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# Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

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When Everyday Life Collapses

What happens with routines when life simply becomes ‘too much’, as flow turns into friction and stress mounts at work or at home? In the early years of the twenty-first century discussions about a new form of stress-related disease was very much in the forefront in Sweden, often called ‘burnout syndrome’, defined as a personal collapse caused by overwork and/or emotional overload. What interests us in this context is how people describe themselves (or are described by others) as cases of burnout and overload.

Our material consists of interviews with people who have lived through this kind of crisis situation and ended up on long-term sick-leave, trying to get back to a normal life (see Löfgren and Palm 2005). In the past, excess was not a problem for them. It was their pride that ‘no’ was not an answer. They were gluttons at work, stretching themselves thin, living an accelerating life that in retrospect often had a manic streak in it. Lars, who had built up a small electronic factory from scratch, described himself like this: ‘Haven’t been able to say no. I always thought: speed up and it will be OK. I could walk through the factory and make twenty decisions in two minutes. I felt in full control, it was almost compulsive: what the hell, I could make anything work!’ People like Lars had never or rarely been on sick-leave before. As the stress mounted they felt irritable, had problems with sleep and woke up early thinking about everything that needed to be done. Work had invaded most of their life. The road to the breakdown was often long, a slowly growing overload. Many describe this phase of stress as a mounting insensitivity. You ignored the signals from the body and didn’t listen to the warnings or admonitions from others until the crash landing occurred. It is often a dramatic change of scene that is described.

All of a sudden everyday life at work and at home became chaotic, just ‘too much’. They found themselves sent home on long-term sick-leave. When Lars broke down he couldn’t go near the factory; even the family became too much and he spent long periods alone in a summer cottage out in the woods, staring at the walls.

The flow of everyday life had turned into friction, order into chaos, and it became obvious how important the autopilot had been in dealing with work and home. Now you were at home on sick-leave with all the time in the world on your hands, but in a domestic world that also had become ‘too much’. Many everyday routines became Herculean tasks. ‘It could be a full day’s work just to take a shower and wash my hair,’ one woman said. You have to make decisions about even the most trivial acts that were earlier handled by autopilot: ‘I remember staring at a flowerpot for hours, trying to make up my mind if I should water it or not.

Routines – Made and Unmade

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In the crash landing of burnout, old routines and habits, these technologies by which people cope with the myriad of tasks and decisions in everyday life, all of a sudden stop working. Life is out of step, out of sync, habits are drained of content, become meaningless or mysterious. Lars expressed it like this: ‘It’s damned hard to be on sick-leave, all of a sudden you’re without routines and it was the routines that kept life running at work. It feels like the floor is pulled away from under you.

A striking theme in the interviews is the constant return to questions of overload at home and in the office. The daily burden had been transformed into new kinds of stress, a body in constant pain or a state of sensory and social overexposure. The TV screen flickers too much, noises are too loud, smells too strong. You want to retreat to the bedroom and draw the curtains and just lie in the dark.

In a life crisis like burnout, people often experienced a very dramatic change of pace. Before their collapse they had felt a manic satisfaction of having ‘total flow’, coordinating many tasks; now all of a sudden they had lost so many of the skills of keeping everyday life going. The body would not obey order, the autopilot had stalled and even minor tasks became huge projects. One thing that was lost was the old skill of multi-tasking (see Löfgren 2007). They had survived juggling their work and home life by being able to do many things at once.

In an autobiographical novel a freelance journalist, Felicia, describes her breakdown into burnout. She remembers interviewing a female hotel manager who told her how she constantly developed her talent for multi-tasking. By buying a headset for her mobile she could vacuum her whole home while taking incoming enquiries from work. ‘This is something for me,’ Felicia thinks. But that was in the old days when she could combine any amount of work. Today it is no longer possible for her to eat pizza and watch television at the same time, cook food while talking on the phone, or sort out the dirty laundry while sitting on the toilet. ‘Maybe I am becoming a man,’ she thinks, ‘I can only do one thing at a time’ (Dahlgren 2005: 71).

