A few weeks ago, at a private dinner party at Via Carota, in New York, well-dressed women in caftans and skirts mingled with men in black T-shirts and blazers, sipping on martinis. Jake Gyllenhaal chatted with Jeremy O. Harris, while Lynn Yaeger shared stories with Derek Blasberg. It was a diverse crowd, yet the conversation invariably centered around a single topic.
“How are you?” someone would ask. To which the other person, no matter what, would always respond, “Oh, I’m so busy.”
These days, discussing one’s long hours, whatever the context, feels inescapable. Many people post about their arduous schedules on social media. Others study Warren Buffett’s and Jeff Bezos’s morning routines in The Wall Street Journal, then set their alarms for four A.M., anticipating greatness.
“You’re surrounded by role models who have achieved so much by my age,” a 27-year-old digital-content creator tells me, “so you feel like you have to be on this constant loop. I’m always anxious and stressed. If I’m not, I think I’m not doing enough.”
“I work really long hours, obviously by nature of what I do,” a 24-year-old consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers says. “But I find myself always stretching them and saying I work more than I do because I think it’ll give me some kind of respectability.”
“I’m always anxious and stressed. If I’m not, I think I’m not doing enough.”
In a recent podcast episode by The Atlantic called How to Keep Time: Look Busy, Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, notes that if time is money, then having a lot of it on your hands should be akin to owning a luxury good. And yet her research has found that being busy is now considered a status symbol in America. “If time is a luxury,” the podcast asks, “why don’t we flaunt it?”
Paharia says, “If you have very little time, then you, in and of yourself, are somewhat of a scarce resource. And then people might come to feel that you’re more valuable or have more social status.”
Sure enough, not working is increasingly looked down upon. Prejudice against stay-at-home mothers has a name now: “motherism.” In 2018, Harvard Business School reported that 80 percent of Americans state they “do not have enough time,” while another study conducted by the software company Slack showed that people in the U.S. spend 28 percent of their time engaging in “performative work,” activities that create the appearance of busyness but aren’t necessarily contributing to the company’s results. In the world’s biggest economy, it seems that incessant productivity—or, at least, looking the part—has become the utmost signifier of success.
“I used to post poolside when Instagram started,” a 30-year-old fashion designer says. “Now I avoid posting my holidays. I feel like people won’t say, ‘Oh, how cool.’ They’ll be like, ‘Oh, she’s so lazy.’”
The Leisure Stigma
Schedules weren’t always de rigueur at fancy dinner parties. In fact, in the early 20th century, doing nothing was the ultimate status symbol. In the 1950s, after Gianni Agnelli had to leave the festivities of an Indian maharajah in Rajasthan early on account of work, legend has it the incredulous prince remarked to the other guests, “I thought Gianni was rich.” (This about a man who, though running Fiat, still found plenty of time to pursue the finer things in life, including boats, fast cars, and women who were not his wife.)
The word “weekend” only caught on with the British aristocracy in the 1950s. Before then, the well-to-do referred to it as “Saturday until Monday,” a concept immortalized in a scene from Downton Abbey in which the Dowager Countess of Grantham admonishes a middle-class cousin for using the term “weekend”—the implication being that if you were of the right sort, every day was off.
In his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen argued that high status was defined by a lack of productivity and unwavering commitment to demonstrations of idleness—polo, hunting, tennis, and drinking to oblivion, Great Gatsby–style. Time and money were for wasting, and the idle rich indulged in frivolous activities and bought frivolous objects—gemstones, horses, and furs—just because.
As the world modernized, workers started dreaming of a time when idleness would become a more widespread privilege. In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes (wrongly) suggested that by the time his grandchildren were grown up, they would be working 15-hour weeks and have time for the finer things in life.
Yet despite technological advancements in the West that replaced human labor, people’s productivity hasn’t declined. “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all [but] we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines,” the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in a 1932 essay. “In this, we have been foolish,” he added, “but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”
“I find myself lying about my day and making it seem more packed than it is.”
The dawn of consumer culture in the 1950s disproved Keynes’s optimism and Russell’s entreaties. Gone were the Regency-era days when people packed their belongings into a single trunk. People needed TVs, cars, and clutter. And more clutter equaled more status. “The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness,” the American historian William Leach wrote in his 1993 book, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture—“the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money as the predominant value in society.”
Similarly, instead of allowing the Internet to lighten our workloads, our devices have crammed our waking hours to unprecedented levels. In her 2014 book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, the writer Brigid Schulte notes that, since the 1960s, references to “crazy schedules” in holiday letters have greatly increased.
In 2016, Columbia Business School marketing professor Silvia Bellezza led a study titled “Why Americans Are So Impressed by Busyness.” Specifically, she examined “humblebrags”—brags disguised as complaints on social media—and found that 12 percent of them focused on projecting one’s own busyness.
“I used to post poolside when Instagram started. Now I avoid posting my holidays. I feel like people won’t say, ‘Oh, how cool.’ They’ll be like, ‘Oh, she’s so lazy.’”
“When we even submit our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes,” Jenny Odell writes in her 2019 book, How to Do Nothing, “time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’ It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.”
Weeknights are now dedicated to networking dinners. Going out with friends is for “inspiration.” Vacations are for “recharging.” Apps encourage us to learn languages and listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed and do micro-meditations while we wait for our morning train.
The Arizona State University psychologist Jared Celniker has found that, across the United States, France, and South Korea, people consider those who exert high effort to be “morally admirable,” regardless of their output or performance. And in a world where 61 percent of Gen Z–ers are diagnosed with anxiety disorders, the unwavering focus on productivity might be part of the problem.
It’s particularly problematic when you consider, as Mason Currey points out in his 2013 book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, that Gertrude Stein wrote for just 30 minutes per day; Beethoven composed in the mornings and spent the afternoon going on long, leisurely walks, then stopped for a drink and to read newspapers; and David Foster Wallace worked only from noon to three or four P.M.
Maybe it’s time to go to a cocktail party in shimmering jewelry and enjoy life like the beau monde used to. And to the inevitable “How’s it going?” question, you could answer: “Wonderful. Today, I did absolutely nothing at all.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL