No time to read this?

Catching up with back editions of The New Yorker -- I'm always a few weeks behind and you'll get the irony of that by the end of this sentence -- I'm fascinated by an essay about why we are overwhelmed by too much to do and not enough time to do it in.

It begins with a reminder that the genius economist John Maynard Keynes believed that within 100 years - he was writing in 1928 -- the standard of life would be so improved that no one would have to worry about making money and we'd work three hours a day.

In fact, the wealth he predicted has been created but it has not translated into leisure.   As the writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, asks "when was the last time anyone you know complained about having too little to do?"

If difficult to fully understand, the reasons for this sorry state of affairs are, at least, easy to enumerate:

• busyness has social status.  We like it because it makes us feel important
• we don't actually have that much to do, but we spend a lot of time thinking about how much we have to do and that makes us feel busier than we are
• women are working but continue to do the lions share of the home maintenance and child-rearing
• Keynes was wrong.  He thought people worked to buy what they need.  Now, instead of working to buy what we need, we find we need more things.  
• work provides the attainable self-realization available to us 

To these, I would add a personal notion:  we are busier because we are pickier.  Exposed to more and more choice by gigantic supermarkets that have replaced corner stores, by television programming and advertising and by online shopping, our standards have been raised.

If you didn't know that European butter bakes better croissant than Canadian butter because it has more fat, you wouldn't have to drive all over the city looking for it, would you?  You'd just use whatever you could find at the closest supermarket.  Instead we are victims of our own rising expectations. In other words, we've pretty much done it to ourselves.