Collective Collapse

There are, however, even more dramatic breakdowns of everyday rhythms and routines that face whole communities that go through a major crisis.

In her ethnographic study War Within: Everyday Life in Sarajevo under Siege the anthropologist Ivana Maček (2000) follows how the web of everyday routines collapsed as the city of Sarajevo became beleaguered during the Balkan wars. A new life of heavy bombardments and an ever-present fear of snipers drastically changed the rules of everyday life. All of a sudden the most basic routines of everyday life disappeared. A constant improvisation was needed to keep life going and the vulnerability of an everyday life that has been taken for granted emerged. The supplies of water and electricity became totally erratic; you had to spend a lot of time searching for a water supply and improvising new techniques for cooking and heating. Everyday routines like preparing a meal could become complicated tasks, calling for both innovation and patience. Can you make a small fire on the balcony? What would work as a water carrier?

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If burnout is an example of a personal crisis, when all the old skills of routines suddenly seem to disappear, the Sarajevo example highlights other aspects of routines. For example, it illustrates how much ordinary routines create a seamless rhythm during the day. Now these normal rhythms were broken up by the erratic supply of basic amenities. Was there any water in the tap? When will the electricity come back? People had to devise new routines like sleeping with all the lamps in the bedroom turned on, so that you would wake up when electricity returned and could hasten out in the kitchen in the middle of the night to do the laundry or cook some food. By keeping the water tap on you learned to listen for sounds of water returning momentarily at the oddest hours.

Instead of the well-known habits and rhythms there was a constant improvisation and confrontation with unexpected situations, with no chance of long-term planning, no steady routines. ‘If I have three children I will call them Electricity, Water and Gas,’ a 10-year-old boy said. The new life was based upon a constant uncertainty, and this was a conscious strategy of the attackers. They were out to break routines and create chaos and thus get the civilians on their knees.

Another aspect of the Sarajevo ethnography concerns the ways in which routines that usually are taken for granted become elevated to almost sacred rituals in times of crisis. In Sarajevo the phrase ‘to imitate life’ became a common figure of speech that signalled a desire to keep some of the old and well-known routines and at least create an image of normal life. Even the most trivial routines acquired a new symbolic charge. People would do almost anything to be able to bake a loaf of bread or dare the snipers for a walk to a bakery. The smell of fresh bread turned into ‘an oasis of normality’. Taking a hot bath or dressing up for a visit to a neighbourhood café turned into an event.

To sum up: private burnout and a society collapsing during warfare represent two different kinds of what the Swedish ethnologist Gösta Arvastson (2006) has called zero-making. What happens when old routines all of a sudden disappear and another everyday life has to be constructed from new conditions? What is it that gets lost? In Sarajevo it was demonstrated how much the routines of everyday life were based upon an often unnoticed infrastructure of amenities and resources. In burnout it was as if the skills of routines and multi-tasking just evaporated. The body refused to obey orders; the autopilot gave up.

In both cases, however, the crisis also created a new platform, a feeling that there was a possibility of building up an alternative existence. The breakdown of everyday routines does not only have to be paralysing, but also provides a chance to rethink and reorganize your life. Much that once was seen as given and absolutely necessary turns out to be possible to do away with or change into new routines.

Routines – Made and Unmade

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Same Procedure as Last Time?

In our discussion of the cultural potentials of mundane routines we have looked at ways in which they are made and unmade. We have been interested in how they may sink into oblivion or taken-for-granted in ways that make them work as a seamless flow in everyday life or as unconscious reflexes.

There is also the transformation when routines all of sudden come up to the surface and demand attention, as in our examples of confrontations between different habits or times of crisis when the fabric of everyday habits collapses. We have mentioned make-up and other morning routines as culturally interesting cases of temporarily coordinating practices with different rhythms that sometimes are disturbed or disrupted. The loss of such self-evident routines – often connected to bodily functions, hygiene or eating and drinking – shows how necessary they are both for personal identity and for social organization. Their importance becomes clearer when we understand how they may give security, power and freedom in everyday matters.

