The Myth Of Busyness

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Working less

If we ever want to reach a workless society — or at least one where we work less — it won’t do to rely on dispassionate historical or technological forces to bring it about.

Instead, we’ll have to get it for ourselves.

The status shift

Busyness proselytizers suggest that Thorstein Veblen’s fin de siècle theory of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby the moneyed class establishes its status through ostentatious spending, has reversed itself: that prestige now derives from public displays of personal industriousness, not empty extravagance.

We take on more

New convenience technologies have never resulted in more leisure time.
When we reach each new Utopia we're neither closer nor further from a true life of leisure. Rather than offload work, we choose equilibrium, absorbing our gains so as to take on more.