My Old Blog

After a moment of pause I’ve decided not to continue the story of my conversation with the “simple living” lady, but instead summarize my conversation with Arlie Hochschild from last week and the one I had with John De Graaf today. (John De Graaf is the author of the bestselling book Affluenza and national coordinator for the movement to “Fight Overwork and Time Poverty in America”.

It isn’t often you get to talk to such “important” people. They don’t exactly list their numbers in the phone book. But a well written letter, some persistence, luck, and a healthy dose of pity/curiosity on the part of the author can sometimes get you an audience.

Arlie is an expert on the failure of family against the backdrop of overworked parents. I came upon her research quite by accident, but remained interested because she studies the effects of what happened in my family: Father goes to work before child gets up for school, comes home in time to fall asleep on the sofa watching the news, and wakes up in time to see that the kids are grown and off to college to repeat the same mistakes they just made. I won’t report the conversation with Arlie as it went much the same as the one with Mr. De Graaf.

John De Graaf is an expert on time poverty and consumerism. I asked him (and Arlie) a question that is often asked of me when I make various points about the practice of pursuing activities that undermine the very aim they seek to achieve in the pursuit.

To translate:

If one gets a job to provide for a family but the act of job itself causes the breakdown of the family…what purpose is the job serving?

If you buy a cell phone, can’t live without your PDA, eat out instead of cook at home, use 6 minute abs, read magazines with bullet point summaries and have assistants pick up your dry cleaning all in an effort to save time, yet still find yourself stressed and overscheduled….perhaps it is the lifestyle itself and not your inability to schedule it. The more time saving schemes you pursue, the less time you will have.

If money lets you do cool things then more money should let you do more cool things. But what happens when you work so much to get the money that you don’t have the time or energy to do the cool things you set out to get the money for in the beginning?

Anyway, I often point out how work has a tendency to beget more work and harms the very life you began your work to provide for in the first place.

Here is the response I often get: “I agree it seems a little odd how work and stuff run our lives, but in the end this is a free country. People are choosing to work this much, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.”

My common response: “People aren’t choosing it, because not all options are available.” People’s expecations of what should be available is clouded by the status quo and powerful folks with a self-interest in perpetuating it. The economy is like a democracy with votes allocated on the basis of wealth instead of one vote per person.

A recent study by economist Edward Wolff of NYU finds 40% of the nation’s wealth is held by the top 1% of the population. The top 1 percent of households now have more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent. They can have any system they like, including one where we all work ourselves to death. Our outlet is government, where we have a voice, not the free market, where our voice is largely drowned out by those with the most votes (money). We are not speaking with one voice. I do not believe it is a conspiracy by the rich. It is simply that the wealthy are organized, Labor is not.

In a recent survey by Fleet Bank, 64 percent of U.S. workers said they would rather have more time than more money. Why isn’t that happening?

That was my question to John De Graaf and he gave the answer that I often give: The free market is failing, just as it failed at the turn of the century during the Industrial Revolution when we passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which saved us all from sweat shop conditions, embarrassing pay, and 90 hour work weeks.

If the American worker is becoming ever more productive, why are we working more? If we make more in less time than we used to, shouldn’t we take some of those productivity gains in extra time, instead of more money?

If we had frozen real wages at their 1969 levels and taken all productivity gains as a reduction in work hours (instead of more money), we would be working only a little more than 20 hours a week. I wasn’t alive in 1969, but I imagine life wasn’t unbearable….and how much more bearable it would be if we only worked 20 hours a week??

I would like to ask the question to your guys, my readers: Most people would agree money doesn’t buy happiness. Most people report they would trade less pay for more time. Why then are we working more than ever? Are we really choosing it?

I like the idea of simple living. It means consuming what is needed and trading more stuff for more free time. Things cost money, but money costs time…so instead of buying that 50 dollar sweater you could instead trade that for 3 extra hours with friends or family….since that is approximately how much time it would take to earn the money. If you count after tax dollars to buy the sweater, which you should, it would be more like 4 or 5 hours. Which would you prefer: 4.5 hours of free time, or an extra sweater?

Well there is an organization that advocates simple living as alternative to consumerism and a way to get back to more human values, instead of market values. I don’t think there is much chance of it ever taking off. It is only really attractive to a small minority who already favors leisure and/or harbors some latent resentment of the current system.

