Most Americans believe they work more today than they did 35 years ago. Yet according to the American Time Use Survey, an ambitious project that for 41 years has been asking thousands of participants to keep detailed time diaries, Americans now have five more hours of leisure per week (38) than they did in 1965. - Can't Get No Satisfaction by Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine
Hat tip to Manano for the pointer to the article. It's long, but worth a read, especially if you're feeling burned out.
From my primitive attempts using the Combined National Time Use Studies, I see that the "household chores" category is dropping at a rate of about 5 minutes/decade to a current level of 23 minutes/day, vs. TV, which rose sharply from 1965 to 1975, and remains at an average of ~130 minutes/day. So we're making time for what's satisfying, clearly.
2 Comments:
Weren't we going to link to each other somehow? I'll have to come up with a way to work Diari and Manano into an actual post...
Several points here:
1. Does said leisure time include secretly goofing off and reading blogs during working hours?
2. They may have worked more hours back then but this was compensated by the fact that they could smoke, drink drive, eat saturated fats and slap their secretaries’ rump once in a while.
3. Yeah, back then sometimes people had to actually leave their homes for leisure. Go figure.
4. There were unions back then so the concept of ‘work’ was relative.
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