by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
POSSESSION OVERLOAD
Swenson observed that many of his patients suffered from what he now calls “possession overload,” the problem of dealing with too much stuff. “Possession overload is the kind of problem where you have so many things you find your life is being taken up by maintaining and caring for things instead of people,” Swenson says. “Everything I own owns me. People feel sad and what do they do? They go to the mall and they shop and it makes them feel better, but only for a short time. There’s an addictive quality in consumerism. But it simply doesn’t work. They’ve gotten all these things and they still find this emptiness, this hollowness. All they have is stress and exhaustion and burnout, and their relationships are vaporizing. They’re surrounded by all kinds of fun toys but the meaning is gone.”
“Tragedy,” observes Swenson, “is wanting something badly, getting it, and finding it empty. And I think that’s what’s happened.”
TIME FAMINE
There’s been an almost imperceptible change in American greetings over the past two decades. Remember how when you used to say “how are you?” to the friends you ran into at work or on the street, they’d reply “fine, and you?” Now, when we ask that question, the answer is often “busy, and you?”(when they have time to say, “and you?”)“Me too,” we admit. We used to talk of having “time to smell the flowers.” Now we barely find time to smell the coffee. “The pace of life has accelerated to the point where everyone is breathless,” says Richard Swenson. “You look at all the countries that have the most prosperity and they’re the same countries that have the most stress.”
Tried to make a dinner date with a friend recently? Chances are you have to look a month ahead in your appointment calendars. Even children now carry them. Ask your coworkers what they’d like more of in their lives and odds are they’ll say “time.” “This is an issue that cuts across race lines, class lines, and gender lines,” says African-American novelist Barbara Neely. “Nobody has any time out there.”2 We’re all like the bespectacled bunny in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, who keeps looking at his watch and muttering, “No time to say hello, goodbye, I’m late! I’m late! I’m late!”
By the early 1990s, trend-spotters were warning that a specter was haunting America: time famine. Advertisers noted that “time will be the luxury of the 1990s.” A series of clever TV spots for US West showed time-pressed citizens trying to “buy time” at a bank called ‘Time R Us’ or in bargain basements. One store offered customers “the greatest sale of all TIME.” A weary woman asked where she could buy “quality time.” “Now you CAN buy time,” the ads promised. “Extra working time with mobile phone service from US West.”
More working time. Hmmm.
We thought the opposite was supposed to be true: that advances in technology, automation, cybernation, were supposed to give us more leisure time and less working time. Remember how all those futurists were predicting that by the end of the 20th Century we’d have more leisure time than we’d know what to do with? In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee heard testimony that estimated a workweek of from fourteen to twenty-two hours by the year 2000.3
We got the technology, but we didn’t get the time. We have computers, fax machines, cell phones, e-mail, robots, express mail, freeways, jetliners, microwaves, fast food, one-hour photos, digital cameras, pop tarts, frozen waffles, instant this and instant that. But we have less free time than we did thirty years ago. And about those mobile phones: They do give you “extra working time” while driving, but make you as likely to cause an accident as someone who’s legally drunk. Progress? And then there are those leaf blowers. . . .
Patience may be the ultimate victim of our hurried lives. David Schenk, the author of The End of Patience, says that such things as the speed of the Internet for e-mail and on-line shopping mean that “we’re packing more into our lives and losing patience in the process. We’ve managed to compress time to such an extent that we’re now painfully aware of every second that we wait for anything.” There are now Internet news monitors in the elevators of a large Northeast hotel chain, and the ability to pedal and surf the Net at the same time at many fitness centers. Gas stations are considering putting in TV monitors on the islands to keep you amused while pumping.
THE HARRIED LEISURE CLASS
We should have paid attention to Staffan Linder. In 1970, the Swedish economist warned that all those predictions about more free time were a myth, that we’d soon be a “harried leisure class” starved for time. “Economic growth,” wrote Linder, “entails a general increase in the scarcity of time.”4 He continued, “As the volume of consumption goods increases, requirements for the care and maintenance of these goods also tends to increase, we get bigger houses to clean, a car to wash, a boat to put up for the winter, a television set to repair, and have to make more decisions on spending.”5
It’s as simple as this: increased susceptibility to affluenza means increasing headaches from time pressure.
Shopping itself, Linder pointed out “is a very time-consuming activity.” Indeed, on average, Americans now spend nearly seven times as much time shopping as they do playing with their kids. Even our celebrated freedom of choice only adds to the problem.
BRAND A OR BRAND B?
