Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Overall, however, the differences are not vast. Women in Columbus spent at most 5 per cent more time in unpleasant activities than their counterparts in Rennes.43 This may, however, be an underestimate, since the data did not include holidays – people who were away, after all, could not be interviewed, and French vacations are three weeks longer. The researchers discounted their importance since across a whole year they add up to a tiny fraction of time. This is surely too simple. Holidays are an integral part of people’s identities. They are planned before and relished after. On vacation, families follow a different rhythm. More time is devoted to play, eating, sociability and, presumably, sex, all of which leaves a legacy when people re-enter ordinary life. The number of photos taken and souvenirs on display tell a story of a holiday’s lasting effect on well-being, which is insufficiently captured by a method that asks individuals to reconstruct only a normal day.

  Research that compares how societies use and experience time is still in its infancy. Plenty of problems remain. What if some societies are simply grumpier than others or take pleasure from different activities? Long lunches may make the French happy, but does that necessarily mean other cultures would (or, indeed, should) follow their example? What is pertinent for us is that the French–American comparison hints at a paradoxical relation between leisure and well-being. It brings us back to the critique that the affluent society is essentially ‘joyless’.44 According to this thesis, affluence favours cheap entertainment technologies and other ‘comfort goods’ that give instant but short-lived pleasure at the expense of genuinely stimulating ‘relational goods’. People sit and watch TV alone instead of meeting friends. Ranking daily activities by their pleasantness suggests this is too simple. Some consumer products give greater joy than others – in France, as in the United States, watching TV is well ahead of computing. More importantly, the French have a greater joie de vivre all-round: they watch more TV and have more sex. Whether consumer goods have really killed time-intensive leisure and relational goods should be treated as an open question, not a foregone conclusion. It is to the uses of leisure that we must now turn in search of an answer.

  WORK HARD, PLAY HARD

  Leisure was a discovery of the ancient Greeks. Work and play were fused in an organic whole in hunter-gatherer societies. It was the Greeks who split them apart. Aristotle ranked leisure alongside wisdom and happiness as one of the ends of life. Leisure made the complete person. It allowed for passive contemplation and civic action, and involved the freedom to take a disinterested view of the world. Not by chance do the European words ‘school’, Schule and scuola echo the Greek for ‘leisure’ (schole), although the reality of education today may be a far cry from this ideal. Unlike for the moderns, leisure for the ancients was pure and indivisible. The idea that it could be measured in hours and minutes or that someone might have more or less of it would have stunned Aristotle. Leisure and work were mutually exclusive states of existence. The privilege of having the former required a complete freedom from the latter. The leisure of the few was therefore supported by the slavery of the many. It was this that gave ‘leisure’ a bad name in Victorian times and made ‘the leisured classes’ a frequent term of abuse. A man with an income of £200,000 a year, the Victorian historian and moralist Thomas Carlyle sharply noted, lived off the labour of 6,666 men and did nothing but shoot partridges.45

  Industrialization delivered enormous gains in productivity that made it possible to give workers time off. Before it could be enjoyed, however, leisure had to be reclaimed as something good. Into the early twentieth century, leisure appeared a ‘threat’. Would workers know what to do with free time, or just drink it away while gambling on a bloody dog fight? The answer, according to middle-class reformers, lay with ‘rational recreation’ such as reading, sober entertainment and physical exercise. By the early twentieth century, the war over leisure was being won. All societies – democratic, fascist and socialist – embraced leisure as a means to create stronger citizens, although they differed in the purpose to which they put this strength.

  In addition to the quantity of free time, therefore, the contest over leisure concerned its quality. Champions of leisure rarely advocated doing nothing. For ‘the first time in human history,’ an American observer wrote in 1942, ‘leisure for recreation and the arts is available to almost all classes. Instead of regarding leisure as dangerous, we should use it as a means of rounding out our personalities . . . Play and creative activities should occupy more of our attention.’ 46

  Defining leisure has been far from easy. Leisure implies choice and the ability to do something for its own sake. In 1976, official British statistics included activities in the work environment, such as company sports and clubs. Paid holidays, meanwhile, appeared in the category of employment before they were moved back to leisure in 1988.47 The international convention since has been to distinguish free time from paid and domestic work on the one hand, and from personal care on the other. The harmonized European time-use survey (HETUS) treats socializing, entertainment, reading, resting and hobbies as free time. Gardening, handicrafts and shopping, on the other hand, are coded as domestic work, together with childcare and cleaning, while eating features as personal care. Of course, such hard-and-fast distinctions blur reality. We must all eat to survive, but some eat for pleasure and like to dine in style; if eating was partly treated as free time, the leisure gap between Americans and Europeans would widen.48 Gardening, knitting and do-it-yourself projects, similarly, have taken on qualities of leisure. In the following pages therefore, we need to be flexible. Anything else would give a distorted picture about the implication of affluence for leisure.