It is easy to get stuck in the reassuring idea of a constantly repeated pattern. If we look at the transformations of making and unmaking, another more dynamic picture emerges. The times and rhythms of everyday life, at home and at work, can be analysed as a temporal order of material practices that are reproduced and rearranged.

By looking at the coordination and disruption of routines we have tried to approach the question of what shapes the temporal patterns of our lives. The evolution of daily, weekly and yearly calendars, in the disguise of ordinary, inconspicuous routines, is a fruitful arena for looking at the interplay between material, natural, social and emotional forces in everyday actions. In this chapter we have focused on two main themes. The first is the surprising complexity of everyday routines as temporal practices. One cannot be sure of what routines mean to different people in various situations. We have to observe behaviour or ask people to describe it and tell us about its importance. On the one hand the routines express a common need for predictability and security in social life. On the other hand when they produce feelings of entrapment – to feel captured by routines is a common experience – they are associated with a robot-like life.

The other theme is the art of multi-tasking. The ability to combine different tasks simultaneously – for example, driving the car, shaving, listening to the radio and having a conversation on the cell phone – is an acquired skill. Routines may create arenas for daydreaming or problem solving, as well as a chance to be both present and elsewhere at the same time. (A mode of being that others may find provocative.)

Our conclusion is therefore that it is important to look closer for traces of the subversive potential of routines. This aspect probably is not the first thing that comes to mind in connection to inconspicuous repetitive behaviour. But when you examine ordinary ways of everyday life, hour after hour, day after day, you may find that these seemingly repetitive acts in fact may produce small and successive changes, hardly perceived, but possibly important in the long run. What one sees as ‘the same procedure as usual’ does not have to be that repetitive at all. It may hide some surprising transformations, just as a trivial argument about morning routines may really be about something much grander.

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References

Routines – Made and Unmade

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Calendars and Clocks Cycles of Horticultural Commerce in Nineteenth-century America Marina Moskowitz

Introduction

The Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist, editor and children’s book author E.B. White (1899–1985) was, in a lesser-known avocation and in tandem with his wife Katherine, a gardener. In January 1952, writing as he often did for the ‘Notes and Comments section of the New Yorker, White explained the ritual many gardeners undertook each year at that time – his first trawl through the seed catalogues. Employing the first-person plural voice characteristic of the column, White recorded:

Our first communication of the year 1952 was a card from a seed company, and this seemed a good omen. A new bush bean, rich in flavor. A new pickle, early, dark green, delicious. A new muskmelon, thick orange flesh of top quality. A new petunia, giant fringed, dwarfish. So starts the year on a note of planning and dreaming. The card went on to chide us – said no order had been received from us since 1949. That is a fantastic accusation; we virtually supported that seed house last year and the year before and the year before, back into the dim, infertile past. However, we don’t expect seed companies to keep accurate records; the whole business is so wild, so riotous, so complex, it’s no wonder they forget who their own best friends are. If there is any doubt on that score, though, we will gladly send the management a jar of our wife’s green-tomato pickle from last summer’s crop – dark green, spicy, delicious, costlier than pearls when you figure the overhead. (White 1990: 4–5)<sup>1</sup>

