Time Squeeze: Harried Work, Harried Consumption

This volume is engaged with the intersection of leisure time, work time and consumption. In consumer societies time has become a scarce resource from two aspects. On the one hand, people are ready to give up some more of their leisure time for more consumer goods in return. Leisure time—unlike in the 19th century—is considered a tradable, valuable, that is, a scarcely available commodity, which must not be wasted. Th at is, idleness is a missed opportunity for gaining more consumer goods. This also explains why the continuous growth of productivity of the last hundred years has not entailed the proportional reduction of work time—in opposite to what was expected yet in the 1920s. Moreover, since the 1970s in the USA time spent on production has been increasing not only compared to productivity, but also in absolute terms. On the other hand, the scarcity of time as a resource means that time not spent on consumption is conceived as wasteful and invaluable. Who has time has low status; wastes his/ her time because does not spend on production; and wastes time because does not spend on consumption either. Besides, more goods and services are purchasable today than earlier, while time for the consumption of those has not become more. This led to the congestion and the concentrated use of leisure time. Intensive forms of spending (like, for instance, tourism or theme parks) have appeared. Lately, time modules supplied by entertainment industry get great demand, since those are foreseeable and calculable services. The reason behind these demands is that people attempt to mitigate the risk of dissipating their scarce (that is, valuable) leisure time due to unforeseeable factors. For the sake of more “efficient” time spending the practice of doing activities in parallel, like watching television besides eating and being together with the family, is spreading (practically, the idea of theme parks also follows this principle). All in all, work time and leisure time have analogous characters: both are scarce, both have to be spent in useful manners, the units of both can be modulated, while both of its values have to be maximized by spending them in increasingly efficient ways.