very busy

[excerpt, Waiting for the Weekend / Rybczynski]---------------- Walter Lippmann's 1930 article in Woman's Home Companion entitled "Free Time and Extra Money" articulated "the problem of leisure."  He warned that leisure offered the individual difficult choices, choices for which a work-oriented society such as America had not prepared him. 

{A man I work with said once, after a three- or four-day break, "The more time off you have, the more money you spend."}

Lippmann was concerned that if people didn't make creative use of their free time, it would be squandered on mass entertainments and commercial amusements.  His view spawned many books and articles of popular sociology with titles such as The Challenge of Leisure, The Threat of Leisure, and even The Menace of Leisure.

...In Work Without End, Benjamin K. Hunnicutt describes how...the shorter workday had eventually, and often reluctantly, been accepted by management; one reason was that studies had shown how production increased when workers had longer daily breaks and were less tired.

The same did not apply, however, to the weekend.  "Having Saturdays off," Hunnicutt observes, "was seen to offer the worker leisure -- the opportunity to become increasingly free from the job to do other things."  And if these "other things" were not good for him, then it was only proper that he should be kept in the workplace, and out of trouble.

{!  These days some folks like to say the word "nanny-state" -- sounds like back in the day they had "nanny industry"...?  The discussion of people being "free from the job to do other things"  made me think of the day one worker "called-in", not "Sick," but rather "Very busy,"  causing his supervisor to murmur, with perfunctory tolerance / annoyance, "I'll very-busy him. ..."}

...There were different views as to what people should do with this newfound freedom.  Some economists hoped the extra free time would spur consumption of leisure goods and stimulate the stagnant economy. 

{"The more time off you have, the more money you spend."}

Middle-class social reformers saw an opportunity for a program of national physical and intellectual self-improvement.  That was the message of a book called A Guide to Civilized Loafing, written by H.A. Overstreet in 1934.  Despite the title, which in later editions was changed to the more seemly A Guide to Civilized Leisure, the author's view was that free time was an opportunity, and the book described a daunting array of free-time activities, from amateur drama to volunteer work.  Overstreet was prescient in some of his recommendations, like bicycling and hiking, although other of his enthusiasms -- playing the gong, for example -- have yet to catch on.
-------------------- [end excerpt]

{Waiting for the Weekend,
by Witold Rybczynski.  Copyright, 1991.
Viking Penguin, New York.}

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