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?

  • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.mlOP
    11·
    1 day ago

    analyses like these make it clear to me that class consciousness is gonna appear in the anglosphere long after it appears everywhere else, because it gets so close to the mark but never quite reaches it.

    I don’t get how you went from the talk of stress/overwhelm to ‘the Anglosphere’ and ‘class consciousness’

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      18 hours ago

      yes, that makes sense.

      class consciousness is almost a taboo subject within the anglosphere – despite there being a very large and easily accessible body of work that explains it as well as a roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the world practicing some aspect of it in every day life already.

      i’m a neophyte to it myself and high profile examples of other neophytes like graham platner and kat abughazaleh make it clear how much damage you can do trying to practice it without a full understanding it. so any attempts on my part to explain it here should fall woefully short of achieving the goal of helping you understand how the lack of class consciousness is making people in the western world feel stressed/overwhelmed without realizing WHY they’re stressed/overwhelmed.

      @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has created introductory reading lists and i strongly recommend starting there by going through their post history if you truly want to understand it.