
Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a toll on society - robtherobber
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/
======
majos
Can somebody reconcile this with statistics about TV watching, which suggest
that people watch about 3-5 hours of TV/Netflix per _day_ [1]?

A possible argument is that, as the article describes, time off is so
unpredictable that scheduling time with other people is much harder than just
turning on the TV. But if most people have hours of free time every day, it
seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per
month.

Are these entertainment consumption statistics skewed by superusers who do
nothing else or something?

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption)

~~~
fossuser
I think TV, YouTube, or even Podcasts can trigger a similar mechanism to
socialization, but without any of the risk that comes from interacting with
real people.

Speculating I'd guess that the low lift and reduced anxiety means more people
get stuck in it as a local maximum even if they'd be happier otherwise.

~~~
K0SM0S
I think you're looking in the right direction.

Speaking from anecdotal experience with online communities, when idling or
toying at home during their free time, people actually engage socially with
friends through chats, networks, games — pick your entertainment drug. They're
everything but alone, and it's genuinely real if limited cognitively compared
to a real physical interaction.

If you add voice chat to that, at the end of the day you really feel like you
spent X hours with friend(s), there's just no other way to put it except for
the physical location.

It's almost a given to me that with appropriate videoconf wall-sized (real-
world size) screens in all living rooms, we'd just "invite" friends this way
most of the time unless the physical interaction was necessary. Less
maintenance, less friction to just spend a cool quality hour.

The 'effort' required to move out of your house is getting increasingly
higher, your 'local maximum' would essentially converge to an actual maximum
in a perfect virtual reality (of which the "80%" / good enough might be just
around the next decade).

~~~
fossuser
I haven't read it, but I think your example is closely related to the plot in
The Machine Stops, which was pretty prescient.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops)

~~~
darkerside
It's amazing how old this story is. It feels so relevant even today

------
bonniemuffin
I'd like to offer up the concept of the casual home-based "brunch" as the most
effective way to spend quality time with your way-too-busy friends. This
version of "brunch" happens at someone's house, from, say, noon to 5pm on a
weekend day, and people do bring food, but it's a drop-in affair and not a
sit-down meal, and showing up without food is also fine.

The timeslot works for people with or without kids. Friends with gig economy
or service industry jobs might have a shift that overlaps it, but a Lyft
driver might be able to take a break and drop in, or a restaurant server might
get a gap between the lunch and dinner shifts to come by. Hosting is easy
because you've already set low expectations for providing food or
entertainment; you're just providing some chairs with a roof over them.

Do other people do this? Among my social circle, we have "brunch" probably
once a month or so, attended by 15-20 people at various of our houses, and it
strikes me as a useful social institution that everyone should have.

~~~
nikanj
In Vancouver, somehow "brunch" has morphed to a massive obligation. Everyone
should bring a dish, all the dishes are high effort, and people secretly hope
to skip the whole thing so they don't have to get up at 7am to cook.

Same with dinners parties too, and the only alternative seems to be placing
the whole burden of cooking on the host. Whatever happened to just making a
giant stew and someone bringing a few loaves of bread?

~~~
mrec
There seems to be an obvious opportunity for upscale takeout food delivery
here. Much easier to split a bill than cooking chores.

~~~
leetcrew
isn't this called "catering"? I know some wealthy people who will often have
catered food delivered (or prepared on premises) if they're having more than a
couple people over and don't feel like cooking. this is also what my office
does when they give us free lunch. I think the economics work out in a way
where the per-head cost is pretty bad for 10-20 people, but reasonable for
~100 or more.

~~~
mrec
I thought catering involved things like waiters or at least servers. Seems
excessive for a dinner party.

~~~
leetcrew
I think there are different tiers of service that are all called catering.
when we get "catered" lunch at our office, they usually just put out a buffet
of prepared food and we line up and take what we want. the catering staff will
replace trays of food when they're empty and occasionally take your plate if
you're finished eating, but that's about it. no idea what it costs per head.

no matter how you slice it, having other people prepare good food (ie, not
pizza and wings) for you is relatively expensive. if you expect the food to
come to you, it either has to be limited to dishes that travel well and don't
suffer from sitting over heat for an hour, or you have to pay even more for
people to cook it on location.

------
legitster
I don't like the explanation that everyone "back in the day" had the same
schedule. Service jobs still existed back then. Upper middle class (white)
people worked 9-5. Women stayed home. The example used was literally the
Beaver family.

Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their
friends. Something bigger is definitely at play.

