The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz Read Free Book Online Page B

actually work more than we used to, but we think we do. In 1991, the economist Juliet Schor advanced the now conventional thesis that global competition forced Americans to toil longer and rest less. She based this on rough estimates that people gave during interviews with U.S. census takers over three decades. Meanwhile, two sociologists, John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, were asking people to fill out time diaries noting exactly how much time they spent on each activity of the day right after they’d done it. They concluded that Americans work less than they did in the 1960s. How do you reconcile what people said with what their time diaries showed? You acknowledge that Americans
feel
more pressed for time, whether they’re working harder or not.
    Many theories have been advanced to explain the perception that we’re overtaxed. Some cite evidence that it’s mainly highly educated white-collar workers who put in those legendary fifty-, sixty-, seventy-hour weeks, even as blue-collar or service workers struggle to cobble together enough work to live on. Others interpret our feeling of being overwhelmed as a function of the fact that, even though as employees we work no more than we used to, as family members more of us are saddled with more of the burdens of domestic life. The women who used to stay home and take care of everything now leave their houses for offices, so that chores must be more evenly distributed throughout the family. People have that nagging sense of never having finished with the housework, even though if you added up all the hours we collectively devote to housework, you’d find that the number is smaller than it was thirty years ago (down from slightly more than twenty-seven hours a week to twenty-four).
    Time
has
become more fragmented. More Americans work during the off-hours than they did half a century ago, the heyday of the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday workweek. According to the sociologist Harriet B. Presser, as of 2003, two-fifths of American workers were working non-standard hours—“in the evening, at night, on a rotating shift, or during the weekend”—and she wasn’tcounting those who bring their work home and do it on their off-hours, or who are self-employed. Some people have enviable flexibility. They’ve won flextime from their bosses, hold non-traditional jobs, or are self-employed. Others have no choice but to work late shifts at companies that measure time by overseas clocks, or else they’ve found employment in the service sector, to which the bulk of American jobs have shifted. There they wait on everybody else in the evenings and on weekends.
    Shift work, it is now clear, disrupts circadian rhythms, fosters insomnia, and induces inattentiveness, memory loss, and depression, especially when the shifts are irregular. This is because different parts of the body’s ecosystem—temperature, hormones, the heart, the digestive system—adjust to disrupted sleep schedules at different rates, causing parts of the body to be at war with others. Flextime workers don’t have the same physical problems, but their irregular work hours nonetheless upset their psychological equilibrium. With a moment snatched here and there, it’s hard to achieve that feeling of being in the swing of something, the self-forgetfulness that psychologists call flow. Moreover, when friends and family no longer follow the same schedule they’re less likely to get together. According to Presser, couples who have children and work separate shifts are more likely to get divorced than those who don’t—as much as six times as likely when it’s the husband who works the late-night shift, or on a rotating schedule, and three times as likely when it’s the wife.
    But we tend not to see these problems as the result of living in a temporally discombobulated society. We blame ourselves. We say that we’re too busy to do everything we want to do and see the people we want to see, and isn’t that a