But I am interested anyway, so I called a lady who had signed up to be a local representative here in Greenville. I want to talk to people who have actually tried to scale back their lifestyles.

Personally, I see several major obstacles to “simple living” that would make it almost unfeasible for most people with normal aspirations. The most important is that it forces you to drop out of normal society. You cannot participate in the conversations about houses and cars, nor can you go out to dinner and bars to drop 80 bucks a night. You won’t be able to afford to live near those that would be your social and intellectual equals. At Christmas you wouldn’t be able to give the thousands of dollars in gifts that most people give. You would have plenty of free time to spend with your friends and family, but since they work all the time, it would still be difficult to coordinate schedules since most of their free time is spend in money spending activities such as expensive dinners or lavish vacations…which you couldn’t do. Your children would not be afforded the same opportunities as you had. Your decision to scale back would be forced onto your children.

In short, “Simple Living” is alienating and could be construed as exile from society, not an escape from conspicuous spending. If you are prepared to leave, be sure of your next best alternative as returning is hard to do. Also be prepared to leave for good as keeping your hand in both cookie jars leaves you realizing both alternatives poorly instead of having the best of both worlds.

So the lady was an ex-CPA who worked for twenty years and raised 3 kids before she went on to “simple living”. Her husband still works. I was highly unimpressed as she had not overcome any of the objections I raised above, but simply chosen not to buy the new Mercedes every few years or vacation in the Hamptons for the summer. She was quite proud of herself anyway, and I applaud her for the effort, which seemed sincere.

Being an accountant gave her a good head for business and we had a long conversation about the escalating importance of work and the toll it is taking on our lives. It is amazing that nearly any discussion executed well enough always ends in the same stalemate: it comes down to a question of values.

It is horribly difficult to prove anything, even appeals to history can be said to represent single data points, not trends, or to be misrepresentative because the situation was not analogous.

Statistics are often employed as proof as well, but they depend on the way the survey was structured, how the questions were asked, to whom they were asked, and how the numbers were analyzed. They give off an air of empirical science, but are largely just value judgments repackaged in numerical form. If you torture the numbers long enough, they’ll say anything you want them to. Just ask Enron.

Take this data for instance: While our GDP is skyrocketing, poverty levels have remained nearly constant. The largest bulk of the gains in wealth over the last 20 years has gone to the rich. Income inequality is the highest it has been since before WWII. These are all facts, undeniable.

I can even throw in some statistics to back it up if I feel like finding the data on my computer…but I don’t. Actually I’ll throw in one chart just to make it seem more scientific:

This kind of information could really sour one on the economy and the structure of our society. It could be used by politicians, by labor unions…by anyone that stands to gain from it. But it doesn’t prove anything…though I often quote statistics like this myself. Data is never scientific; people pick the facts they want, the ones that back up what they believe. If they don’t find the right facts, they keep looking until they do.

Consider this alternative view: The reason the lower income brackets are not rising as fast as the higher ones is immigration. Through the 1980s and 1990s, America accepted more than a million legal immigrants annually – for each of the last twenty years the US has accepted more legal immigrants than all other nations of the world combined, along with a huge influx of illegals, estimated at 8 million currently within our borders.

The result is that today 11 percent of the US population is foreign-born, the highest proportion since the 1930s. Immigrants start at the bottom of the bell curve, often below the poverty level and keep blue collar wages from rising because the low-skilled labor pool is kept artificially plentiful by immigration.

Does this explain all of the rising income inequality in the US?? The source from which I got those stats (a book I’m reading called “The Progress Paradox”) says largely yes.

And I am sure it explains some of it, especially the persistence of poverty. Although no number of immigrants can explain the ballooning of CEO pay:
All across Europe it never exceeds 40 times the pay of the average worker.

Anyway, the short moral to this long story is this: don’t listen to all these “experts”. There certainly are experts in this world, but it is so hard to tell the difference between someone who is very well-informed on a subject and someone who is very well-informed and has an agenda to promote…..that I hesitate to believe what any of them say.

I think I’ll stop here since this post has dragged on long enough. Next time I’ll continue with the specifics of our conversation, how it came down to value judgments and how it contrasted with a similar conversation I had with Arlie Hochschild yesterday. She is a leading researcher at UC Berkeley on the work/life and family movements.

It has come to my attention that I have not been updating my website very much at all during the last few weeks.

