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Tuesday 2 December 2008

And Another Thing

A leisure class can accommodate the workaholics of wisdom

One of the great paradoxes, for most of us, is the hatred of work, and the need for it to fill what Dr Johnson called ‘the great vacancies of life’. We sigh for leisure, then don’t know how to handle it when it comes in abundance. Occupation is wearisome, but essential, and retirement is longed-for but disappointing. A typical example was Charles Lamb. During the 33 years he worked at the East India House he perpetually grumbled about the way his work gobbled up the best hours of each day and left him tired and listless, with virtually nothing for himself and his pleasures. Once retired, on a generous pension, he grumbled about lack of occupation — see his essays ‘The Superannuated Man’ and ‘Popular Fallacies; That We Should Rise with the Lark’. As his most devoted biographer, E.V. Lucas wrote, the history of his life, between retirement in 1825 and his death in 1834, ‘makes sad reading’. Often he was alone, lacking any fixed purpose, sick and dejected.

I have been looking at some American statistics about the growth of leisure, not only in retirement but throughout working life. Their experience usually adumbrates ours, by a few years, so it is a common transatlantic problem. In 1870 Americans (on average) started work at 13 and had 30.5 years of it. Since life expectancy was only 43.5 years, they had no retirement period. So 61 per cent of their waking life was spent working. All the same, in a lifetime they had 99,016 hours of waking leisure, more than the 93,604 hours they spent on the job. In 2007 the average figures tell a startlingly different story. The age for starting work is 20, life expectancy is 78, the retirement age on average is 62.5 and the years spent on the job 42.5. All the same, the average number of hours spent working is only 65,068 in total, and the number of hours spent at home on household chores etc has shrunk from 61,594 to 58,800, despite a much longer life span, an extra 34.5 years. Meanwhile the number of hours available for waking leisure has jumped to the enormous total of 329,452. This is more than the entire lifetime of most people 100 years ago. We need to redefine the term ‘leisure class’. Moreover, Americans, compared to most Western societies, tend to work longish hours and have short paid holidays. Their economy functions well — it has been in recession only 16 months in the last quarter-century. So present trends will continue, most likely, and become more pronounced. Where will that leave us, say, by 2050? And will we be happier, or less so?

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