  A final word of caution about a simple yet fundamental difference. Private consumption, for the economist, refers to how much money an individual spends. Leisure, for the sociologist, measures the amount of free time devoted to a certain purpose. The two do not translate into each other. Mr Jones might buy a fancy new car, but if most of his driving was to commute to work, it would show up as travel to work in a time-use diary. Conversely, leisure can involve more or less consumption. An active skier consumes more money and resources than her neighbour who prefers to stay at home and read. Whether more leisure is the inverse of more consumption – as in the idle European, consumerist American stereotype – is a question that calls for empirical verification.

  In 1927, Lydia Lueb interviewed 2,000 female textile workers in Westphalia about how they spent their free time. On average, these young women worked fifty-four hours a week, including Saturday mornings. In addition, they did around two hours of housekeeping a day. What was their ‘favourite’ activity in their own time? she asked them. The biggest single answer was rest (41 per cent). A quarter listed sewing, knitting and domestic work, followed at some distance by reading (8 per cent), cycling/sport (3 per cent) and entertainment (2 per cent). The women had a week’s holiday – half spent theirs at home with needlework or in the garden. Only one in five went on a short trip. A tiny minority went hiking. During the working week, some of the women went swimming, but ‘sport on the weekend was virtually unknown’ among them. Some lived in hostels and factory homes which on evenings and Sundays put on dances and social games as well as courses in cooking and sewing. In the winter months, trade unions organized plays and song recitals for their members. For the majority, Sundays were unchanging: in the morning to church, then housework and lunch. The afternoon was filled with walks and visits with friends and family. A few practised an instrument or rehearsed for a play. Some went on excursions with their singing club. What they appreciated most, however, was the chance to sleep in and rest.49

  Fast forward to Europe in 2000 and we enter a different time zone. A German woman now enjoyed over five hours of free time a day, a Norwegian almost six. Men, on average, had half an hour more. Around two hours a day was devoted to watching television – one third of all free time in Germany, and over half in Hungary. This is the single biggest shift in the use of leisure ti
me. What rest was for Westphalian workers, TV is for contemporary Europeans. Other activities, however, complicate the picture. A good half of all Europeans spent an hour or so socializing. Reading, too, remained popular, especially in Northern Europe. A quarter of Europeans spent half an hour a day playing a sport and walking. Cultural participation (five to fourteen minutes a day) came last, but it looks so small because time-use diaries measure daily averages and people do not go to the theatre or the museum every day. Gardening added ten to thirty minutes a day, shopping another half an hour.50

  Of course, the two surveys do not allow for a rigorous comparison; the historical study was limited to female workers, not a cross-section of the population. National time-use surveys exist only from the 1960s. Still, placing the two alongside each other points to major changes in the quality of free time, its rhythm, pace and density. First, in the 1920s it was still natural to include housework and needlework as ‘free time’; indeed, a quarter of the young women listed these as their favourite activity. By 2000, such tasks had been demoted to ‘unpaid work’. Second, the number of leisure activities has grown exponentially. The Westphalian working women either went swimming or did no sport at all. Their great-grand-daughters could choose football, volleyball, tennis, judo and indoor skiing. The greater level of activity, thirdly, is related to greater mobility. Other than the occasional walk, leisure in the 1920s had a fixed residence, at home or in the hostel. Today, Europeans still spend two thirds of their leisure at home, but they have been increasingly restless since the 1960s; in 1961, a British adult spent eighty-seven minutes a day on shopping and out-of-home leisure; forty years later it was 136. In France, more than a third did not go out at all in the evenings in 1973; a generation later, that number had fallen to a fifth.51 Going out for a meal was unknown to the Westphalian women, who either ate at home or at work – their ninety-minute lunch break would strike most workers today as equally inconceivable, at least outside France.

  Finally, there is the density of activities themselves. Europeans in 2000 do not only watch long hours of television, they also crowd their day with a larger number of other activities than their ancestors. Reading has slightly declined in the last three decades,52 but the numbers flocking to museums and the outdoors are up. And while no longer as dominant as even half a century ago, socializing remains a significant part of everyday life. In the past, there was less leisure, but what there was came in predictable, sequential chunks: the visit to church, followed by housework, lunch, then the afternoon walk. Today, there is more time off, but leisure is less structured and comes in a greater range of offerings, each with their own demands on time and space. The visit to the gym needs to be coordinated with dropping off the kids for their music lesson and the trip to the supermarket. Europeans today spend more time in their car for the purpose of free time than to get to work.53 Together, the rise in physical mobility and decline in collective, pre-arranged rhythms means that households have to do ever more of that synchronization themselves. Leisure time, like all time, involves the artificial ordering of scattered reality. What was once accomplished by the church bell and the factory clock is today increasingly left to the family schedule. Information technology makes it possible to stagger time – for example by pre-recording movies or pausing live performances – but this simultaneously eats into pauses by freeing up the down-time between tasks for another activity. As in paid work – where breaks have all but disappeared since the 1960s54 – leisure today is both more flexible and more turbulent. This is one reason for the rising feeling of harriedness.

