"Take 30 minutes out of your day every day, just for yourself." That new chestnut.
It's a common "stress-busting" tip. It's the sort of advice you get in those unbearably chipper "lifestyle" magazines and "health and wellness" newsletters. You know, the rags with articles that assume you can't figure out which vegetables are the brightly colored ones.
When it's not the Great New Diet of the day or the Tip That Will Save/Change Your Life, it's always "5 ways" to do this, the "top ten" something-or-others, or "50 Wild New Sex Positions to Drive Him Bonkers" (well, if it's Cosmopolitan). The copy never rises above the sixth-grade reading level. I've written some of this stuff myself, professionally. (Not for Cosmo.) Reading this stuff, you'd think you could breeze through diabetes or follow a bullet list to nirvana.
Americans love this stuff. It's the Cliffs Notes of self-help. Short, easily digestible, yet insubstantial, we're left coming back for more. When January's diet fails—even though Sheila Lost 44 Pounds!—we move on to February's. Because look—Anne Lost 37 Pounds and Feels Great! Our franks'n'beans nation is exhorted to zealously incorporate the latest Miracle Food into meals like we're in Kitchen Stadium—"The secret ingredient is: KIWIFRUIT!!!"
We often don't follow the given advice, and then buy more, very similar advice with different titles—which we will also ignore. It's infotainment, padded with liberal amounts of bullshit, whose primary value lies in the glow of anticipating an accomplishment—"I will lose those 30 pounds, dammit!" When the accomplishment is not forthcoming, we turn the page. Oh! I can apply Feng Shui to my cubicle at work! I'm on the Path to Wellness!™
It's the same stuff over and over, except where it's different—and not by much. In their publishers' defense, the flood of near-dreck is a reflection of something fundamental about us as animals. To bone up on human nature, just reconnoiter the average supermarket checkout aisle. Food, sleep, sex, and wasting time reading junk about food, sleep, and sex. Rinse and repeat.
Those perennial issues, folded together with 2 cups of other problems, a teaspoon of vice and a dash of poor coping skills, and stewed in your overheated brain for 16 hours a day, make a nice heaping batch of stress. Serves 4. And so the mags give us an endless supply of snappy paragraphs and time-tested tips on stress, dealing with stress, coping with stress, reducing stress, and not causing stress. It would be nice if they were having some effect, instead of stressing us out over stress reduction while we get fat on faux diet plans.
Just look at the statement up top. Think about it for a moment. If they're giving out advice that says one should take 30 minutes out of one's day for one's own benefit, that implies that umpteen millions of Americans aren't currently doing that. It implies that vast numbers of people don't have half an hour—one forty-eighth—of the day to spare.
How overbooked does one have to be? Must one always be at the beck and call of others (who themselves are at the beck and call of still others...)? Are relaxation, downtime, recharging and introspection really values for nothing in our society? Is that why it seems that everyone's so harried and surly and only out for themselves—because they're desperate to get everything out of the way and perhaps have a tranquil two or three minutes brushing our teeth just before bed? (You're not going to help your fellow man when you're in a kick-the-dog mood. Or be nice to your kids. Or...)
It comes down to this: What's the point of being out of the office if you're still going to feel like you're there, watching the clock, racing to appointments, kowtowing to every demand?
Healthy people are now turning to drugs to keep them awake for as long as 48 hours at a stretch. Some say we're heading for a 24-hour lifestyle. Are we just going to fill that up with more commitments, responsibilities, and structure, structure, structure? What's the point of having more time to spend if you never spend it on anything you actually like to do?
Sound like a recipe for more living, yet less life, to you? It sure does to me. But you can bet it will make some powerful person very, very rich, and that seems to be enough justification for anything these days. If it's just like work to be home, might as well keep working, right? Because that's what it will be.
I recall being in school in the 80s, using lots of nice 1950s textbooks (the schools have always been underfunded). The science and social studies books often had a page or chapter of futurism, where they speculate on the wondrous things that postwar technological breakthroughs would bring. It was some gee-whiz pablum for the little ones. I loved it myself.
Robots and computers were favorite topics, written in that breezy style of the insubstantial magazines of the day (which were really just wordier and less-coarse versions of our modern supermarket rags). They'd speak of how these marvels would do our work for us, and leave us all with lots of leisure time. The need for supporting oneself was never mentioned, leaving one to assume that we would be paid for the robots who are doing our work for us--sort of as if we would be owning the robots. It was an irresistible and utopian sales pitch. Like our lifestyle publications, it didn't feel like a sales pitch, because it wasn't about a discrete, single product. It was about a vision of great possibility. I bought it, and so did society.
But what did we get? Not fucking nirvana, that's for sure.
Like with those cheesy magazines, we got bullshit. Opposite world. Bait and switch. Like stress-busting that causes stress, diets that cause weight gain, and peace that means war, we got free time that means more work.
The futurists of the past were right about robots and computers doing lots of our toil for us. But the forgot to mention that with the work being done by machine, the people—the workers—are often no longer necessary. And when they are, they're doing staggering amounts of work, coordinating the activities of the machines that replace hundreds of people. Those replaced persons are the ones with all that leisure time, except they need to spend it trying to find money, because they're unemployed. (I'm not saying no one should work. I'm in favor of work-life balance that's balanced. We all spend more time with the boss than the family...)
No surprise that they didn't sell the future to us that way. So are we going to buy it when they tell us that staying awake for long periods unnaturally is finally going to provide us with that time to live, enjoy our relationships, travel, relax, recharge, etc.? Because it won't. Can you imagine the 20-hour workday? And note that such profound alterations of sleep patterns are bound to have as-yet-undiscovered long-term effects on cognition and learning--and likely much more than that.
So are we going to wreck our health just for the chance to fill our days with more work, more structure and more stress? It might be worth it to gain that half hour to spare.