Go to the ‘Lifestyle’ section of a broadsheet and they paint a picture that we are all struggling to deal with stress and overwhelm. This is portrayed as an unavoidable feature of modern life.

A few things make it hard to believe –

  • Firstly, it just doesn’t square with my daily experiences. I’m not stressed out and overwhelmed, while living a pretty normal lifestyle with full-time work plus childcare and sports etc.
  • The stats don’t bear it out. Working time has gone way down – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_hours_per_worker – it’s below 35 hours a week most places, 46.25 in the highest in that table. Yes when I worked 80 hours a week I was exhausted, but that’s not the norm, and the papers talk about it like it’s some inescapable trend.
  • Then there’s the stats on TV-watching. How can it be true that modern life is hectic AND people watch telly for three hours a day?

I know this is coming across as a rant diguised as an AskLemmy question, but I have real curiosity about it… am I the exception for not feeling busy? Is there some explanation I am missing for why people in a society with 35-hour workweeks feel busy? Do you find the ‘hectic modern life’ narrative relatable? Do you think people are lying about being busy for some reason, e.g. to avoid being asked to do things?

    • TiredTiger@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 day ago

      The US has no maximum working hours, not even in the so-called “progressive” states. There may be limits in the public sector or in very specific industries (airlines), but this represents a very small percentage of the US labor force.

      I’m not trying to be US-centric here, and I know other places have better laws, but the average USian is extremely ignorant of their own labor laws and the US deliberately misrepresents its actual conditions to those abroad via propaganda. (That system is being allowed to break down for the moment but it is not gone.) This is what capitalism brings, and anyone who thinks they are insulated from it or that their country is ‘too civilized’ to go down this path is being wilfully ignorant. The vassal states will not be unaffected as the imperial core turns to open fascism.