Between 1900 and 2000, our national human life expectancy doubled, increasing more in a single century than all prior millennia combined. And over the next thirty years, the number of us expected to live to 100 will likely quadruple.
This rapid increase in longevity is arguably one of the greatest achievements in recent human history. While the causes are well known, such as reductions in infant mortality, advances in sanitation and medicine, public education, and rising standards of living, the effects are less obvious, as we haven’t really adjusted our lifestyles, nor our “life timelines”, to accommodate this ongoing change.[1]
Two examples illustrate this point. First, it is important to acknowledge that the only stage in life that is actually lengthening is old age. We aren’t kids, teenagers, and twenty-somethings for longer periods of time, as wonderful as that would be. We are simply living beyond the age of sixty, and for increasingly longer periods of time. Despite this trend, traditional concepts, timelines and phases for childhood, education, entering the workforce, starting a family, and retirement have remained the same, even though we may find ourselves working longer, or retiring longer, with the end of life increasingly postponed for most people.
Second, our institutions, policies, and norms also remain stagnant, even though said institutions, policies and norms were developed when we lived (and worked) for nearly half as long. For example, formal education remains front-loaded for most Americans in the first twenty years of life, with very few opportunities to accommodate lifelong learning, adult education or career pivots. We continue to grind away with 40+ hour workweeks, limited vacation time, and a lack of universal paid sick or family leave despite it now becoming more common to work into our sixties and seventies. And we continue to treat life in three, inflexible blocks – education, work, retirement – even as children are born, parents require assistance, or other interests and needs are identified. Even our savings and benefits models are structured to ensure we work, uninterrupted, for 30-40 years and presume there will be no breaks, pauses, pivots, or downshifting during this time. They are “retirement” benefits, after all – not “enjoy your life while you’re still young” benefits.
But what if we decided to restructure our future centenarian society into less of an extended “rat race”, with work as the only non-negotiable, seated, stagnant, and often exhausting main course, and more of a floating, roaming, sustainable, family-style buffet “with heaping, delectable servings of time” that catered to everything life has to offer?[2] Instead of fighting to simply exist within a hurried time-famine packed into the fringes of an archaic, artificial and self-imposed 40-hour work week, what if we were really able to truly live through and fully experience and appreciate phases of life malleably devoted to education, work, parenting, caregiving, and leisure, while still allowing time and space for endeavors in volunteerism, civic engagement, exercise, sleep, friendships, marriage, skilled hobbies, career pivots, and sabbaticals?
History reveals that we were once on our way to pursuing this dream. Beginning in the early 19th century and continuing up until the Great Depression, working hours in America were gradually reduced, by many accounts cut in half over the course of a single century. Surprisingly, both sides of this labor debate agreed that shorter work days and work weeks would be good for the country. Labor leaders desired shorter hours for the health and welfare of the workforce, whereas business leaders such as Henry Ford viewed increased leisure as good for consumption, providing the time required for the development of new needs, wants, and desires:
But it is the influence of leisure on consumption which makes the short day and the short week so necessary…Business is the exchange of goods. Goods are bought only as they meet needs. Needs are filled only as they are felt. They make themselves felt largely in leisure hours…The five-day week is not the ultimate, and neither is the eight-hour day…But probably the next move will be in the direction of shortening the day rather than the week.[3]
However, this fleeting agreement was quickly overpowered by skeptics in support of consumption, economic growth, and the endless work required to support it. Business leaders argued that the structure and discipline of full-time work was needed for the mass of humanity, and that most humans would waste away with increased free time and “decline to a subhuman existence.”[4] Furthermore, in addition to this moral argument, many in the business world also began outlining how shorter hours threatened the future of the economy. Henry Ford himself stated that emphasizing shorter hours too strongly might put us in trouble, “for then leisure may be put before work rather than after work – where it belongs.”[5]
Even notable economists, such as Nixon Carver of Harvard University, stated clearly what the idea of Higher Progress and noble leisure might cause in terms of consumer choice:
There is no reason for believing that more leisure would ever increase the desire for goods. It is quite possible that the leisure would be spent in the cultivation of the arts and graces of life; in visiting museums, libraries, and art galleries, or hikes, games and inexpensive amusements. If the cult of leisure should result in the cultivation of Gandhiism, humanism, or any of the highbrowisms, it would decrease the desire for material goods. If it should result in more gardening, more work about the home in making or repairing furniture, painting and repairing the house and other useful avocations, it would cut down the demand for the products of our wage-paying industries…The question in the broadest aspect is simply this: “do we prefer to take our increasing prosperity in the form of more goods or more leisure?”[6]
In other words, increased productivity would present us with a choice between two clashing forms of wealth – leisure or luxuries – a choice which in a free market society should be determined by consumers, and might arguably be the most fundamental and important of all consumer choices.