Consider the average supermarket. It now contains 30,000 items, two and a half times as many as it did twenty years ago.6 Picture yourself having to choose between a hundred types of cereal, for instance (or almost any other item). You can decide by price, grabbing what’s on sale; by flavor—sweet sells—or by nutrition—but then, what counts most? Protein? Cholesterol? Calories? Added vitamins? Fat? Dietary fiber? Or you can give in to your child’s nagging and buy the Cocoa Puffs. You can reach for tomato juice, confident that you’re getting vitamins and antioxidants and only fifty calories per serving. But don’t look at the “sodium” column—you won’t be able to allow yourself any more salt for the rest of the day without feeling guilty.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, warns that having so many choices increases our anxiety and is likely to leave us less happy. He points out that many of us are regularly troubled by the sense that we may have made the wrong choice, that we could have gotten a better product or a lower price.
So many choices. So little time. Linder said this would happen, and he warned that when choices become overwhelming, “the emphasis in advertising will be placed on ersatz information,” because “brand loyalty must be built up among people who have no possibility of deciding how to act on objective grounds.”7 Ergo, if you’re a marketer, hire a battery of psychologists to study which box colors are most associated by shoppers with pleasurable sex. . . Or something else you might want.
OVERWORKING AMERICANS
Linder argued that past a certain point, time pressure would increase with growing productivity. But he wasn’t sure whether working hours would rise or fall. He certainly doubted they’d fall as much as the automation cheerleaders predicted. He was right. In fact, there seems to be some pretty strong evidence that Americans are actually working more now than they did a generation ago.
Using U.S. Department of Labor statistics, Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor argues that full-time American workers are now toiling 160 hours—one full month— more, on average, than they did in 1969. “It’s not only the people in the higher income groups—who, by the way, have been working much longer hours,” says Schor. “It’s also the middle classes, the lower classes, and the poor. Everybody is working longer hours.”8 Indeed, according to the International Labor Organization, in October of 1999 the United States passed Japan as the modern industrial country with the longest working hours. Forty-two percent of American workers say they feel “used up” by the end of the workday. Sixty-nine percent say they’d like to slow down and live a more relaxed life.
NO TIME TO CARE
Moreover, Schor says, “The pace of work has increased quite dramatically. We are working much faster today than we were in the past
. And that contributes to our sense of being overworked and frenzied and harried and stressed out and burned out by our jobs.” In the fax lane, everybody wants that report yesterday. Patience wears thin rapidly when we get used to a new generation of computers.
Several years ago, Karen Nussbaum, former president of 9 to 5, a clerical workers union, pointed out that “twenty-six million Americans are monitored by the machines they work on, and that number is growing. I had one woman tell me her computer would flash off and on: YOU’RE NOT WORKING AS FAST AS THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU!”9 Doesn’t just thinking about that make your blood pressure rise?
Sometimes the speedup reaches utterly inhumane levels. In late May 2000, evening newscasts across the Northwest showed disturbing footage taken inside the Iowa Beef Processors slaughterhouse in Wallula, Washington. The video showed cattle being struck on the head, electrically prodded, and hoisted in the air as they moved down the slaughtering line, kicking and struggling. Fully conscious cows were skinned alive and had their legs cut off. In a signed affidavit, one employee said, “The chain goes too fast, more than 300 cows an hour. If I can’t get the animal knocked out right, it keeps going. It never stops. The cows are getting hung alive or not alive. I can tell some cows are alive because they’re holding their heads up. They just keep coming, coming, coming. . . .” The video provides gruesome evidence that the speed of American production, driven by an insatiable desire for more, virtually guarantees us no time to care.
CHOOSING STUFF OVER TIME
Meanwhile, we have less time to recuperate from the work frenzy. A survey by Expedia.com found that Americans gave back an average of three vacation days to their employees in 2003, a gift to corporations of $20 billion. As their reason for doing so, most said they didn’t want to be seen as slackers when the next round of layoffs came. Others said they simply couldn’t take time off and keep up with the demands of their jobs.
Juliet Schor reminds us that the United States has seen more than a doubling of productivity since World War II. “So the issue is: what do we do with that progress? We could cut back on working hours. We could produce the old amount in half as much time and take half the time off. Or we could work just as much and produce twice as much.” And, says Schor, “we’ve put all our economic progress into producing more things. Our consumption has doubled and working hours have not fallen at all. In fact, working hours have risen.”10
Europeans made a different decision. In 1970, worker productivity per hour in the countries that make up the European Union was 65 percent that of Americans. Their GDP per capita was about 70 percent of ours because they worked longer than we did back then. Today, EU productivity stands at 91 percent of ours, and several European economies are more productive per worker hour than we are. But real per capita GDP in those countries is still only about 72 percent that of the United States.11 They have a lot less stuff than we do. So what happened? It’s simple: the Europeans traded a good part of their productivity gains for time instead of money. So instead of working more than we do, they now work much less-nearly nine weeks less per year.