Part of that is because of the holidays and the rest of it is due to the fact that I started seeing a girl I met at a networking function. It seems I am better at getting a date than at getting a job. Most of the time that before was spent at my computer in the evenings is now spent with her.

I am not implying that I now don’t have time…after all I am unemployed. I have actually amassed an amazing and frightening amount of data about all my favorite subjects. I feel like a walking database of labor, tax, health and wage statistics. I joked the other day with my sister that if I decided to go back to get a PhD in economics I would already have most of the research for my thesis done before the first day of class.

And it isn’t that I’ve suddenly decided that my readers should no longer be burdened by my obsession. It is just that I am now gathering new material faster than I can organize the old material to be published….which in turn makes it even harder to organize. So I promise to continue to post yummy tidbits about how much our economy is supposedly doing for us.

Do I have any New Year’s Resolutions? Sure. I resolve in the next year to continue to clarify what I believe and either do something about it or move to some place that shares my views. I resolve not to sell myself into wage slavery and to never work a job that does not in some way express who I am as a person. I resolve to put my family and friends above all else. I do not resolve to lose any weight, nor eat healthier, nor quit drinking, nor pursue any other silly promises that won’t last the week.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!!

I spent the holidays with family mostly. The presents both given and received were great. The food was abundant and delicious. I am thankful that everyone has remained relatively healthy another year…even my 17 year old dog. And finally, I am happy for the time together and also happy that it only comes once a year.

Overall life during the holidays has been slow and enjoyable, if a little boring…much like life not during the holidays. I got some nice stuff for Christmas even though I didn’t ask for anything. I have everything I need and more materially.

I just really have nothing to say right now. I think I’ll go watch Saturday Night Live.

I’ve been sick the last few days with a head cold that I always get in December. I’ve often wondered if perhaps I’m allergic to Christmas trees or dust from the decorations in the attic. The only times in recent memory that I’ve escaped my Christmas time head cold were those when I came home from travelling.

Anyway, the best way to get rid of congestion is to exercise. It comes back afterwards, but for a few hours you feel all better.

Some folks I know asked me to play for their basketball team last night. I figure that in a not so distant future I will be tempted to talk about how good I used to be. You know that conversation when older people say they “used to” be able to do this or that? I never much liked it. I “used to” wet the bed. Am I supposed to give them a lollipop for what they can no longer do?

I am as good as I ever was, probably better. I didn’t “used to” be able to do anything I can do right now, though I suffer more aches and pains that I did at 18.

When is that desire to be better not a wish for improvement but an inability to let go of the past? After all, one cannot be always better at everything ad infinitum. One must reach a peak.

And I think I’ve reached mine. I’m happy to say it was very late for me. I am approaching 30 and I’m arguably in the best shape of my life.

The game went well. We won and I poured in 28 points in a short game. If it had been an NBA length game and I’d continued to score at the same pace (not likely), I’d have scored 50. It is fun.

That feeling, the one where we climb the beanstalk and rescue the princess, is one I wish we all felt more often. We forget about it as we get older and it makes us dull…unwilling to risk because we’ve forgotten the reward. Or maybe we don’t forget as we get older, but the forgetting makes us older.

I know I’ve given up a lot to live my life. I wake up everday to the trades I’ve made. I occasionally envy others for what they’ve been able to build and for their ability to be satisfied with it….an ability I fear I lack.

And so I often wonder what I’ve earned by prolonging this part of my life, the one where you are young and all the possibility in world still lies before you, where you are still as good as you’ll ever be at everything you’ve ever done.

With a smile I can say I feel it is its own reward.

Dear Readers:

I have been lazy about writing lately. Corina complained that my posts are too long anyway. I contend that her attention span is too short.

Greenville is much the same as it ever was. I am still looking for work and have a few things on the horizon, but it is useless to talk about it until something actually happens.

I have twice written about obesity in this journal, both times as a response to Mr. BigFatBlog who maintains a website promoting fat acceptance.

He wrote me again today. The exchange is posted in the Comments section of these two posts: 02/08/03 and 02/26/03. The rest of today’s entry is better understood if you’ve read the other two, but it isn’t absolutely necessary.

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I have always meant to write a piece about the obesity epidemic in the US. Everyone knows I have been to a lot of countries and I can easily say Americans are noticeably fatter than the rest of the world…although other countries are catching up.

Here is my opinion as to why we are so fat and why the rest of the planet will become more so in the coming years unless something is done. I wrote this email to Paul today. He maintains bigfatblog.com.

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Paul,

Everyone has that idea for which they are willing to go down with the ship. This seems to be yours.

You skill with rhetoric is admirable. You seem to have well developed opinions and you express them well…..but no amount of skill will persuade the world that fat is ok. None. Give it up. If this is the idea for which you are willing to go down with the ship….then you just bought your ticket to the bottom.

In fact, the fatter the general population gets, the more desirable it will be to be thin.

Can you change the opinion of the world? I don’t think so, but you are welcome to try.

I stand by the statement that your time is much better served in losing weight than in trying to shift world views.

I am sure you’ve tried. You say diets don’t work. I agree, the research is extremely clear on that point.

But the fact is that our caloric intake has not changed much in the past 50 years. Yet we are much fatter.

The difference is in our lifestyles. 50 years ago over 90% of folks worked in manufacturing or agriculture. These jobs required manual effort and burned calories. Kids played outside because there was literally nothing else to do.

Now 70% of the economy is in the service sector. We do nothing at work more physical than walk to the bathroom. Kids play video games and chat online. Our lifestyle no longer burns calories.

I am not much into placing blame, but the epidemic of obesity and the myriad of health and social problems that come with it has been caused by the monetization of America….and the time poverty that comes with it.

40% of the US labor force works 50 hours or more a week. We work more than any other industrialized country in the world: on average 9 weeks longer per year than Western Europe.

We’re too tired at the end of the day to take exercise and our jobs no longer require us to do anything but punch keys or answer a phone. We went from 8 hours of manual labor per day to 10 hours of sitting on our butts at an office. No wonder we are fat.

And as for children, they used to play outside. But playing outside is cheap. It doesn’t cost anything to go play catch with a friend.

At some point marketing identified kids as a demographic with disposable income and pushed them an endless stream of diversions that compete with outside play. These products simply didn’t exist in the past.

Their parents buy them the crap because they feel guilty about not spending enough time with their kids because they’re at work all day. The fact is they have the money to spend on useless diversions, but not the time to make sure their kids live a healthy lifestyle. In many Western European nations it is illegal to advertise to children.

In short, forget changing world opinion and forget diets. Go join a basketball league or a runners club….if you can find the time to do it.

If you trade all the time you spend defending fatness with time spent exercising, you’d find you no longer needed to make such a defense.

If you prefer your current lifestyle, by all means, continue it…and I will continue to enjoy your website =)

Happy Holidays,

Elliott Dykes

Lets do some math:

40% of the US labor force works 50 hours or more a week. American men average 49.4 hours a week on the job. As I’ve stated before, the United States works more than any other industrialized country in the world: on average 9 weeks longer per year than Western Europe. We passed Japan in the mid-1990s. The Japanese work so much they have a word for death by overwork: Karoshi.

And yet we proudly work more than they do. I often hear it when I ask people how they are: “Busy,'” they say. As if “busy” has replaced “good” or “fine” as a positive mental state.

People are happy with themselves when they have to check their calender for availability…..and find a spot a week or more out. Our friends are no longer the people we spend the most time with, but the ones who most understand why we don’t have the time to spend.

So here comes the math part:

50 hours a week is 10 hours a day.
The average work commute is 72 minutes a day.
Let’s say eating takes up 1.5 hours. I think that is a fair estimate.
We are now at 12.75 hours in a day.
Lets sleep for 8 hours (wishful thinking).
We are now at 20.75 hours in a day….lets round it off to 21 hours.

You now have 3 hours to brush your teeth, take a shower, shave, pay bills, make phone calls, read a book, plan a vacation, mow the lawn, iron your clothes, shop for a present, fix the grill, walk the dog, read the mail, shop for new insurance, do your taxes, watch some TV, and take a shit. The fact is those 3 hours are easily eaten up just maintaining your life.

And now you are out of time. 24 hours is gone.

You still haven’t relaxed, spoken to your children at all, or spent a second with your wife. Nor have you volunteered in the community, spent time with any of your friends or extended family, gone to church, or gotten a minute of exercise.

I am a bit of an environmentalist. I like it when the tree-huggers point out that you can’t just keep taking from the Earth. The Earth is a limited resource. It will run out if we don’t allow it to replenish. It is common knowledge and, while we don’t act in accordance, at least we acknowledge the fact.