Unpacking White’s evocative prose reveals a number of ways in which seed houses and gardeners traded on the natural cycles of planting. White shows the full fruition of a commercial exchange in seeds that developed over the course of the nineteenth century. Although seeds had been exchanged as gifts and traded informally for centuries, and were often highly prized, it was not until the nineteenth century that seeds were commodified on a large scale. One of the earliest businesses in the United States to employ mail-order sales, the seed trade relied on print culture to reach consumers. Trade catalogues and other ephemera served as calling cards to establish a commercial relationship and facilitate the exchange of horticultural knowledge. Like White’s tongue-in-cheek offer to send his wife’s green-tomato pickle, the language of the early commercial correspondence was often suffused with motifs of friendship and gift exchange. Keeping this market relationship going year after year was a way of inculcating and demonstrating brand loyalty; though White is humorously slighted that his regular trade has not been recognized, he is also eager to show his status as an annual customer to any in ‘doubt’. To keep things interesting in these long-term market relationships, firms developed new commodities, ‘novelties’ such as the bean, melon and petunia that White describes. White’s mention of home-made relish also shows the cyclical quality of natural commodities and the uses to which they are put. The commodity of the seed is not an end in itself, as many consumer goods are, but rather implies the growth of some further natural object – flowers, produce, more seeds – which may be consumed by the grower, but which might also form the basis of additional exchange, whether commercial or affective. Not only might consumers (of seeds) become producers (of a variety of crops), but seed firms themselves acted as consumers, buying at least part of their stock to sell on. The seed trade was indeed as ‘complex’ as White states, though many a nineteenth-century proprietor would have taken umbrage at his suggestion that the firms were ‘riotous’ and disorganized. While obviously reliant upon the rhythms of nature, many seed firms as they developed in the nineteenth century tried to impose industrial time on agrarian practices (or at least they tried to present themselves as doing so), and might even encourage their consumers to do the same. For both purveyors and consumers of horticultural commodities in the nineteenth century, issues of time, calendars and routine behaviour were at the heart of their exchange. In an era when many consumer markets were expanding due to the increasing tempo of mechanized production, the seed trade reached a national market while still respecting, and even imprinting, an annual cycle of consumption.

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Natural Commodities

Planting is a cyclical process. Left to their own devices, many plants eventually drop seeds onto the ground, some of which might take root, whether in the shadow of the original plant or carried elsewhere by wind, water runoff or birds and insects. A new plant might grow from this seed and start a new cycle. So how does it work when, instead of being left alone, the plant’s seeds are harvested, stored, packaged, sold and planted elsewhere? What does it mean for a commodity to have its own life cycle?

The commodification of seeds takes the natural life cycle of plants and adapts it to new scales of time and space. The seed trade, in tandem with its consumers, allows each generation of plant to thrive in a different geographic location, on a schedule at least partially determined by the person who plants it. Humans cannot get too far away from a plant’s life cycle (or at least they could not with nineteenthcentury developments in botany); they can rush or retard growth, for example with the application or removal of heat or light sources, only within certain bounds. In the United States during the nineteenth century, horticultural practices were most frequently viewed as an annual cycle. Even in places (such as the extreme Southern states) where the climate might allow for multiple harvests of particular crops, individual plants needed their periods of renewal, or dispensed seeds for a next generation. The very categories in which plants were classified, and sold, recognizes this yearly sequence and its variations: annuals, perhaps the largest category of seeds sold, required yearly planting of new seeds; biennials required two years to reach fruition and produce seeds; and perennials could keep producing blooms or produce for more than two years without renewal by replanting.

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From growing fields across the country, purveyors of seeds gathered what I believe to be the largest variety of products of any nineteenth-century business. The diversity of nature was augmented by the science of plant breeding to the point where each catalogue offered literally thousands of different products, or species and varieties of seeds. While the first years of the nineteenth century still offered botanists and plant hunters unexplored territory in North America, by the end of the century the American frontier famously had been declared ‘closed’ by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Plants were no longer as likely to be discovered by natural historians as created by plant breeders, often working in a commercial context. Publication of new species was still the right of those who developed and named the new strains, but was likely to come in commercial rather than scientific catalogues. This emphasis on hybrids unique to a given company was frequent in later nineteenth-century catalogues and continues to the present day.

White’s description of the seed trade ephemera he received in January 1952 raises many of the qualities that were sought through plant breeding. With flowers, both purveyors and consumers looked for new colours or colour combinations; large, or double, blossoms; and quantity of blossoms per stem or plant. With produce, the desire for good colour, size and prolific nature continued, along with the shortest possible sowing to harvesting time. Prolific bearing on small plants was a particular boon for those growing to feed their family or sell their produce at market. Any quality deemed favourable in a plant might be the object of selection and breeding to ensure the continuation of that quality. Seed companies vied with one another to create, or purchase from creators, particular strains and varieties of vegetables that they believed would be attractive to growers; the new names for varieties often reflected the firm or breeder who developed them, so that even when sold by other companies, the seeds would provide advertising for a competitor.

