Free Time and Time Pressure
It is no wonder, then, that huge interest has been generated by the idea that time is in short supply in modern societies. Complaints about the twenty-four-hour day being too short to fit everything in are common in the academic and popular presses. The inexorable increase in the pace of life is viewed as a perverse symptom of late modernity, leading to increasing pressure and stress. Understanding why time pressures have increased is a critical social question not least because of the consequences for physical and mental health outcomes.
Sparking this debate was Juliet Schor’s book The Overworked American.5 It claimed that from the 1970s through the 1980s, Americans were working longer, and that this applied generally across the spectrum on income and family type. Her argument was echoed by many others, including Arlie Hochschild, whose book title The Time Bind entered general currency. The finding that American workers are logging more time at the workplace than their parents and grandparents touched a chord in the popular imagination. Whereas economic progress and increased prosperity were supposed to deliver more leisure time, instead time scarcity and the paucity of leisure time seem to be the result. Media exposure of notions like the “time squeeze” and “time famine” rapidly became part of the folk narrative about the pressure of time in modern life.
A linked concern was whether, as a consequence, parents are spending fewer hours with their children. Most Americans agree or strongly agree to survey questions asking whether “parents today don’t spend enough time with their children.”6 The cultural image of the modern mother changed from the devoted homemaker to the frenzied, sleepless working mom. The conventional wisdom accompanying this change is that today’s mothers, who juggle the dual roles of worker and family caregiver, spend less time with their children and receive relatively little help from fathers. Social commentators worry about the quality of family life. The politics of time has thus become a major issue that has largely taken the form of a discussion about work-family balance and the quality of contemporary life.7
The Time-Pressure Paradox
63