~~~
non-entity
> Even my other 9-5 friends office coworkers are not making time for their
> friends.

Personally, I haven't had any friends since graduating HS and I dont have the
time to make new ones. For one, I'm pretty transient, moving every few years
to take a new job as thats the only way to get a significant pay increase (I
might finally settle down when and if I find a job I can enjoy somewhat)

~~~
SomaticPirate
It's interesting to hear that "not having time to make friends" is associated
with career growth. All the high achievers I have met specifically carve out
time for networking and the best networking usually depends on having an
actual personal connection with someone. Even in tech, I have found most of my
jobs by invitation which has eased the stress of the interviewing and having
to get a foot in the door.

Are you finding the opposite to be true?

~~~
non-entity
Not really, I suppose my definition of "friend" just must be stricter as I
don't consider most people I end up networking with the really be friends.
More of acquaintances

------
ghostcluster
If you look at the actual data, average hours worked has gone _down_ steadily
in the US over the past 200 years:

> 1830 69.1 hours per week

> 1880 60.7

> 1929 50.6

> 1988 42.4

> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours
> “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups —
> but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but
> the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty
> hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes
> rather than increased leisure time.

[https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-
history/](https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/)

In my own estimation, spending time with friends may be less emphasized in the
current era due to the increased role of social media and the personal
atomization it unintentionally prmootes.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Yeah but for what quality of life?

Wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up.

So just fundamentally this means that the amount of work to maintain the same
standard of living has increased.

So this statement/study is missing one or more variables.

~~~
akavi
> wages haven't increased while inflation has gone up

...That's not true, at all? Adjusted for inflation, wages have _at worst_ been
flat for _certain_ sectors. The vast majority of people have seen _inflation
adjused_ wage increases.

~~~
dpc_pw
The official inflation numbers are useless. Cost of goods is flat, sure (after
you include the hedonistic adjustment gimmick), but cost of other's people
time has skyrocketed (daycare, teachers, doctors, waiter, plubmer etc.)

------
sharadov
Moved to the Bay Area from LA couple years back. The Bay area seems like
everyone is perpetually overworked and stressed. I take my kids for
soccer/basketball lessons, and standing on the sidelines, hope to chat up with
parents, but they are glued to their phones or horror of horrors ( some have
their laptops open and coding!). LA was so much more chill, just easier to
chat up with people, invite people over spontaneously and make friends.

~~~
wutbrodo
For another anecdotal data point, I grew up in LA, moved here as a teen, and
have spent my career here with regular visits back to LA, and haven't found
that to be the case. Leisure is so much _easier_ in San Francisco that it's
hard to avoid it... Every resident is a maximum ten minute walk away from a
park, there are constant awesome free events, and your life isn't fully
governed by the dictates of constant traffic between any two points in the
city. I've spent my time in the city itself but I've had plenty of exposure to
different parts of the Bay and, controlling for the fact that it's less dense,
much of the same applies.

The sheer success of the metro economy relative to LA over the last ten years
means that there are a lot of people who moved here with dollar signs in their
eyes, and I don't doubt that that's shifted the culture a bit, but it's very
easy to avoid IME.

Our data points do differ in that it sounds like you're primarily around
families and I'm around single people or young couples. Perhaps what you're
describing is true for that subset of the population.

~~~
faanghacker
Maybe he was in bay area but not SF itself. A common ambiguity when talking
about the area

~~~
wutbrodo
Right, I alluded to that in my comment, though it wasn't the focus.

------
cryoshon
>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at
Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off.
It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one
weeknight off per member per week.

what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any
company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.

after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation
should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if
there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from
doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one
tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.

the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time
off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together
to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to
follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a
problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize
aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their
own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working
longer than required.

~~~
dkersten
Completely agree. After a few years as a startup founder (ie: in super high
stress environment), I now no longer work anywhere where time outside of
contractual work hours are not 100% mine, I don't do "on call" anymore and
won't work anywhere that contractually asks me to work longer than normal for
my country hours or on weekends.

This means that I leave/stop as soon as the day ends and am not reachable for
work stuff.

Yes, I will make the occasional exception when it really is an emergency, but
in return I expect that the company makes occasional exceptions for me when I
need some flexibility.