Plant breeding had several effects on consumer behaviour in the seed trade. First, newly acquired strains and hybrids were part of the annual package that each catalogue offered to make one firm stand out from another. The ‘novelties’ for each year were often included in a separate section of seed catalogues, even printed on coloured paper to draw attention, suggesting the value of the work that botanists and breeders carried out each year, creating new strains for the consuming public. More importantly, ‘new’ seeds provided a reason for prospective consumers to purchase seeds: to grow plants they could not otherwise obtain and to continue growing them. Nineteenth-century botany did not appear to have as its aim the halting of the natural growth cycle that we find in today’s ‘terminator seeds’. Nonetheless, the common wisdom of the day taught that the seeds of hybrid plants were not productive of further generations of plants, at least not those reliably true to the original: for example, if a new strain was created by crossing two others, the seeds from the ‘novelty’ plant might revert to one of the ‘parent’ plants. Thus, in developing the unique qualities of hybrids, whether the deepest colour and largest blossom of flower or the earliest and most prolific bearer of fruit, seed companies were also ensuring that customers would return to them each year for a new supply of seeds. Ironically, ‘heirloom’ seeds, seen as an antidote to the intervention with the natural world according to human priorities, now serve as the ‘novelties’ in contemporary seed catalogues.

Calendars and Clocks

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The hybrid ‘novelties’ that blossomed in late nineteenth-century horticulture were only the most obvious examples in the intervention of natural cycles at the core of the seed trade. For the seed industry to be successful, it needed to convince its consumers not to harvest seeds from their own gardens, but rather to buy seeds from the companies each year. Although debates about seed purchasing versus seed saving did appear, particularly in regard to grain seeds as evidenced in agricultural periodicals, the trade was largely successful in convincing many Americans to purchase their seeds. Using the mechanisms discussed above, ranging from the allure of specific plant material to the inculcation of seed purchasing as an annual routine, the trade persuaded gardeners to dispense with the final stage of the plants life cycle. Instead, gardeners might rapidly deadhead flowers to encourage more blooms, or harvest all produce without letting part of their crop go to seed, preferring to devote the time and space available to them for a particular crop, rather than the means to continue growing that crop. Still, the persuasion of gardeners to purchase seeds was not as insidious an example of the push to consumption as it might initially appear, but was in part reflective of the new situations in which planting took place. For example, the rise in urban populations over the course of the nineteenth century led to a rise in market gardens, cottage kitchen gardens, leisure-time flower gardens and garden suburbs with vast lawns. The intensive planting methods of these urban and suburban settings simply would not have allowed for gardeners to reap true seeds without the natural crossing that occurs as a result of wind, birds and insects carrying the pollen of proximate plants.

So, does the phrase ‘go to seed’ indicate wastefulness or productivity? Of course, within the trade, allowing plants to go to seed was the requisite for productivity. But in order for seeds to be commodities, they had to be not only produced by one set of growers, but also discarded by another, who would then need to obtain them outside of their own gardens. Today, ‘going to seed’ tends to have a negative connotation denoting neglect and decay, stemming from the precedence that consumers grant to a plant’s productive use as an object of sustenance, economy or even beauty, above its reproductive use as the starting point of a next generation of plants. This very smallscale form of ‘planned obsolescence’ sits directly at the intersection of the natural process of planting cycles and the means of altering and influencing those cycles to create objects for consumption. The commodification of horticulture shows a tension between being guided by nature and trying to intervene in its inherent patterns for commercial or other purposes. As horticultural life is cyclical, so the trade that grew up around it is cyclical too. Purveyors and consumers of seeds both abide by and negotiate the natural cycles of plants when establishing commercial routines.

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