If we're working harder, we have less time
and less energy to fit other things into our lives. We try to make more
time, for example by sleeping less – we sleep, on average, one and a half fewer
hours per night than our ancestors at the turn of the century, which is around
five hundred hours a year less than we need (no wonder we're so tired). Next, we
cut out exactly those activities which reduce stress: according to research by
the Mental Health Foundation, exercise is the most likely activity to be
squeezed out by the demands of work (48 per cent admitted this), followed by
relationships – nearly half of the employees questioned said they had had to cut
the time they spent with their partners.
Forty-two per cent reported having slimmed
down their social life, seeing less of friends, while 41 per cent cut out
hobbies and entertainment. These findings are backed up by worrying trends in
the long-running British Social Attitudes survey, which show that in the last
two decades the amount we see of our best friends has dropped, as has our
socialising with family members (who still make up the bulk of our social
lives).
In one study, 72 per cent of British managers
said they had received criticism from family or friends
about their long working hours, 65 per cent
said work was damaging
their health, 72 per cent said it restricted
their ability to get involved in
community affairs, the same proportion said it affected their relationship with
their partner, while 77 per cent said it affected their relationship with their
children. Of these, 24 per cent said it had a `very adverse effect on their
children'. Seventy-nine per cent said it cut into their social life and leisure
time; it's all work and no play.
This issue prompted a lot of emails to the
`Working Lives' web-site. Lack of time and energy for friends and hobbies was
one of the biggest causes of resentment towards employers, particularly among
women (with or without children). They described the deprivation as `having no
life'. One twenty-seven-year-old female lawyer emailed:
As I got more senior the work began
accumulating, and with no idea when the work would come in and when I would be
forced to stay late, I began not to make appointments to see friends, go to
plays etc. because it became too frustrating to cancel all the time. But that
ends up leaving a vacuum in life where
friends and leisure should be. After long evenings at work, weekends when I wasn't
working were needed to catch up on sleep, never mind the household chores.
Another woman emailed:
The current work crunch means that it is
absolutely impossible to combine work
with any form of artistic expression. I mean that modern
work rips so much energy out of you that it
makes creative pursuits pretty much impossible.
A woman working in a university emailed:
I'm not a particularly energetic person, and
this limits the hours I can do. I know that I have colleagues who do much more
in terms of total hours per week. Even though I have what must be a lot more
free time than some . . . I'm too tired most of the time to take advantage of
it. I have not made friends in this city, which I have lived in for over five
years now, and often miss meetings of the few societies I have joined due to
lack of energy/pressure of work. Just writing this down makes me realise what a
totally pathetic individual I must appear to be ... For me personally I don't
know what to do. I make re about `having a life', and have actually
managed to cut my hours a bit over the last year . . . I still constantly feel
`stressed-up' due to not being able to get everything done (and had
to deal with a major depressive episode a couple of years ago caused by
overwork). What else can I do?
At its worst, leisure in the overwork culture
simply becomes time for rest and recuperation before work starts again. As has
been seen, the predictions of a leisure age have been strangled by the rise of a
neo-liberal market capitalism which exhausts its workers. Despite all the
increases in labour-saving technologies in the home, our time for leisure has
increased by a pathetic twenty minutes a day between 1961 and
1995. The amount of time people devote to
sport has got stuck at ten minutes a day, unchanged since the
1970s
despite a vast increase in access to sporting
facilities for much of the population.
And it's getting worse: recent figures collected by the Future Foundation show a
fall in every kind of leisure activity, from socialising to sports.
The harder people work in a non-standardised
24/7 working week, the more difficult it is to find your free time
overlapping with that of your friends, a point eloquently made by one plaintive
email:
I
have a little (hobby) band, and I write songs
for it, but they ALL work so hard and so many hours that they're always
knackered and never have time to make much input.
Two researchers at the Institute of Social
and Economic Research at Essex University have argued that the mismatch of
working time is leading to a decline of many kinds of `associational activity',
as `the more of people's time is absorbed by paid work, the more difficulty each
person will have in scheduling and matching their own leisure time. This has
serious consequences both for individual satisfaction and for society as a
whole.' It has reduced the value of non-work time for individuals such as the
songwriter in the email.
The problem is that the harder you work, the
less rewarding your leisure time is likely to be, comments business psychologist
Jock Encombe. He sees many senior executives under enormous pressure, and
observes how they get addicted to the adrenaline, which produces `a
state of mental agitation which makes it difficult to savor and enjoy other
kinds of experiences'. After the thrill of a challenging big project, the
details of everyday life can seem
mundane.
As the demands multiply on people, there's an
`increasing depletion of life outside
work, because they have less time to build family and social capital and develop
other interests'. The less investment in other areas of life, the less rewarding
they become; the cycle becomes
self-reinforcing, leading to a single focus on work,
