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Can somebody reconcile this with statistics about TV watching, which suggest that people watch about 3-5 hours of TV/Netflix per day [1]?
A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.
Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do nothing else or something?
I think TV, YouTube, or even Podcasts can trigger a similar mechanism to socialization, but without any of the risk that comes from interacting with real people.
Speculating I'd guess that the low lift and reduced anxiety means more people get stuck in it as a local maximum even if they'd be happier otherwise.
> But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.
One of the main points of the article is that many people don't know their schedules in advance. So even if schedules do line up, they may not know in enough time to schedule something. TV watching is also a done-in-the-margins activity. The tv exists in the same place they sleep and eat. I don't see anything to reconcile.
Lots of people have something on the TV just about all day long (or at least the whole time they're home—for retired folks this can actually be the entire day) and skew the numbers higher, I think. My parents do it, just leave the TV on even if they're not paying attention to it. I bet it's on 12+ hours a day at their house, on average. I have some friends whose home life was similar growing up—if someone's home, the living room TV's on, even if no-one's actually watching it.
Yes there is overlap, but it's not a predictable overlap and there's no easy way to find out if your time off overlaps with someone else without first reaching out to them (which is a whole other barrier). It's so much easier to turn on netflix or whatever. If it wasn't so easy to do that then maybe people would go through the other hurdle to test if someone they know is available.
I'm not sure what all is wrapped into "TV" in today's numbers, but average household watching as been, to my way of thinking, astoundingly high forever. It was 7 or 8 hours a day going back to the 70s and 80s.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...
In my opinion, it's not about amount of time available, it's about scheduling. There seems to be a real aversion in the current generation to committing to doing stuff at a specific date/time. Try to plan an event and get people to promise to show up. Even if they enjoy the event, and know that they will be free, they'll still balk at making that promise.
Perhaps people feel that if they commit in advance, they'll miss out if something more interesting pops up. But nothing more interesting pops up when the day comes around, and you end up watching TV because nobody would commit.
For me, a major "transaction cost" is just picking that flexible date. And after a few failed attempts, which is totally understandable (kids, jobs, eldercare, etc), friendship equity suffers.
I've tried a handful "let's make a date" apps. None really work. Worse, I can't figure out how I'd do better.
One crucial missing feature is shared calendar event updates. For example, you need to push back our lunch 30 minutes, my calendar gets auto updated.
That would be divine!
Part of that could also be how TV/Netflix can be in the background. I probably watch a few hours of a random Netflix show over the weekend. But I'm also doing laundry, touching up some hobby code, or just spacing out and drinking my coffee. It kind of falls into place as background noise when my brain doesn't need to be fully occupied by the task at hand.
I couldn't do those things while entertaining a guest. That requires much more mental effort.
It may depend on how they define "watch".
In my case, I have the TV on for an hour and a half to two hours, but during that time it's mostly background noise for the rest of my morning routine; maybe 20-30 minutes is actually _watching_ the local news.
When I get home, it's the same: it's _on_ for 3 hours or so, but I'm only paying attention to it about half that time.
So, 5 hours a day, but under half that time is actually watching anything.
I'd like to offer up the concept of the casual home-based "brunch" as the most effective way to spend quality time with your way-too-busy friends. This version of "brunch" happens at someone's house, from, say, noon to 5pm on a weekend day, and people do bring food, but it's a drop-in affair and not a sit-down meal, and showing up without food is also fine.
The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy because you've already set low expectations for providing food or entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them.
Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.
In Vancouver, somehow "brunch" has morphed to a massive obligation. Everyone should bring a dish, all the dishes are high effort, and people secretly hope to skip the whole thing so they don't have to get up at 7am to cook.
Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?
Excellent strategy.
I hosted Saturday pancakes (friends and family) and bimonthly book study group (geeks) for years. I miss both dearly.