As summarized by historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, “the entrepreneur, advertiser, and sales person needed to compete with workers’ desire to consume more leisure by convincing them to consume more goods and services instead, in the free time already available.”[7] Modern industry, it seemed, had to find a way to increase consumption within a fixed leisure space, rather than relying on the expansion of leisure to drive increased consumption. Eventually, they feared, leisure – “the cultivation of the arts and graces of life” – might retake its place as the priority of human existence, allowing the marketplace to once again become subordinate to the essential business of living. With time as the only fixed, limiting factor, something had to give: the economy or leisure. Business leaders knew their growth and wealth depended on the expansion of the former and the stationary state of the latter.
The Great Depression, most notably its symptoms of overproduction and unemployment, accelerated this argument. To those in the labor movement, these symptoms seemed to confirm their suspicion that both higher wages and shorter hours were essential to the health of the economy, as wages hadn’t kept pace with productivity, and hours hadn’t been reduced sufficiently to stimulate a necessary, sustainable demand.[8] Henry Ford himself agreed that fewer working hours were an inevitable aspect of economic growth and productivity, that additional free time was bound to arrive – our only choice was to receive (and perceive) it as unemployment or leisure.[9]
To reactively counter the 25% unemployment rate of the Great Depression and proactively soften the blow of future technological unemployment (when tech innovations, or machines, inevitably replace human jobs faster than they create them), labor leaders proposed work-share policies, otherwise known as “share the work” programs, in which existing work was redistributed to more employees in shorter blocks of time. President Hoover and his administration fully supported the proposal, allowing major businesses such as Kellogg’s and Goodyear to voluntarily pivot from three, eight-hour shifts to four, six-hour shifts, adding substantial numbers to their payroll while allowing employees to have the time and opportunity to pursue interests and commitments outside of work. Nationwide, work sharing provided 25% of the nation’s workforce by 1933, and created upwards of three to five million jobs at the height of the depression.
Work-sharing, clearly, was an essential policy move to lead the country out of the Depression. Hoover and Roosevelt made public claims to be the original and strongest advocates of the measure on the campaign trail in 1932. Furthermore, they both supported a draft bill (the “Black-Connery Bill”) limiting the national work week to 30 hours, embracing a coming Age of Leisure, with Newsweek on April 15, 1933 proclaiming that the thirty-hour workweek would soon be the law of the land.[10] With the Senate passing the 30-hour bill, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins voicing administrative support, it was all but settled that a federally regulated six-hour work day (with strict penalties for overtime) would soon be reality.
Unsurprisingly, pressure from business leaders and influential advisors pivoted Roosevelt away from the plan, forever changing the direction of America, our ability to reap the benefits of progress, and our relationship with work. The main concerns, it appears, were the threat this arrangement presented not only to the tax base necessary for government growth and spending, but to “the spirit of capitalism” itself.
American progress and freedom, on the cusp of being re-accepted as the pursuit of happiness on our own time and outside the grips of the marketplace, was instead re-defined as perpetual economic growth, “Full-Time Full-Employment”, and a forever expanding standard of living, regardless of its impact on our families, our communities, our faith, or our environment.
Instead of solving Keynes’ “economic problem” and tackling our “permanent problem – how to use [our] freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for [us]”, we instead agreed to take on additional economic “problems” into eternity, pursuing endless expansion in the face of an artificially created sense of scarcity rather than accepting the existing abundance as proof of progress.
The government ventured down the slippery slope of job creation, serving as the nation’s employer of last resort when the private sector couldn’t create enough jobs through the natural laws of supply and demand. And in doing so, it effectively redefined increases in leisure – free time, arguably our most prized possession – “as lost wealth in subsequent measurements of gross national product and then gross domestic product.”[11] Living our lives in perpetual scarcity as loyal consumers awaiting the next best product rather than in collective and individual abundance through moderate frugality, working forever under necessity rather than by free choice, was the new law of the land. Visions of Higher Progress slowly faded away, forcibly replaced by a new faith in “Salvation by Work” which would fund our new “Gospel of Consumption” driven by the development of massive industries in marketing and advertising.
But what if the shorter hours and share-the-work movements had continued, long after World War Two pulled us out of the Depression? What might have happened if these trends eventually intersected with our lengthening lifespans? How might we have used all the extra time?
Educators such as Robert Maynard Keynes and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright had lots of ideas, both of which will be examined in the next post.
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The New Life Map, A Report from The Stanford Center on Longevity ↑
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Ibd ↑
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Henry Ford and S. Crowther, “The Fear of Overproduction,” Saturday Evening Post 203, 1930, as cited in Free Time ↑
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Free Time, Hunnicutt, 114 ↑
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Henry Ford, “Why I Favor Five-Days’ Work with Six-Days’ Pay” interview, World’s Work 52, 1926, as cited in Free Time ↑
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T.N. Carver, Shorter Working Time and Unemployment, American Economic Review 20, 1932, as cited in Free Time ↑
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Free Time, Hunnicutt, 115 ↑
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Hunnicutt, Free Time, 116 ↑
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Henry Ford and S. Crowther. Unemployment or Leisure. Saturday Evening Post 203, 1930, as cited in Free Time. ↑
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Free Time, Hunnicutt ↑
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Free Time, Hunnicutt, 120 ↑