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
    1·
    7 hours ago

    I spend about 3-4 months a year in African LDCs (Least developed countries) (not gonna say which ones coz it identifies me) and people there are oppressed by poverty, but not hectic. Actually they’re very bored and unemployed.

    The ‘poor people are happy’ narrative doesn’t square with my experiences, but neither does the ‘everyone is busy’ narrative.

    I worked 80 hour weeks for a few years, and yeah I’d feel it then, but that’s not mainstream. And friends in Shenzhen yes they feel it, but it seems far from universal.