Time is also a limited resource. There are only 24 hours in a day. To me it is common sense, but somehow it is not common knowledge.

Work+Transit+Food+Sleep+Life Maintenance = about 24 hours. And you haven’t spent a minute with your kids, wife, family, friends, or, perhaps most importantly, with yourself. You haven’t gotten one lick of exercise or wasted the first minute daydreaming.

The only one of the necessary inputs that can be changed appreciably is sleep hours, but lack of sleep damages the very aims you are trying to accomplish by getting less of it. We are not robots.

All this while cell phones and email and the myriad of other productivity enhancing devices are said to save us time. Don’t do me any favors!! If they save me any more time I’ll be sleeping 3 hours a night and end up in therapy.

Where is all this time supposed to come from?

The Environmentalists have a whole movement behind them, trying to Save the Earth and the Whales and the Rainforest. It is a noble goal. Recycle, buy Organic stuff, give to Greenpeace….whatever floats your boat.

Where is the Save the People movement? The one where we acknowledge 25% of Americans took no vacation at all last year, that dual income families spend 12 minutes a day talking to each other, and that more work hours in industrial countries is directly related to increased rates of murder, rape, suidice, divorce, pollution and mental illness?

Not only is there no movement to take back our lives, but we seem at least superficially happy with being overscheduled.

“How’s it been going?”

“Aww….you know, just staying busy.”

I don’t believe we should delve too deeply into the subconscious. The inside of our head is a very slipperly slope…we may reach the bottom, but how then do we return?

Somewhere in the recesses of our head is the motivation for our actions. The serpent of our desires is always slithering around in there somewhere, lurking about, affecting our decisions.

We weigh pros and cons, mull about, converse with friends, dilligently research…and think we arrive at a “rational” decision.

But that snake in your head is making a mockery of you. It pushes you to weigh the pros as more important through the cons be more numerous, to mull about for the correct period of time, to converse with friends that reinforce what you want to believe, to research the idea that supports your subconscious desires.

I believe in free will mostly. I am free to write these words after all. They are not predetermined.

But if you put a rat in the middle of a tube with food at one end and nothing at the other, the rat will move towards the food. It assumes in its little rat head that it made a decision. (I am not a licensed rat psychologist.)

We see that the rat is simply responding to a food incentive, that it will always make the decision to go towards the food. In effect, it is not deciding, but responding to stimuli in the same way plants grow towards the light. The rat is not making a decision any more than the plant is……anymore than we are.

Rationality is what we use to justify the decisions we’ve already made…or have been made for us, depending on how you look at it.

Of course, this does have some bearing on my life otherwise I wouldn’t be thinking about it. The problem lies in the number of serpents. If there were just one, how easy then would it be to make a decision? The number of competing desires and the degree to which those desires disagree with each other can cause some serious dissonance.

It is truly a den of snakes in my head.

I read the Ten Pillars of Wisdom years ago. It is from that book that I take one of my favorite quotes:

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

I once visited Wadi Rum and Aqaba while living in Israel in 1997…or maybe it was 98. I went to Jordan to see Petra, which was in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Wadi Rum was far more impressive although it was semi-accidental that I went.

Lawrence of Arabia is a very long movie, split into two parts by an official intermission. I saw the first half years ago in Wadi Musa at the Petra Hostel, where I am sure they still show it nightly.

The second half I watched for the first time tonight. It is one of the most amazing stories I could ever conceive: that a man could lead an entire race of people, to which he didn’t belong, through sheer strength of will for no other reason than to feed an ego that he feared and a belief in himself that threatened always to swallow him up. And yet you knew his love of Arabia was real at the same time.

It is a similar story to that of Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness, yet not so allegorical. The story of T. E. Lawrence is true. Crazy.

Last I checked I am still human. Although we all love to maintain that we do not need external reinforcement of our opinions and lives, it is still nice when you get it.

A Mr. Frank Furedi has written a book, reviewed here, that restates much of what I have been screaming on this web site for over a year, using nearly identical language even.

I thought it particularly relevant because my last post touched on similar themes…albeit from a different angle.

Some of you may think, “What difference does it make?” My answer is that to me it makes a very big difference.

As a whole, these are the ideas that make up my life and I would like to see a future that is better than the present, one where our most treasured human values are still treasured.