The new year is now upon us, and with each new year comes the pressure to reassess ourselves and our lives, to figure out what we should do differently. I will exercise more! Eat less! Volunteer more! But it’s hard to fit anything new in, because we’re all so busy, we’re all going at 90 miles an hour, right?

Well, here’s some surprising news from the world of facts: Sociologists John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey point out that researchers have been having people fill out time diaries since the mid-1960s or so. And, taken as a whole, what these records show is that there has been little aggregate change in the amount of time we spend on the various basic activities of life: working, sleeping, time with family, leisure. As a matter of fact, on average people have nearly an hour more of free time today than they did in 1965.

How can this be? Like you, I’m absolutely convinced I get busier every year. Maybe it’s a statistical problem: although the averages of time spent on various tasks have remained constant over decades, perhaps that’s because some people have become super slackers while others–such as you and me—have become super busy. However, this probably isn’t the right explanation; the ratio of slothfulness has probably remained more or less constant in the last half century.

Anthropologist Chuck Darrah is among the researchers who have been exploring some other possible reasons for the perceived busyness epidemic. One thing that has indeed changed in the last forty years is there are far more dual career couples now and the partners in these couples are working more hours. As this has happened, available time in dual career families for things like preparing meals and driving the kids to soccer practice has become more scarce. So, if you are in a dual career family, you may in fact be busier than your parents were.

Darrah also points out that as we have become convinced we are insanely busy, a whole new realm of activity has emerged, that of managing busyness. It’s great that now you can keep a calendar on your smart phone and co-ordinate activities with others by constant texting, but these things actually take a lot of time.

Finally, I’d like to add that if you listen closely to yourself or others talking about busyness, you are likely to detect a tone of pride. People may complain about how busy they are, but underneath the complaining is the message: look at me, I’m so busy! I’m getting so much done! My time is in demand! I mean, what if you aren’t busy? Doesn’t that suggest that the world doesn’t really need you?

In contemporary entertainment culture, we expect to be stimulated more or less continuously. Moments when we aren’t doing something specific are in fact likely to seem boring to us. One reason we are all so busy is that our culture has programmed us to only be comfortable when experiencing high levels of arousal. We say we want to slow down, but do we really?

Photo by MCCChurch.

As those who have read this blog in the past know, I consider entertainment to be very important in our culture. It’s important because much of what people want to do comes down to being entertained—watching TV, movies, and sports, playing games, amusing themselves online, going out to eat, drink, and party, etc., etc. In that sense, although we are unlikely to put it in this way, entertainment seems to operate for many of us as the very purpose of life.

Entertainment is also important because our lust to be entertained infects many areas of life that aren’t in themselves entertaining—we want our food and our cars and our politicians and our classes and our friends to be entertaining, just for starters. The result is that certain kinds of products and activities—for example, an honest and competent, but ugly and boring politician—tend to disappear.

In a number of recent posts, I have been trying to point out another aspect of the importance of entertainment—entertainment can only flourish in a particular sort of cultural environment. Whether it’s a strange coincidence or not, the mass entertainments of the turn of the 20th century (motion pictures, followed by radio and TV) were accompanied by new ways of thinking about people and values. At this time there was a growing emphasis on the importance of people being amusing and being able to create a good first impression, and there emerged a new flexibility about moral values. Above all, this is the period when it began to be widely accepted that the possibilities of fulfillment and self-realization opened up life’s most important quests. And what better way to find fulfillment than in entertaining activities and the acquisition of the flood of consumer goods that was starting to appear around this time?

I don’t claim that entertainment caused all these things, but I do claim that they all emerged in our culture at roughly the same time—around the turn of the 20th century. As I pointed out last time, that’s also the time period in which an increasingly vocal protest started to emerge against this culture of entertainment, a protest that usually took the form of religious fundamentalism.

So, what’s the point? Is entertainment good or bad? The point has nothing to do with entertainment being good or bad. Sure, there are social problems that are associated with entertainment; here are a few possibilities that come immediately to mind: childhood obesity, addiction, political polarization, widespread boredom. I’ve discussed all of these in this space.

But there are lots of good things associated with entertainment as well: tolerance of diversity, effective communication, and–can’t forget this–it’s fun. In the end, the point isn’t to pass judgment on our culture of entertainment, it’s to better understand that culture. Because we are more likely to be able to control what we understand. And what we don’t understand is more likely to control us.

Photo by Jason Scragz

Historians and anthropologists who have studied boredom have often concluded that it is not a universal affliction, but is instead a problem that is largely confined to contemporary society.  Perhaps this seems counter-intuitive: I mean, what could be more boring than hunting and (especially) gathering, the ecological adaptation that has been the means of support throughout most of the time humans have been on the planet?  Every day you get up and look around your territory for stuff to eat, no TV, no internet, not even a book to read. We might expect that foraging groups would have an extensive vocabulary of boredom, but as far as I know that has never been reported in the anthropological literature.

In fact, it seems as though nobody in the English speaking world complained of boredom until the mid to late 18^th century.  Why might this be?  No one knows for sure, but it is probably relevant that this is roughly the same time that modern novels started to appear.  More broadly, the first stirrings of the contemporary culture of entertainment date from around this time, and as opportunities for entertainment proliferated, people began to compare their daily experience to the adventure and romance and glamour of the worlds they could experience through entertainment.

Today, we expect or at least hope for more or less continuous entertainment.  Teachers and campaigning politicians need to be entertaining if they expect an audience, we expect our food to be full of stimulating tastes, we carry music with us wherever we go—obviously, this is a list that could go on and on.  We live in a world where those who develop more entertaining options for anything are going to get rich, and as a result more and more of our experience is entertaining.  Except when it isn’t.  Think about it—the moments when you are bored are those when you are not being entertained. What do you do to address your boredom?  Try to find something entertaining, of course.

What I’m saying is this:  We live in a society that sets us up to be bored.  Everyone who has something entertaining or stimulating to sell has an interest in our being bored, and an enormous amount of resources go into making sure that if we try to step back from the world of entertainment, we will be.  In our society, the opposite of bored is entertained; and more to the point, if we aren’t entertained, we’re bored.