Most Americans fear retirement. There are a variety of reasons to explain this trend.
First, many would-be retirees fear that they don’t, or won’t, have enough money to sustain themselves. Economic uncertainty, cost of living, inflation, and a rapidly rising life expectancy are just some of the factors driving Americans to work longer and longer.
A second key concern is health. Acquiring affordable health insurance without full-time employment to cover the costs of a serious illness make many hesitate departing the workforce. Alternatively, some see the routine of work as a net positive on their health, and fear their exercise, diet, and overall well-being may suffer without this structure.
The third factor, sitting beneath the surface of tangible concerns like finances and health, is a more abstract fear which indicates a fundamental flaw in our educational system and cultural upbringing. This fear isn’t about funding our retirement – it is a fear of filling it. It is a fear of the most precious, fleeting resource we have at our disposal – that of time.
Why do we fear one of the most historically desirable components of the human experience when we work so long in the hopes for more of it?
That is the central question of this essay series. And after an excessive amount of research, observation, and reflection, it appears that as a culture we are steadily losing our ability to “occupy our leisure,” [1] becoming somewhat incapable of existing meaningfully outside of our work.
Part of this is because of our blind acceptance of compulsory (from an economic sense), life-long labor as normal. After nearly one hundred years of gradually reduced working hours in America (thanks to power machinery and the original goals of the labor movement), the fear and uncertainty of the Great Depression brought about a renewed commitment to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt termed “Full-Time, Full-Employment”: New Deal-funded, government-backed jobs with eight-hour work days and five-day work weeks, where previously no work existed. Work was no longer something we simply did for a living – it was now the “right or moral thing to do”, a virtuous act, an act of citizenship, and became accepted as the dominant obligation in American life. FDR’s “Salvation by Work” became an American mantra.
We also began to embody Max Weber’s observation that we were living to work rather than working to live. When the Industrial Revolution removed our agrarian and craft-based work/life model, the vast majority of us no longer controlled the price for our product (and therefor when and how much we worked), but instead exchanged increasingly long, non-negotiable blocks of our time for a wage. And as more and more of this finite time was allotted to functionary, servile, wage-based work, we steadily lost the ability to derive value out of unpaid activities pursued for their own sake. In other words, we began losing our ability to live meaningfully outside our work, both practically (in terms of time) and philosophically (in terms of desire). There increasingly became fewer and fewer alternatives to a life based on work and work alone, because we somehow convinced ourselves that a life of endless, compulsory work – even if tedious, monotonous, or otherwise drab – was morally good, and a life well-lived.
Leisure also began disappearing because of its negative reputation in America, especially from a historical perspective. Although the leisure class “contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization” through the development of the arts and sciences, literature and philosophy, and the refinement of social relations, it did so on the shoulders of an oppressed and often enslaved working class, holding “advantages for which there was no basis in social justice.”[2] Leisure, as a result, became attached to aristocracy, enslavement, and entitlement.
At no other point in human history has time been as feared as it is today. Bertrand Russell was right in stating that this, in so far as it is true in the modern world, “is a condemnation of our civilization.”
An alternative life philosophy exists, though. Writers, poets, artists, philosophers, and politicians have talked about “elevating everydayness” with the do-it-yourself creations of “democratic artists and artisans.” They’ve argued for replacing our passive consumption of paid entertainment with an age of “ordinary excellence” for all, allowing for the collective practice of leisurely pursuits in realms such as music, theater, or art, areas traditionally considered the “preserve of the few.”2 And they outlined how, with a heightened focus on how to live, rather than how to make a living, we might begin again to “redeem” our time with active, freely chosen intellectual, social, or cultural occupations aligned with a “higher mode of existence”, activities which from a distance may very well look like vigorous work, but are freely chosen and therefore autotelic, serving as their own reward.
Furthermore, as a result of the pandemic, entire generations have done away with the cult of “workism”, a trend which describes the replacement of community and religious involvement with rising work hours and career prioritization, or the belief that “work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization.” Terms such as the “Great Resignation”, the “Great Reshuffling”, and “Quiet Quitting” illustrated a deluge of workers seeking to take advantage of the disruption to FDR’s “Full-Time” nine to five, forty-hour work week for something that felt more healthy, meaningful and empowering, or to pursue pet projects on the side while doing the bare minimum in their primary, salaried role. This past year, for example, Washington University researchers as well Census Bureau data concluded that since the pandemic in 2019, many Americans actually began working less, reversing a 30-year trend.
And the financial independence movement, now known as “FIRE” (financial independence, retire early), has morphed from a relatively obscure, quasi-socialist hippy movement into a mainstream goal and lifestyle for entire generations. Consumerism, once sold to the public as an act of patriotism and both a benefit and duty of living in the land of the free, is now considered to be a form of enslavement. Thrift is reemerging as the true path to liberation.
This shift should not be ignored. The use of free time, historically described as leisure, is one of the most important indicators of a culture’s condition, especially America’s condition, because it is about self-actualization in environments free of external constraints, which has historically been a core component of freedom in America. John Maynard Keynes foresaw this as our “permanent problem – how to use [our] freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy [our] leisure, which science and compound interest have won for [us], to live wisely and agreeably and well.” To use leisure rightly, noted Aristotle, is indeed the basis of the free man’s whole life.
If we don’t know what to do with our leisure – if we don’t know how to occupy it, work it, or use it rightly – or if we prefer compulsory, paid obligations and passive, digital distractions in its place – we are essentially admitting that we are uncomfortable with our most prized possession, that of freedom, and incapable of exercising its most direct corollary, that of free choice.
We are often promised that hours of commuting time will be saved with self-driving cars, or that commuting, altogether, may vanish as remote work becomes increasingly normalized. And artificial intelligence, some predict, will reduce our work week to three days, or cut the eight-hour work day in half.
These trends, and many others, beg the question: what will we do – and how should we live – in a world with more time?