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Add to that a work ethic gone mad. "Work has become trendy," observes Jim Butcher, a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. But he and other professionals acknowledge the toll that such a relentless pace takes on creativity. No instrument, no invention, can emit an utterly original thought. "I flew 80,000 miles last year," says economist James Smith of the Rand Corp. "You start losing touch with things. My work is research, which at its best is contemplative. If you get into this mode of running around, you don't have time to reflect."
The risk is that the unexamined life becomes self-sustaining. Attention spans may be richly elastic, but little in this rapid life-style conspires to stretch them. In fact the reverse is true, as TV commercials shrink to 15- second flashes and popular novels contain paragraphs no longer than two sentences. "I do things in a lot of 3 1/2-minute segments," muses UCLA anthropologist Peter Hammond. "Experience just sort of rolls by me. I think it affects the quality of my work."
Technology alone, however, bears only part of the responsibility for the time famine. All the promises of limitless leisure relied on America's retaining its blinding lead in the world's markets and unfolding prosperity at home. No one quite bargained for the Middle-Class Squeeze, what Paula Rayman, a sociologist at Wellesley College's Stone Center, calls "falling behind while getting ahead." The prices of houses have soared, inflation erodes paychecks, wages are stagnant, and medical and tuition costs continue to skyrocket. So now it can take two paychecks to fund what many imagined was a middle-class life. "The American Dream is very much intact," says Rayman. "It's just more expensive."
Keeping a home and raising 2.4 children, as anyone who has ever done it knows, is a full-time job. The increasing rarity of the full-time homemaker has done more to eat away everyone's leisure time than any other factor. If both mother and father are working to make ends meet, as is the case in 57% of U.S. families, someone still has to find the time to make lunches and pediatrician appointments, shop, cook, fix the washer, do the laundry, take the children to choir practice. Single-parent households are squeezed even more.
On the surface, families are coping by teaching children to put the roast in the oven after school, enrolling them in day care, hiring nannies, making play dates, sending out laundry and ordering in pizza. "We spend a lot of time buying time," observes economist Smith. "What we're doing is contracting out for family care," notes Rand demographer Peter Morrison, "but there's a limit. If you contract out everything, you have an enterprise, not a family."
Like the ever expanding white-collar workday, this stage of family evolution defies all the expectations of a generation ago. For years, stress research tended to focus on men, and so the office or factory floor was viewed as the primary source of tension. The home, on the other hand, was a sanctuary, a benign environment in which one recuperated from problems at work. The experts know better now.
Listen to the families: