The Industrial Revolution Was Supposed to Lead to Unlimited Free Time But Only Gave Us Smartphones and Endless Dopamine

Speaker 1 It's got here with another episode of the History Unplugged podcast. Free time is one of life's most important commodities, but often feels unfulfilled stuff with Netflix, doom scrolling, and other activities that make you feel like a dopamine slug once it's all over. But why is that? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to smartphone activities are a lot less affiliate. Despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both the scarcity of free time and disappointment in it. In this rebroadcast episode, I'm speaking to Gary Cross, author of Free Time, the History of an Elusive Ideal. We discussed a broad historical explanation of why affluent society doesn't afford more time away from work, why that time is unsatisfying. By the end of the 19th century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations will lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a rise in free time devoted to self development and social engagement. There would be more peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens, movie theaters and organized sports. How are all of these things hijacked and what can we do about it? Hope you enjoyed this discussion and one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors. Before exploring the modern idea free time, it'd be useful to contrast it with what came before. I've seen research that suggests the pre modern world had a surprisingly light work week. There's nothing in human DNA that required a 40 hour work week, and for a lot of human history, 15 hours of work a week was the standard. In the work schedule For a medieval peasant, for example, there'd be frequent feast days where you wouldn't work at all. If somebody was laboring, they would have a nap around the lunch hour or hours. So with that in mind, before we look at what happened in the age of industrialization, how would you characterize a typical person's work schedule and leisure time? Speaker 2 Well, all depends upon whether you're talking about before agriculture or after. Before the 15 hours might actually apply. After agriculture required more work, but it produced more goods and more reliable goods. But still productivity was so low that produced a kind of a curious relationship between work and free time. There were lots of periods in an Agricultural Society where there wasn't work because of the Dow season or the basic course of the planting season. The harvest required a lot of work, but there were lots of lull times for festivals as you mentioned, particularly in the winter, but also down times because of rainy days or the lack of equipment. What has happened in the modern world is that we found ways to make work much more continuous. And if you were one of the rich, of course you didn't have to labor, and so your work week was often virtually nil. And that produced a kind of a leisure culture that is very different from the modern one. It was episodic. It was seasonal for the working people and for the rich, of course. It was pretty much continuous. Speaker 1 I think for people who haven't studied this topic, they would imagine that in the pre modern world you would have to work all the time. They're assuming that anyone who wasn't a royal was a chattel slave and from when you woke up to when you slept you would be working. But anthropologist who've gone to traditional tribes observed that there was a lot of free time. There is a reality show on The History Channel called Alone where survival experts go off into the wilderness and try to survive as long as they can by themselves and what they find once they build their shelter and have a. Speaker 2 Good source of food. Speaker 1 Is that much of their day is basically spent in their cabin, out of the elements doing nothing, and they're shocked by this, that if they aren't starving, they're just basically sitting around and try not to expend as many calories as they can. With this in mind, what is your make of in your research what leisure culture worked like in the early modern era? Is this? Was it poems, culture, creation, people just ambling around? How do you describe this? Speaker 2 Well, it's often noted that people working people, people, even people who were serfs or even slaves in some cases, had a strong tendency to favor free time over more work. Even if you were a free peasant or a craftsperson, you tended not to fill up your entire day because there wasn't really much reward for producing more. Sometimes your salary went down. Sometimes there simply wasn't a market for additional products. And so this leisure ethic often LED kind of frustrated capitalist to figure out ways to find ways to get people to work more hours. One way was to reduce wages. Another way was to build factories that required that you'd be there at 6:00 in the morning and stay there till 6:00 or 7:00 at night. So a lot of intermittent free time was traditional. People sometimes didn't work on Mondays because they can feel like it and the raw materials they needed to get the job done hadn't arrived and they didn't really have to get the job done until Saturday. So often they would take off on Monday as well as Sunday. So this kind of work discipline that was required to get people to put in a 60 hour week or to work most of the days instead of of having festivals and having Saints days and the like, that was a really difficult thing. It took centuries to get people to adapt to that kind of work discipline. It was actually also true with the aristocracy or the rich generally was seen as something that a rich person worked, was something that a rich person disdained. And of course, it's really only with kind of early modern shifts, sort of modern kind of entrepreneurial middle class, upper middle class, that you get the work ethic in the rich. And even that came very slowly and never completely. Speaker 1 Our entire approach and conceptualization of time changes with industrialization. Now time is commodified. The nature of the relationship between work and productivity changes. There's a lot to consider here, so could you lay this all out for us? What changes with industrialization and our concept of time and free time? Speaker 2 Well, one thing the industrialization does is create the idea of a normal work day, maybe 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning to seven or six at night, and that it be continuous and uninterrupted. It minimizes sort of episodes of free time such as festivals, Christmas shifts from being 12 days to maybe one day. And many among certain elements in the Northeast or the US, for example, Christmas was even ignored. People worked on those days. So the idea of a kind of almost mechanical notion of time and and certainly intense work time became the norm. Sometimes the rich found ways of retiring early. Ben Franklin did. But the idea was in your most productive years, you were expected to work continuously and regularly and look at time as something that you had to kind of measure your productivity against. Getting more done per minute or per hour per day became a kind of a cardinal virtue. Speaker 1 Can you walk me through how this change played out? You know it about 250 years ago with the beginning of industrialization. This is when the switch happens. What does this look like on the ground? Are people now aware of time? They hear factory whistles. They have a concept of they begin at a particular hour when in the past, if they were working on a farm, they didn't really think in terms of hours. They thought more in terms of where the sun was in the sky. So what did this process look like in this change look like? Speaker 2 One thing is there are a lot more clocks. Watches appear that allow for self regulation of time. You know, you look at your watch, you can determine how much have I gotten done by 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning. There be big clocks in the front of factories that would tell you that you have to be there at a certain hour. If you don't get there, then you might lose a substantial sum of money that day, maybe half of your day's pay if you didn't get it through the factory dates at the right time. A much greater sense of the need for punctuality, I mean, and this of course runs across businesses as well, this idea of making meetings at a particular time. This requires a coordination of time. It led to the development of standardized time zones in the 1870s to cope with the need to coordinate time across distances. And so this, the whole idea of time becomes, you know, far more mechanical, I guess you'd call it, or much more tied to the number, the number of the hour of the day, 8:00, noon, 5:00 of all of that. Speaker 1 We have international Telegraph networks, so a news organization can think globally. And as you said, we have to have time zones to understand if we're dealing with live news on the other side of the planet, what time of day it is over there, leaving the origin of our wire services that we still call today in honor of that legacy with the commodification of time. Now there's also an understanding of free time. There's work time and then there's free time. And this is something distinct from leisure as you described before, the painting, the dancing, the culture making. How is free time different from leisure time? Speaker 2 Well, you know, using your definitions, one of the things that happens with industrialization is those old intermittent moments, maybe when the job slacks because of the lack of raw materials or markets or whatever. A lot of work tended to be seasonal before modern times. What you have instead is workers begin to look at free time Is time away from work, not within work. And they looked at free time as something that essentially becomes more private, less tied to say, communal festivals, which are more or less repressed in the early modern period. And So what you get is this idea of sort of binding periods after work and sometimes eventually on the weekend where you're totally free from the market, a boss or a kind of work process. And this of course leads to the whole idea of a kind of a free time built around the home and built around the family and built around personal choice. That you in your free time are free to do what you will, to take a line from a famous song about the 8 hour day. And that, of course, leads to a rejection of people living in the home of an employer. It makes it much more difficult to get people to become servants or workers who were on call at any time. When the day is over, people expect to be totally free of employment. Of course, some of that's being reversed now with the Internet and, you know, emails and whatnot. But for many years, the whole idea of free time was total freedom. Speaker 1 There's a sense as productivity increases with increased industrialization in the 19th century that free time would increase as well. Because productivity and total work hours are strongly LinkedIn the minds of people at the age of high industrialization, there are hopes that this is going to cause an increase in self development and social engagement and overall improve the human condition. Can you describe what this optimism looked like in the 19th century? Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, essentially, if you think about it, economists, you know, people like John Stuart Mill and and later economists, even John Maynard Keynes, the, you know, the famous English economist, they all kind of basically assumed that with increased productivity, there would be a kind of balanced choice between more goods and more free time. And people would, shall we say, optimize those choices. And as more goods became available, there would be a shift from wanting more things to wanting more free time for, as you say, self development and social engagement. And so the idea was that over a period when of assumed progress, and there was a lot of assumptions about unlimited progress in the 19th and early 20th century, that there would be an increasing choice that people would take for more free time as their material needs for housing and warmth and food and whatnot were met. Speaker 1 We'll look at how well these hopes were met or not met, but in the 20th century, we see the development of the entertainment industrial complex, modern sports out of the origin, this time amusement parks, movie theaters, and they really grow after the Second World War. Tell me about the growth of these industries and how they link to industrialization and the growth of free time. Hey, everyone, Scott here. We're going to take a short break for a word from our sponsors. Speaker 2 Well, in early industrialization, the total focus was on producing, let's call them capital goods, iron, you know, maybe even textiles and stuff like that. By the end of the 19th century, there's an awareness that there and there's a sufficient what meeting of those basic needs that you can see the development of a more diverse consumer and entertainment economy and this leads to the development of all sorts of progress. I tend to think they start at the beginning of the 20th century, like bonographs, movies and but also sort of group entertainments like amusement parks and popular theater. And it leads to astonishingly large and important industries built around essentially the fast moving music industry. Tin Pan Alley that leads to the hit song that is so much a part of, of modern culture and the celebrity that went with it. And all of that was something that, I mean, I, my guess is that Mill didn't really expect. I mean, I think there was this kind of common notion that when these sort of material expectations were met for clothing and basic housing and food and so forth, there would be a shift toward this older idea of contemplation and self development in social direct social engagement. But these new entertainment industries produced a really very different kind of free time than had earlier been expected. In my book, I sort of argue that there is a kind of a commercialization of the carnival that we see in the mass crowds that go to Coney Island or the crowds that participate in the mass culture of movies and phonographs and later radio and television. That this older, just sort of genteel idea of of free time just didn't have a means to either explain very well it it seemed to me, or to cope with or address. Speaker 1 It's sad to look at the hopes of what more free time could produce versus what has been produced. The most utopian idea of free time is probably the original Star Trek or Star Trek The Next Generation. That humanity is going to focus on its self development and reach its highest ideals leading to the United Federation of planets and a post scarcity utopia. Versus what did happen where you described it as this large carnival or an entertainment industrial complex that seemed to always push to a lowest common denominator. And with smartphones, even though the power of the Apollo mission is in everyone's hands, what that has led to is the hijacking of our dopamine system and doom scrolling and looking for hundreds of micro dopamine hits a day, leading to all sorts of developmental problems that we're only just beginning to understand what the mass proliferation of smartphones. So for what you saw in the 20th and 21st century, is free time doomed to a lowest common denominator where we're slaves to whatever brings us the most dopamine? Speaker 2 Well, I'm not sure of that, but it's really difficult to come up with this kind of alternative, this utopian idea that, you know, that you just mentioned. You know, when you have a whole economy that is based upon vastness, you know, the rapid turnover of goods, the more intense experience and then the more convenient access to them, they kind of make displace these older ideals, which require refinement, they require time, They require skill and the light. I mean, and, you know, I'm a guy who's read thousands of books, but, you know, I've been enslaved to the cell phone as much as well, maybe not quite as much as as others. It's an extraordinarily powerful trend that we've seen across the 20th century in the development of a very fast style consumerism. And this what I call funneled consumerism, where instead of developing integral self built around refinements and developments and the like, we have a culture that is based on upon a series of choices that we make. But like through the cell phone that are essentially very ephemeral, produces a kind of a serial self instead of a kind of knit together and foundational self. And at the same time, instead of getting social engagement as people are traditionally unexpected at which would be in direct involvement with other people in dialogue and, you know, social involvement and cultural involvement, we get the other in. And three, this kind of World Wide Web that is immense. It's far more engaging than talking to your neighbor. But on the other side, it's highly, it's very ephemeral and it's in some ways it actually produces loneliness. So, you know, there are lots of things that get in the way of those earlier ideals of the slow and the free time. And the self developmental and the social engaged free time and my guess is that for most people that change is going to be really hard to avoid or to reverse. I see signs of it in the fact that people, well, you know, even small things like people who, you know, are deeply engaged in the Internet still go to conventions, you know, like cosplay conventions or even the Comic Con conventions out in out in San Diego. I mean, these, you know, these are highly commercialized, but they do suggest that people have a kind of a longing for real contact instead of just simply, you know, in and through the Internet. You know, I see it too. And things like the slow food movements and at times other efforts to actually have personal exchanges with people. You know, I go out on, I walk walking paths every day and I encounter 5 or 6 people who will want to say hello. And if you engage, maybe it's small talk, but it's not always that small, you know? So I mean, I think that these trends are real and they're pretty hard to reverse. But on the other side, they are meeting people's needs entirely. And so there are efforts that people will make from time to time to get something more out of their free time. Speaker 1 I'm also curious what free time is tethered to. That's also changed. You noted that in the pre industrial era people would largely work until they were hitting diminishing returns. If you were able to gather as much food as you could by hunting 3 hours a day, there was no purpose in hunting 8 hours a day if you wouldn't return with any more food. Then in the industrial era we were working for 12 hours a day. That was eventually reduced to 8 through the labor rights movement, but the purpose was to essentially work as much as the market demanded goods for, and the expectation was that work and free time was tethered to productivity. So as automation and industrialization improved, the need for work would decrease and this trajectory would keep moving upward. And you can see this idea and things like old Jetsons cartoons where the joke is that George Jetson is wiped out after an 8 hour work week instead of an 8 hour work day. But then things change. I don't know if this is a good analogy, but similar to countries moving off the gold standard, now, currency isn't tethered to any sort of material unit. It's now a Fiat currency where it's tethered to something that's intangible, which is trust. And it seems that free time, it's not tethered to productivity, it's tended to some sort of ephemeral social consensus of how much people should be working. Is that accurate or do you think it's something else? Speaker 2 Well, you know, this business about how much people should be working is tied to the persistence of that work ethic I mentioned earlier. And what's kind of odd about it is that that work ethic has produced a level of productivity that in many ways is not physically or even culturally necessary, you know? And so the work ethic is combined with a belief in unlimited growth and the need for unlimited growth. I mean, whenever the economy is down in terms of outputs or whatever, it's assume it's a bad thing. Well, it strikes me as that at a fundamental level, this whole idea of working and spending and doing it kind of progressively more and more should have reached a limit and it hasn't because of that persistence of the work ethic, this political consensus around gross everyone, you know, nobody is advocating any growth, you know, really. But also at the very fact that in a competitive economy, it's really hard to reduce the work week because your competitors who don't won't and you'll, you know, you will be at a disadvantage. So historically, one of the ways to have done that, to overcome that problem was to have general rules about what was the standard work week. In 1919, it was the eight hour day and it was pretty much adopted internationally. And now we don't have the capacity for that kind of large scale agreement about what a standard work week should be. I mean, that's certainly one of the problems, but also I think underlying that is that huge influence of the centrality of work in people's lives and the centrality of increasing output, economic growth at a a social level. And you know, part of the problem there is that free time is simply not valued very much. And it's not valued because in certain ways people are disappointed with it. People, you know, see it as being lazy. And there isn't a strong enough idea that free time is really the kind of end of or the goal of the whole economic enterprise. And that's going to be difficult to keep up, I think over the long run. I mean, we have problems with technological unemployment rearing. It's ahead. They're going to be goods that are going to be produced that aren't going to require so much work ethic and services as well. So how do we deal with that problem? How do we deal with the problem of the obvious environmental problem of excessive growth and then of course the personal problem of people finding themselves, particularly with the double income household, with working so many hours that they don't have time to take care of their families? Speaker 1 Scott here. One more break for a word from our sponsors. So finally, in your survey of centuries of history, looking at the balance between work and free time, what do you see as the ideal balance? And with this question, I'm thinking of a German philosopher, Joseph Peeper, who argued in the 20th century that the entire basis of a culture is leisure. It's what a society produces in its leisure hours that produces the cultists, which is where we get the word culture from the common fund of knowledge that makes a group who they are. With that in mind, what do you see as the ideal balance to strike? Speaker 2 Well, you know, first of all, we need to continually produce some sufficient goods and services to provide for people's security, for diversity in life, to fulfill people's needs, for even novelty and change. I mean, I'm not advocating some kind of return back to some kind of, you know, ancient Greek world where Aristotle talked about and that idea of leisure, of, of simply contemplation and of sharing ideas in some kind of village setting, that's not us. And it's also, of course, that whole system was beta on slavery anyway. So what we need to do is, you know, to recognize the importance of work. Work is necessary to organize people's lives, to make people feel like they deserve their share of the productivity that comes from other people's work. But on the other side, you need to have sufficient free time so you know people can take care of their families, that the people can develop themselves personally and socially and fulfill a kind of a balance between the two. And to recognize that as productivity goes up and as environmental concerns go up, maybe we need to redress that ballot somewhat to realize that, well, maybe we don't need to have a new cell phone every two years or a new car every four years. And that perhaps we don't need to have 2500 square foot houses and three car garages. And that's going to be very difficult. And you know, I can't say I'm terribly optimistic about it. But again, as I was suggesting, we may be sort of obliged to do this as environmental issues increase, as technological employment enters into high gear with artificial intelligence and whatnot. And we need to begin to think about the value of time away from the market and time that can be extended sufficiently in freedom to develop one's personality and one's social engagement. Speaker 1 Well, as we move forward with increased automation, roboticization, these are questions we're going to have to consider more and more. And you've given us a lot to consider with how society worked on this in the past and the pitfalls that came. We weren't prepared with the technological changes that would restructure society. Well, for listeners who want to dive into this much deeper than we're able to get here today, the name of Gary's book is Free Time, The History of an Elusive Ideal. Gary, thank you for joining us. That's all for today's episode. If you'd like to see show notes with sources, maps, links, anything else related to this episode and all my other ones as well, go to parthenonpodcast.com.