About social obligation (other reply's point): after much trial and error, it was just easier if I provided all the food. Hoagies, spaghetti, greek food, whatever's easy. Early birds were "punished" with KP chores.
For study group, I asked for $5 donation per head. Some people always showed up early to help. Most geeks gave more, of course.
I don't like the explanation that everyone "back in the day" had the same schedule. Service jobs still existed back then. Upper middle class (white) people worked 9-5. Women stayed home. The example used was literally the Beaver family.
Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.
Honestly, I think it's the "schedule" of constantly checking your phone every few minutes. _Kids these days_ aren't really interested in learning to drive... because they're on social media crack apps. I'm not saying that the technology (both economic drive and effect) are all that different from the TV culture of the 70s and 80s or even the rise of the internet in 90s and 2ks. However, the effectiveness of the skinner box improves with targeting ease and continuous availability. Hopefully, the youngsters will develop some herd immunity to this disease as well, I don't give the rest of us so much hope.
> Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends.
Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)
> Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their friends.
Lots more ways to spend time without involving other people. TV was always there, but you didn't always have something interesting playing. Now you have on-demand Netflix. You have always-on Internet connections. You are always near your smartphone.
I think for most people, the reliable way to value time is to get put into a situation (e.g. job with long commutes) for a while, and then you're forced to eliminate a lot of the pointless things that were eating your time when you did have the time.
That transition may take a year or two, though.
It's a weird cultural thing to some degree, IME. I spent the last couple years either on sabbatical or in a (regrettably) undemanding job, and I've now come back to a pretty challenging high-pressure work environment, where I'm almost getting more responsibility and difficult work thrown at me than I can handle. I absolutely love it, and I do deal with some level of stress, but I've grown to expect a certain amount of me time, and I work a hard 8 hours a day. I know there are people whose workplaces explicitly care about butt-in-seat time and expect after-hours availability, but I know many, many people whose workplaces don't but that still find themselves working all the time. I really don't know how to account for this: all of my friends who do this seem pretty miserable about it, and none of them are in a position where they're so resource-constrained that they need to squeeze more dollars out of their income.
Service jobs were not scheduled the same way back then; they didn't have the technology do it.
If you look at the actual data, average hours worked has gone down steadily in the US over the past 200 years:
> 1830 69.1 hours per week
> 1880 60.7
> 1929 50.6
> 1988 42.4
> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal atomization it unintentionally prmootes.
i’m curious to see how it’s changed after 1988... any info about that?
Yeah but for what quality of life?
Wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up.
So just fundamentally this means that the amount of work to maintain the same standard of living has increased.
So this statement/study is missing one or more variables.
Moved to the Bay Area from LA couple years back.
The Bay area seems like everyone is perpetually overworked and stressed. I take my kids for soccer/basketball lessons, and standing on the sidelines, hope to chat up with parents, but they are glued to their phones or horror of horrors ( some have their laptops open and coding!). LA was so much more chill, just easier to chat up with people, invite people over spontaneously and make friends.
For another anecdotal data point, I grew up in LA, moved here as a teen, and have spent my career here with regular visits back to LA, and haven't found that to be the case. Leisure is so much _easier_ in San Francisco that it's hard to avoid it... Every resident is a maximum ten minute walk away from a park, there are constant awesome free events, and your life isn't fully governed by the dictates of constant traffic between any two points in the city. I've spent my time in the city itself but I've had plenty of exposure to different parts of the Bay and, controlling for the fact that it's less dense, much of the same applies.
The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very easy to avoid IME.
Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're describing is true for that subset of the population.
The downside of LA is that everybody is rather spread out, separated from each other by long commutes in traffic through the sprawl. It's a tough city to make new friends.
>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week.
what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.
after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.
the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.
Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for my country hours or on weekends.
This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for work stuff.
Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I need some flexibility.
Its been much less stressful.
My brother and sister-in-law work for BCG. There are no secrets about what you're signing up for when you take a job there, and they're paid a premium for it. Their clients pay for fast results, and the best way to do that is have employees work long hours. "We have smart people working long hours on your problem" is their entire business model.
