate the burden you so achingly carry.
Sometimes you dream of getting off this treadmill of tasks, but you fear that, if you did, you’d be passed by and summarily forgotten.
Welcome to our “time famine.”
Time is, in our modern society, a scarcity, a “precious resource,” and the unspoken enemy that must be subdued. But this was not always so. At other moments in history, time was abundant. So what changed? How did time turn against us?
How time “sped up”
Those of us living in developed ｃountries generally work less than our predecessors living in the 1850s, and yet we feel not just that we have less time but also that the pace of life keeps speeding up. The cause of this disconnect—which sociologist Judy Wajcman calls the “time-pressure paradox”—has been a subject of debate among historians and sociologists.
Some have argued that technological advances alone have caused the pace of social life to speed up. Yet this can’t be the sole cause of our time famine, since many “labor-saving” machines were meant to also save us time. We no longer spend long hours washing our clothes by hand, for instance, and hyperloop promises to make the commute between Los Angeles and San Francisco feel, in the future, like a short subway trip.
“It’s capitalism, st****!,” someone else might be heard exclaiming. The late historian E.P. Thompson argued that industrial capitalism required a new breed of workers—industrial workers—who were increasingly subjected to “time-discipline,” the social control of time through precise measurement and ruthless management. This shift in how we work is an obvious contributor to our current time famine. Whereas before industrialization, workers were freer to work according to more natural, even seasonal rhythms, thereafter they were submitted to the brutal demands of standardized clock time and capitalists’ expectations about ever-higher levels of productivity. Contemporary knowledge workers inherited this time-discipline, albeit now in a digitized form.
But even though the rise of scheduled work may contribute to time famine, it still falls short of completely explaining it. Industrialization created not only a demand for scheduling, but also prosperity. The Great Enrichment, a period beginning in 1800, saw citizens in developed nations become 130 times richer than they were before 1800. This new prosperity for many created an unprecedented opportunity for “free time.”
Time-saving technologies and prosperity, rather than making us time poor, should make us feel as if time is on our side. But they haven’t.
The reason, asserted German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is social acceleration. In Rosa’s view, we can only understand the speedup of modern culture once we see how technological innovations, social changes, and the pace of life all affect and reinforce one another. He writes, "Examining the causal relations between the three spheres of social acceleration reveals a surprising feedback loop: technological acceleration, which is frequently connected to the introduction of new technologies almost inevitably brings about a whole range of changes in social practices, communication structures, and corresponding forms of life. For example, the Internet has not only increased the speed of communicative exchange and the virtualization of economic and productive processes it has also established new occupational, economic, and communicative structures, opening up new patterns of social interaction and even new forms of social identity."
I would add a fourth element to this model: the changing pace of knowledge work brought on by the threat of precarity. Security—in jobs, welfare, retirement, and on just about every frontier—has become increasingly rare as work turns into a task-by-task arrangement. The precarious employee fears losing her job and is often responsible for tasks that were once distributed among more employees, while the precarious freelancer, anxious about an uncertain future, is often completing one gig while searching for the next ones. Financial insecurity begets endless, anxious activity and, in turn, an acute sense of time famine.
These explanations, ranging from the less to the more complete, all touch on something important about our time famine. But they still fail to explain a deeper shift in thinking that led to the modern experience of the ever-fleeting, ever-antagonistic nature of time.
Article Source: https://work.qz.com/1272033/why-you-never-have-enough-time-a-history/
Image Source: https://evolvingwisdom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/shutterstock_271332740-696x464.jpg
VOCABULARY WORDS:
1. Vacillate (v.) ~ alternate or waver between different opinions or actions be indecisive
2. Alleviate (v.) ~ make (suffering, deficiency, or a problem) less severe
3. Famine (n.) ~ a shortage
4. Subdued (adj.) ~ (of a person or their manner) quiet and rather reflective or depressed
5. Paradox (n.) ~ a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true
6. Unprecedented (adj.) ~ never done or known before
7. Precarity (adj.) ~ lacking in predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare
8. Antagonistic (adj.) ~ showing or feeling active opposition or hostility toward someone or something
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What is "time famine"?
2. Do you often feel that you don't have enough time to do the things that you need to complete for the day? What do you think is the main reason for it?
3. Do you think that time-consuming devices are really helpful in saving time? Discuss your answer.
4. What can be done so that we would have enough time in our hands to complete our daily tasks?
