Take Your Time

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In truth, we've always been suckers for the promise of a simpler life. Take the popular new reality television show Amish in the City. In a witty analysis in The Washington Monthly (Oct. 2004), Sasha Issenberg claims that we have long romanticized the Amish for their plain ways.

"In living Amish culture, [we] see both the purity of a simpler past and a promise of a more virtuous present," Issenberg writes. "Americans' lionization of the Amish is part of a broader tradition -- the reactionary anti-urban, anti-consumerist vein in our national life that had its roots among America's first Puritan settlers and has lasted well into the modern age in communities ranging from the crunchy back-to-the-land hippies of the 1960s to the right-wing survivalists of today."

The busier we get, it seems, the more we make a fetish of the simple life. Like Depression-era audiences who lapped up Busby Berkeley's lavishly produced, exorbitant musicals, we'll make do with fantasy if we can't attain the reality.

WE WEREN'T ALWAYS so lost. Aristotle's famous view that "we work in order to have leisure" held up well into the 20th century, according to Ben Hunnicutt, professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa. For more than a century prior to the 1930s, American workers successfully lobbied for higher wages and shorter hours, most notably the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek, and there was a widespread expectation that leisure would increasingly come to dominate our lives.

Back then, Hunnicutt says, "the American Dream consisted of two things: more wealth and more time to live." And it wasn't just put-upon workers who defined progress as having more leisure time. "Liberation capitalists" like W.K. Kellogg and Lord Leverhulme (one of the Lever Brothers) viewed the coming age of leisure as the finest possible accomplishment of industrial capitalism. Kellogg even put his money where his mouth was and, in 1930, instituted a six-hour workday in his Battle Creek, Michigan, cereal factories. The result? Not surprisingly, workers spent more time with their kids and in their communities, strengthening both family and civic ties.

So why didn't this utopian experiment spread across the country? The answer is complicated, Hunnicutt says, but one factor is consumerism and the birth of marketing in the 1920s. "There was a great deal of pessimism in the 1920s that the economy was not going to grow anymore because people had all they needed. Then this new view comes along that it's possible to convince people to buy things they never needed before," he explains.

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