Every single person at BCG could easily find another job that turns off at 5:01pm if they wanted to. They choose not to.
What particularly made it dystopian to me was the acronym choice. PTO is already the most common acronym to corporate accounting departments for paid time off. Reusing the same acronym for predictable seems to send a dystopian message that paid time off is no longer a norm, and one should just be happy if their time off is predictable.
I'm still not sure that sort of Orwellian new-speak was intentional by Perlow, but I also cannot imagine a world in which a highly paid management consultant is unaware that PTO was already a commonly used acronym.
The problem is that if BCG didn’t work so hard then Bain/McKinsey/Deloitte (or whoever else) are willing to work harder/longer and will steal clients. And if some employees don’t want to work past 5pm well there are plenty of other fresh, young graduates who are willing to work these crazy hours because of prestige and high pay.
I work at an investment bank so I am no stranger to crazy hours. I’ve tried to think of a more sustainable alternative model but I haven’t found a compelling one.
There are plenty of companies with the expectations that you're describing, and nobody is forced to work at Boston Consulting Group or goes in not knowing that it's a long-hours environment. I don't see any problem with BCG being the way it is and other companies being the way they are. Vote with your feet.
Articles like these make me very pessimistic for the future. Not because the article is incorrect, but because the fact this has become such a widespread issue is like a bad joke. If you told me in the 90's that people's work schedules would become so unpredictable that families would start dissolving, I would have called you dramatic. But now, it's happening to basically everyone I know, and only in the last few years have I broken free from that myself.
Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix" this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships with their family and friends?
That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent", which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.
Rentier capitalism results in artificial scarcity. With rentier schemes and behavior dominating aspects of life so fundamental as housing and health care, conditions of artificial scarcity have stretched their tendrils into the fabric of our wellbeing: into our mental, spiritual, social health, into our very sense of having the time to freely work in pursuit of healthy lives.
And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we care about. We are dependent.
People just have more competing for their time. Endless streaming, phone usage, video games, etc... not only compete with each other, but also with things like hanging out with friends. It used to be that there really wasn't much to do so for better or worse you hung out with people who were close to you geographically. Now, it's much easier to eschew people who are physically close to you, but may not share your exact ideals, for people who you genuinely want to interact with.
I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different than before.
This would be an argument in favour of the oft-maligned rules about opening hours in the UK, France, etc. (it can be a challenge to buy DIY goods in France on a Sunday, for instance).
If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.
And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country.
I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.
Most people I know would say that they don't "have friends". It's humorous, but I take that at face value. Because it's certainly my experience as well.
I see my friends almost every night at the gym. We meet up down the pub and have nights out more than once per month too. Often we'll converge on someone's house for a barbecue or just to drink wine and chat shit.
We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.
productivity increases were meant to help us earn more by working less. what went wrong
This article misses a fundamental point.
Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling, gossiping, gaming in some way, etc.
But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of effort.
I see my friends all the time. We are very busy, but we make time. If you care, you can make time.
i work a predictable 40 hours a week schedule but it's corporate, conformist malaise that's killing me.
> Experiments like this one have given social engineering a bad name.
What a remarkable understatement.
On that note, any hobbies / pastimes that you're passionate about that actually lead to more time with friends and new serendipitous connections?
LOL, this is just called getting older. As you get older, it gets harder to make new friends, harder to see your existing friends. I suspect it's always been this way.
give them a call
I had a good childhood and decent teenage years with very few but really good and precious friends, those memories will forever stay as a warm bonfire in my heart at which i can rest during whatever coldness i might face in reality. In my view as a Zoomer, barely seeing the people you treasure anymore is just a part of being an adult, you have to go out there and face the world with everything you got and sometimes you meet good people on your road with which you can share a moment with before you have to head out again. That's just life.
TLDR: man up