Another variable contributing to the problem of compulsive overconsumption
is the growing amount of leisure time we have today, and with it the ensuing
boredom.
The
mechanization of agriculture, manufacturing, domestic chores, and
many other previously time-consuming, labor-intensive jobs has reduced the
number of hours per day people spend working, leaving more time for
leisure.
A typical day for the average laborer in the United States just before the
Civil War (1861–1865), whether
in agriculture or industry, consisted of
working ten to twelve hours a day, six and a half days per week, fifty-one
weeks per year, with no more than two hours a day spent on leisure activity.
Some workers, often immigrant women,
worked thirteen hours a day, six
days a week. Others labored in slavery.
By contrast, the amount of leisure time in the United States today increased
by 5.1 hours per week between 1965 and 2003, an additional 270 leisure
hours per year. By 2040, the number of leisure hours in a typical day in the
United States is projected to be 7.2 hours, with just 3.8 hours of daily work.
The numbers for other high-income countries are similar.
Leisure time in the United States differs by education and socioeconomic
status, but not in the way you might think.
In 1965, both the less educated and more educated in the United States
enjoyed about the same amount of leisure time. Today, adults living in the US
without a high school diploma have 42 percent more leisure time than adults
with a bachelor’s degree or higher, with the biggest differences in leisure
time occurring during weekday hours.
This is due in large part to
underemployment among those without a college degree.
Dopamine consumption is not just a way to fill the hours not spent working.
It has also become a reason why people are not participating in the
workforce.
Economist Mark Aguiar and his colleagues wrote in an article aptly titled
“Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” “Younger men, ages
21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years
than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men
distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational
computer activities.”
Writer Eric J. Iannelli briefly alluded to his own history of addiction as
follows:
Years ago, in what now seems like another life, a friend said to me,
“Your entire existence can be reduced to a three-part cycle. One: Get
fucked up. Two: Fuck up. Three: Damage control.” We hadn’t known
each
other very long, probably two months at most, and yet he had
already witnessed enough of my regular blackout drinking, just one of
the more obvious manifestations of addiction’s self-perpetuating
vortex, to have got my number. With a wry smile, he went on to
hypothesize more generally—and,
I suspect, only half-jokingly—that
addicts are bored or frustrated problem-solvers who instinctively
contrive Houdini-like situations from which to disentangle themselves
when no other challenge happens to present itself. The drug becomes
the reward when they succeed and the consolation prize when they fail.
—
When I first met Muhammad, he was a river of words. His tongue could
barely keep up with his brain, which was teeming with ideas.
“I think I may have a little addiction problem,” he said. I liked him
immediately.
In flawless English with
a slight Middle Eastern accent, he told me his
story.
He came to the United States from the Middle East in 2007 to study
undergraduate math and engineering. In his home country, drug use of any
kind risked harsh punishment.
After arriving in the United States, it was liberating for him to be able to
use drugs recreationally without fear. To begin,
he restricted drug and
alcohol use to the weekends, but within the year, he was smoking cannabis
daily and could see that his grades and his friendships suffered as a result.
He told himself,
I’m not going to smoke again until I complete my
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