As a result, they live longer and are healthier, despite spending far, far less per capita on health care. In fact, the United States ranks dead last in health among industrial nations, and we are now expected to spend 19 percent of our total GDP on health care by the year 2014.12 Can you say “Mister Yuck?”
Not everyone agrees with Schor about longer working hours. John Robinson, who runs the Americans’ Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland, claims that “time diaries” kept by employees (they record how they spend each minute of every workday) actually show a decrease in working hours. But Robinson does agree that most working Americans “feel” more time-pressured than ever.13 Much of their increased leisure, he says, has been consumed in watching television—and thus by absorbing even more exhortations to consume. He also agrees that Europeans work far less and spend much more time socializing-which has proved to be good for health.
Whether one accepts Schor’s numbers or Robinson’s, the experience of time famine intensifies, driven by longer, or at least more demanding, working hours, and the competing time requirements associated with the care and feeding of stuff. Something has got to give. For many Americans, it’s sleep. Many doctors say more than half of all Americans get too little sleep-an average of an hour too little each night. We average 20 percent less sleep than we did in 1900. And that takes a toll on health (not to mention the 100,000 traffic accidents each year that result from drivers falling asleep at the wheel).14 So does our urgency about time.
HEART ATTACKS WAITING TO HAPPEN
The intake examination at the Meyer Friedman Institute in San Francisco is like none other in a doctor’s office. A nurse runs prospective patients through a series of questions about their relationship to time. “Do you walk fast? Do you eat fast? Do you often do two or more things at the same time?” She also notes their physical responses to her questions. “Something you do a lot,” she tells one interviewee, “is what we call expiratory sighing, as if you’re emotionally exhausted or don’t even want to think about the matter I’m asking you to talk about.”
The nurse tabulates the answers provided by patients and gives them a score, putting most squarely in the category that, years ago, the late Meyer Friedman called the Type A personality. While working on the Affluenza film, John took the test and asked the nurse how he did. “You’re right in the middle,” she said, smiling. “You mean, like A minus, B plus?” John quizzed her. “I’m afraid not,” she replied. “You’re right in the middle of Type A. However, if it’s any consolation, you’re less Type A than most people in your profession.” Unconsoled, John is working on slowing down (is that an oxymoron?). For the first time ever, he’s trying to lower his grade.15
The more Type A someone is, the more likely that person is to suffer from what Dr. Friedman called “time urgency.” “We’ve also called it hurry sickness in the past,” Bart Sparagon, the mellow, soft-spoken doctor who now directs Friedman’s clinic, says slowly. “It’s as if people are struggling against time.”
“I have a vivid image of an advertisement for a famous journal about financial affairs,” Sparagon adds, with a look of resignation. “It’s a picture of men in suits carrying briefcases, leaping over hurdles, with this hostile, tense look on their faces, and it’s an ad suggesting that if you buy this magazine, you can win this race. But when I see that picture, I know those men are racing toward a heart attack. I mean, do you want to win that race?”16
Along with time urgency, the racers usually are afflicted with what Meyer Friedman terms “free-floating hostility.” Everything that causes them to slow down—in their pursuit of money or other symbols of success—becomes an enemy, something in their way, an obstacle to overcome. “I think that time urgency is the major cause of premature heart disease in this country,” Meyer Friedman once declared.17 The more Type A a person is, he believes, the greater that person’s risk of cardiac arrest.
Affluenza is certainly not the only cause of time urgency. But it is a major cause. Swelling expectations lead to a constant effort to keep up with the latest products, to compete in the consumption arena. That, in turn, forces us to work more, so we can afford the stuff. With so many things to use, and the need to work harder to obtain them, our lives grow more harried and pressured. As one pundit put it, “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” And you may be a dead one.
In recent years, many scientists have come to believe that viruses and other infections make us more susceptible to heart attacks. Their conclusions have come from studying influenza viruses. But if Meyer Friedman and his theories about Type A personalities are right, they should look more closely at affluenza as well.
CHAPTER 6
Family
convulsions
There is a tension between materialism and
family values.
—TED HAGGARD,
Pastor, New Life Church, Colorado Springs
Doherty, a family therapist and professor at the University of Minnesota, warns that today’s kids are terribly overscheduled, as “market values have invaded the family.” Parents often see family life as about instilling competitive values in their children so they can compile the best resumes to get into the best colleges to get the best jobs to earn the most money. Meanwhile, Doherty says, the number of families regularly eating dinner together and taking vacations together has dropped by a third since 1970.
Then, too, the pressure to keep up with the Joneses leads many families into debt and simmering conflicts over money matters that frequently result in divorce. Indeed, the American divorce rate, despite reaching a plateau in the 1980s and declining a bit since then, is still double what it was in the ’50s, and family counselors report that arguments about money are precipitating factors in 90 percent of divorce cases.2