  Can we go one step further and relate that feeling of rushing to the hectic quality of consumption itself? In the Harried Leisure Class (1970), Staffan Linder, a conservative economist and Swedish Trade Minister, argued that we can. He presented a version of what we earlier described as the ‘kid in the candy store’ syndrome. We were richer than ever before, Linder wrote, but, instead of enjoying a harmonious arcadia, ‘our lives . . . are becoming steadily more hectic.’ At the root of this paradox of affluence lay an ‘increasing scarcity of time’. Consumption, he noted, takes time as well as money. As productivity increased the relative price of work, it simultaneously made free time more expensive. Sitting on a bench and watching the birds looked less attractive if it was possible to earn good money in the same amount of time. In addition, products were becoming progressively cheaper. The natural response to these changes, Linder argued, was to switch from timehungry, slower cultural activities to cheap goods that offered instant gratification. Consumption, he predicted, would become more and more ‘commodity intensive’.55

  Forty years on, it is possible to take stock. True, cupboards and garages have never been so full of goods and gadgets. But the thesis was not simply about the rate of acquisition. It was about consumer goods killing off time-intensive leisure activities. Reading, it is true, has declined in almost all affluent societies since the 1980s, although there are notable differences between countries and age groups. Scandinavians remain twice as avid readers as Southern Europeans. Among the French, however, fifty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds today are more likely to read a book than they were ten years ago. In Britain as a whole, book reading has been on the rise in the last generation.56

  Plenty of other evidence, however, suggests that free time in affluent societies has not entirely succumbed to turbo materialism. After all, the biggest chunk is spent in front of the television. Adverts may be faster and more frequent than they were half a century ago, and there are shopping channels and channel surfing but, as such, television is not especially ‘commodity intensive’. The set is changed every few years, TV dinners arrived and programmes whetted an appetite for the outside world, but otherwise the two hours a day in front of the box are two hours of wasted opportunities for other ‘commodity intensive’ leisure. A good deal of television viewing, moreover, involves time-intensive sociability. Herr W., a fifty-six- year-old retired digger operator, told German researchers in the 1980s that he watched up to six hours a day when football was on – he was a Borussia Dortmund fan – but did not think it had hurt his social life at all: he often watched with neighbours and they sometimes played games on the side.57

  Television habits remain uneven across Europe. The more affluent Scandinavians and Germans devote less of their free time to television (c.33 per cent) than Hungarians and Eastern Europeans (50+ per cent). Interestingly, the former also socialize more than the latter, the very opposite of what the harried model would predict. Socializing has declined in some countries, such as the Netherlands. Overall, however, visiting and chatting have been remarkably resilient, and this in spite of materialist temptations and more women joining the workforce. Americans today socialize less with neighbours than two generations ago but in exchange spend more time with friends and family. In Britain, socializing has been stable since the 1970s. In Germany, it may even have increased. And families spend more time with their children. Ironically, and notwithstanding the advance of fast food and eating out, the family meal at home is stronger than ever in some affluent societies today. Germans spent more time eating in 2000 than in 1990 and did most of it within their own four walls.58

  Social life might have been accelerating, but it is a mistake to presume that it was an oasis of calm a century ago. The Week-end Book first appeared in 1924 to provide the British middle classes with suitable material for ‘hours of sociable relaxation’. A run-away success, many new editions followed. In the 1931 edition, poems took up 218 pages, games and songs another 116, including the ‘Eton Boys’, best sung ‘with feeling and a nasal Cockney intonation’. Relaxation in the lounge, however, was accomplished through speed in the kitchen. ‘As time is usually the chief consideration,’ the authors explained, ‘menus have been drawn up on a speed-basis.’ A good hostess was advised to ‘serve unusual dishes that will be remembered’ but assured that it was fine to use ‘tinned foods’ and ‘disguise them’. A ‘quickish’ menu consisted of escalopes of veal – simmered for te
n minutes – accompanied by a nut and olive salad, and ‘deep-fat-fried potato fingers’. If time was really short, there was always the ‘very quick’ option of cold mutton slices, followed by ‘stewed prunes in claret – boil 10 minutes’. What was not be rushed were the drinks. There were recipes for seven cocktails: ‘If possible, ALL COCKTAILS should stand on ice for at least half an hour before shaking and taking.’59 Fast food and slow drinks summed up the inter-war weekend. A new edition in 1955 added scrambled eggs and hot sandwiches to the list of ‘quick dishes’ and introduced ‘quick sweets’ such as tinned pineapple with honey ‘fried over low heat’. And, thank God, it discovered espresso for the English. Coffee, it explained, need not be ‘Puddle water’.60 The serious host was urged to acquire an expensive Gaggia machine or at least to ‘practise your palate at the Espresso bars’ in the meantime. By 2006, coffee had improved, but The Week-end Book had dropped both its poetry section (an indication of the decline of shared reading aloud) and its sheet music (a sign of the decline of the house concert and the diffusion of stereos and CD players). The number of cocktails, on the other hand, had jumped from seven to forty – reflecting the rise of exotic travel and the greater range of cultural influences. Foodstuffs and cuisines, too, were more varied than ever before, ranging from Scallops en Coquilles to old-fashioned Tripe and Onions. Speed, interestingly, no longer merited special attention at all.61