Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

What are people doing with that extra time and money? Are they truly enriching their lives, or are they just buying more golf clubs and designer handbags? Though it’s presumptuous to pass judgment on how people choose to spend their days, we can focus on the pursuits that almost everyone would agree are constituents of a good life: connecting with loved ones and friends, experiencing the richness of the natural and cultural worlds, and having access to the fruits of intellectual and artistic creativity.

With the rise of two-career couples, overscheduled kids, and digital devices, there is a widespread belief (and recurring media panic) that families are caught in a time crunch that’s killing the family dinner. (Both Al Gore and Dan Quayle lamented its demise in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election—and that was before smartphones and social media.) But the new tugs and distractions have to be weighed against the 24 extra hours that modernity has granted to breadwinners every week and the 42 extra hours it has granted to homemakers. Though people increasingly complain about how crazy-busy they are (“yuppie kvetching,” as one team of economists put it), a different picture emerges when they are asked to keep track of their time. In 2015, men reported 42 hours of leisure per week, around 10 more than their counterparts did fifty years earlier, and women reported 36 hours, more than 6 hours more (figure 17-6).²⁰ (To be fair, the yuppies might have something to kvetch about: less-educated people reported having more leisure, and this inequality-in-reverse has grown over these fifty years.) Similar trends have been reported in Western Europe.²¹

Nor are Americans consistently feeling more harried. A review by the sociologist John Robinson shows some ups and downs between 1965 and 2010 in the percentage who say they feel “always rushed” (with a low of 18 percent in 1976 and a high of 35 percent in 1998), but no consistent trend over forty-five years.²² And at the end of the day, the family dinner is alive and well. Several studies and polls agree that the number of dinners families have together changed little from 1960 through 2014, despite the iPhones, PlayStations, and Facebook accounts.²³ Indeed, over the course of the 20th century, typical American parents spent more time, not less, with their children.²⁴ In 1924, only 45 percent of mothers spent two or more hours a day with their children (7 percent spent no time with them), and only 60 percent of fathers spent at least an hour a day with them. By 1999, the proportions had risen to 71 and 83 percent.²⁵ In fact, single and working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home married mothers did in 1965.²⁶ (An increase in hours spent caring for children is the main reason for the dip in leisure time visible in figure 17-6.)²⁷ But time-use studies are no match for Norman Rockwell and Leave It to Beaver, and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness.

Figure 17-6: Leisure time, US, 1965–2015

Sources: 1965–2003: Aguiar & Hurst 2007, table III, Leisure Measure 1. 2015: American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016c, summing Leisure and Sports, Lawn and Garden Care, and Volunteering for commensurability with Aguiar & Hurst’s Measure 1.

Electronic media are commonly cited as a threat to human relationships, and certainly Facebook friends are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact with flesh-and-blood companions.²⁸ Yet overall, electronic technology has been a priceless gift to human closeness. A century ago, if family members moved to a distant city, one might never hear their voices or see their faces again. Grandchildren grew up without their grandparents laying eyes on them. Couples separated by study, work, or war would reread a letter dozens of times and tumble into despair if the next one was late, not knowing whether the postal service had lost it or whether the lover was angry, faithless, or dead (an agony recounted in songs like the Marvelettes’ and Beatles’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Why Don’t You Write Me?”). Even when long-distance telephony allowed people to reach out and touch someone, the exorbitant cost put a strain on intimacy. People of my generation remember the awkwardness of speed-talking on a pay phone while feeding it quarters between bongs, or the breakneck sprint when called to the family phone (“IT’S LONG DISTANCE!!!”), or the sinking feeling of the rent money evaporating as a pleasant conversation unfolded. “Only connect,” advised E. M. Forster, and electronic technology is allowing us to connect as never before. Today, almost half of the world’s population has Internet access, and three-quarters have access to a mobile phone. The marginal cost of a long-distance conversation is essentially zero, and the conversants can now see as well as hear each other.