The busier you are the more important you seem; thus, people compete to be (or appear to be) harried. When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?
A researcher at the University of North Dakota, Ann Burnett, has collected five decades' worth of holiday letters and found that they've come to dwell less and less on the blessings of the season and more and more on how jam-packed the previous year has been. Based on this archive, Burnett has concluded that keeping up with the Joneses now means trying to out schedule them.
The average worker is, of course, an abstraction; what matters is not the mathematical mean but the experience of real individuals trying to make real livings while raising real kids.
Most American women today work; more than two thirds of mothers with school-age kids are employed outside the home. Many now out earn their husbands; in dual-income couples, about a third of wives are better paid than their spouses. Even so, studies show, women do the lioness's share of the housework: between seventy and eighty per cent. If they have children, the bulk of the child care also falls to them.
Small wonder that women are more likely than men to report "chronic stress and the feeling that life is out of control."
Is leisure preferable to labor?
The average employed American now works roughly a hundred and forty hours more per year than the average Englishman and three hundred hours more than the average Frenchman.
Europeans will further reduce their working hours and become even more skilled at taking time off, while Americans, having become such masterful consumers, will continue to work long hours to buy more stuff.
Work may not set us free, but it lends meaning to our days, and without it we'd be lost. In the view of Edward Phelps, of Columbia University, a career provides "most, if not all, of the attainable self-realization in modern societies."
As the income gap in the U.S. has widened, it's actually lower-wage workers who have ended up with the most leisure. And it's high earners who report feeling the most time pressure. This is true even for couples in which only one spouse works outside the home.
High pay is highly rewarding. So much of what we do, collectively and individually, suggests that we still believe more wealth is the answer. Re-examining this belief would probably be a good idea--that is, if anyone had the time for it.
Source: The New Yorker, May 26, 2014
When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self-Coaching Guide for Career Women--Workbook Edition
Women, Know Thyself: The most important knowledge is self-knowledge.