Its been much less stressful.

~~~
johnsimer
I'm about to make this transition

I'm kind of worried that my skills will atrophy because I'll be working less,
but I almost dont care at this point, because I'll finally have a social life

~~~
watwut
You will atrophy when you never learn new things. Time off does not prevent
you to learn.

~~~
dkersten
Yes, it can even give you more opportunities that you otherwise would have
missed.

------
jjpwojwpwf
Articles like these make me very pessimistic for the future. Not because the
article is incorrect, but because the fact this has become such a widespread
issue is like a bad joke. If you told me in the 90's that people's work
schedules would become so unpredictable that families would start dissolving,
I would have called you dramatic. But now, it's happening to basically
everyone I know, and only in the last few years have I broken free from that
myself.

Every clever scheduling algorithm or trick that people try applying to "fix"
this situation feels like a band-aid solution. It begs the question, WHY are
so many people taking jobs that they know will destroy their relationships
with their family and friends?

That immediately takes the subject to the unpleasant conversation of "rent",
which has shot up dramatically all over the world in the last few decades. I'm
honestly no longer convinced that the systems we have for property acquisition
nowadays are actually any better than homesteading. We pay taxes so the
government can defend property claims; except 90% of people don't own much at
all, so we are basically paying for rich people's security guards.

~~~
macawfish
Rentier capitalism results in artificial scarcity. With rentier schemes and
behavior dominating aspects of life so fundamental as housing and health care,
conditions of artificial scarcity have stretched their tendrils into the
fabric of our wellbeing: into our mental, spiritual, social health, into our
very sense of having the time to freely work in pursuit of healthy lives.

And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid
scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we
care about. We are dependent.

~~~
ip26
What artificial scarcity do you have in mind, bearing in mind that there is a
true scarcity (or at least fixed supply) of land close to desirable places to
live?

~~~
CalRobert
Try buying a house in the sunset and turning it in to flats.

~~~
macawfish
Try buying a house and selling it for a similar or lower price without walking
away in debt.

------
matwood
People just have more competing for their time. Endless streaming, phone
usage, video games, etc... not only compete with each other, but also with
things like hanging out with friends. It used to be that there really wasn't
much to do so for better or worse you hung out with people who were close to
you geographically. Now, it's much easier to eschew people who are physically
close to you, but may not share your exact ideals, for people who you
genuinely want to interact with.

I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing. It's just different
than before.

~~~
CapricornNoble
>>>I'm not sure if this is universally a bad or good thing.

One of the side-effects of hanging out with physically-proximate but non-
optimized-personality people is that you learn to compromise. You learn to
build productive relationships despite differences in temperament and
interests.

I think that is largely lost in the digital age. It's part of why we see such
uncompromising partisanship in political movements. People are so accustomed
to interacting with exactly the sort of opinions/viewpoints they want to
experience online that they don't know how to handle anything contrarian when
they are in meat-space.

~~~
matwood
This is a great point I hadn't considered. Interacting with people you do not
agree with not only causes one to learn to compromise, but also softens
extreme viewpoints.

------
CalRobert
This would be an argument in favour of the oft-maligned rules about opening
hours in the UK, France, etc. (it can be a challenge to buy DIY goods in
France on a Sunday, for instance).

If you have the same time off as people without a 9-5 M-F job it might be
easier to befriend a few of them and aid interclass social cohesion.

~~~
MrMorden
If it's a good thing to ban retail from opening on Sunday, it's also a good
thing to do the same to restaurants, transit, and everything excepting
emergency services. The UK only restricts retail over 280 m^2, and only in
England and Wales—a Scot-lead UK government blocked deregulation in 2006, and
more recently Scots did it again.

France is no different; its closing laws also apply only to retail, plus they
exempt tourist areas. Germany's exempt train stations. Israel comes closest
(at least for Jewish employees), but still allows more than the minimum
necessary employment on Saturday; and assuming Benny Gantz forms a government
in two weeks the faction who want to impose their religion on everyone else
will lose more control.

------
michaelbrooks
And this doesn't just affect America, but I think it affects every country.

I never see my friends any more and very rarely see my family. It's a really
sad state of affairs, but I'm just working to make a living so I can hopefully
one day own a house and go travelling with my wife.

~~~
ghego1
Be aware that if you live for tomorrow and that tomorrow never comes, you
might end up regretting not having lived for today :-)

~~~
haskellandchill
yea and if you live for today you could be in the street tomorrow

~~~
kibwen
Though sadly there are a fair number of folks who both live for tomorrow and
also fear ending up in the street tomorrow.

------
olah_1
Most people I know would say that they don't "have friends". It's humorous,
but I take that at face value. Because it's certainly my experience as well.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
I see my friends almost every night at the gym. We meet up down the pub and
have nights out more than once per month too. Often we'll converge on
someone's house for a barbecue or just to drink wine and chat shit.

We all work at least full time and some of us run businesses (myself
included). I honestly can't relate to this. I'm 35, for what it's worth.

------
ptah
productivity increases were meant to help us earn more by working less. what
went wrong

~~~
pochamago
It's not like you can't work fewer hours and have all the things greater
productivity offered. But it's also created even more things you can get by
continuing to work more, and most people do not feel satisfied living without
them

~~~
lm28469
I'd work 30% of what I do now if I could. The truth is that no one will ever
employ you at 30%.

~~~
leetcrew
first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim. shift work pays
by the hour for however many hours you work (and possibly overtime), and most
of these jobs don't expect you to work full-time. in fact, they might prefer
that you don't. you're probably not gonna get an aeron chair and a mechanical
switch keyboard though.

even in software, there are people working less than full-time. there was a
thread about this just the other day.

~~~
lm28469
> first of all this is an incredibly white-collar centric claim

Well yeah obviously I wouldn't be able to live working @30% doing food
delivery or cleaning bathrooms...

> there are people working less than full-time.

There are some for sure but so far I haven't found a company accepting my
requests. It's probably highly dependent on the country/industry.

------
pastor_elm
This article misses a fundamental point.

Historically, people have liked to socialize by drinking, smoking, gambling,
gossiping, gaming in some way, etc.

But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional class.
Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton of
effort.

~~~
CapricornNoble
>>>But those activities have become too risqué for the modern professional
class. Socializing has to be inclusive and bland and you have to put in a ton
of effort.

How much of that is due to demographic changes in the _Western_ professional
class? Asia still knows how to mix business with pleasure.

[https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-
ba...](https://theaseanpost.com/article/deal-making-asias-escort-bars-
thriving)

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/23/national/social-
issues/metoo-dealmaking-escort-bars-thrives-corporate-east-asia-including-
japan/)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121268021240548769)

------
derision
I see my friends all the time. We are very busy, but we make time. If you
care, you can make time.

~~~
war1025
A thing we've found very helpful is if something ends up working out well time
/ place-wise, just suggest doing the same thing again next week. It's like
building any new habit. You have to be very intentional about it to start
with, then it becomes easy.

------
bettyx1138
i work a predictable 40 hours a week schedule but it's corporate, conformist
malaise that's killing me.

------
rayiner
> Experiments like this one have given social engineering a bad name.

What a remarkable understatement.

------
BadassFractal
On that note, any hobbies / pastimes that you're passionate about that
actually lead to more time with friends and new serendipitous connections?

------
rmah
LOL, this is just called getting older. As you get older, it gets harder to
make new friends, harder to see your existing friends. I suspect it's always
been this way.

~~~
ghaff
My first suspicion upon reading this was that some writer or editor observed
that they weren't getting together with friends as much as they used to and
spun a story with some plausible theories and anecdotes out of it.

The real answer may be as simple as they got a bit older, people they know got
busy with partners, family, kids, etc. and tend not to be available on random
nights and weekends.

I'm willing to believe that there are meta-trends which have caused shifts in
how and how much people socialize in addition to this but I'd need to be
convinced.

~~~
luckydata
No, I come from a country where having friends is not strange at any age. The
US are weird and can't put my finger on it but I never felt so detached. I
will definitely leave when I'm done working, I hate the lifestyle here, it's
so hollow and boring.

~~~
solean
The US is a big place. You would have a different experience in Georgia than
you would in SF.

~~~
luckydata
I lived in California and Michigan. In most of the ways that matter it's not
that different.

------
joewrong
give them a call

------
Reschi
I had a good childhood and decent teenage years with very few but really good
and precious friends, those memories will forever stay as a warm bonfire in my
heart at which i can rest during whatever coldness i might face in reality. In
my view as a Zoomer, barely seeing the people you treasure anymore is just a
part of being an adult, you have to go out there and face the world with
everything you got and sometimes you meet good people on your road with which
you can share a moment with before you have to head out again. That's just
life.

TLDR: man up

~~~
sudosteph
The world is worthless. "Everything you got" is usually not enough. Good
people are hard to come by.

Treasure those precious friends of yours. They're actual people who care about
you. They will have your back when memories can't. And sometimes you'll have
to inconvenience yourself to have their backs too. _That_ is life. Or at least
a life that is worth living.

