So Becca, many years ago I was driving home from work and I had a terrible day.
I don't remember why, but I was just cheesed off.
You know, it's like white knuckling my steering wheel, you know, still angry from whatever
it happened.
As I was driving, I saw a colleague of mine from work walking to the train to go home.
And he was just kind of sauntering down the street.
And I noticed that he was carrying a book, like I guess if it were a lunch box almost,
he was very casually holding this book at his side.
And he had nothing else, not a bag or a backpack or anything.
And I remember looking at him and thinking, oh man, he has it figured out like what is
wrong with me, that that's not how I'm behaving.
Now that my work day is over.
He hasn't figured out because he's holding a book.
Well, the interpretation I had of what was going to happen to him next is that he left
work.
His work day was over.
And he was going to get on the train and read his book and go home and, you know, make
dinner do whatever he did in his evening routine.
It just somehow came naturally to him to leave the office and begin the process of not being
at work.
In a technical sense, I could do whatever I wanted with my leisure time once I left work,
but there was something preventing me from really having control over that time.
Welcome to How to Keep Time.
I'm Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of The Show.
And I'm Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.
So Ian, your book story makes me think of how many of us can't leave our work at the
door.
And there's this specific dread when you feel like your entire day and weeks and potentially
your life will be expended at work.
I wanted to quickly play this clip for you of a young woman I saw on social media, Ian
talking about how all her hours a day are expended at work.
And she's talking about her very first nine to five jobs.
She's sitting on the couch.
She's in her sweats and she starts tearing up a bit while talking about it.
And I know it could be worse.
I know I could be working longer, but like I literally get off its pitch black.
Like I don't have energy.
How do you have friends?
Like how do you have time for like dating?
I don't have time for anything and I'm like so stressed out.
Am I so dramatic?
It's fine.
Oh wow.
I mean, yeah, she's got it, doesn't she?
I really empathize with this girl.
I mean, I'm in a very different life stage, but the situation this young woman is describing,
it's not really new.
And it's not really confined to her generation.
Either it's just she's got like these fresh eyes on it, you know?
Right.
Like what the heck?
Day, my whole entire life seems to be taken up by work or work related activities like
commuting.
Right.
And there's no life for me left.
That's what she's saying.
Right.
And the obvious first solution would be working less and winning more time back for yourself,
but that seems pretty unlikely as the only solution.
Yeah.
But what if you could live more for yourself even when you're at work?
And rather than seeing that as time that you've lost to your boss or your company, as
time that's like not even yours, even though you're there, you know, you're there at work
in your body, in your time while it's happening.
And I do think in her stating it so plainly, it forces us to sort of revisit our mainstream
approach to this binary we create between work and life, which is obviously bothering
her.
Yeah.
And thinking of your work time as something that isn't yours, like it's like some ghost
or some other personality, that's the problem that has to be solved in some way.
And it forces us to question whether there are maybe new ways to structure our time.
But I also think that I mean, is I job worth not having a minute to think about yourself,
you know, I don't think so.
So you know, maybe our conditioning to prioritize work isn't just a thing in our heads, or because
we're at the whim of our calendars.
My name is Ignacio Sanchez Parado.
I go by natural, which is short for Ignacio in Spanish.
I'm a professor of Latin American studies at Washington, New North in St. Louis, who researches
Mexican culture broadly.
Depending on where you work or the nature of your job, a lot of people's work require
you to leave your life at the door.
Not sure someone who spends time observing and studying cultural practices.
And I wanted to ask him if and how time can be understood as a reflection of culture.
I'm wondering if our culture and social practices around how we should be using our time at work
can feel like more of a barrier to using our time in a more cohesive way, where that
binary between work and life feels less disconnected.
I think that what's surprising actually is that in the United States, people work for
working.
And I think that one thing that I want to make clear with is that one I create this narrative
where Americans are working at the Mexican Artificial Center.
Mexicans were very hard and very productive in Mexico, in the office culture and the university
culture.
But I don't think the notion that you're defined by your employment is strong.
Not sure, could you tell me about how that work and leisure time balance is in Mexico?
So people see their job as a means to an end and the end is their family life, their social
life, their leisure, their hobbies.
I think that difference is not the car working but also the understanding that putting
limits to your work is a right.
And if you don't, you're just giving up your rights.
I think that leads for people to, I mean, I know I have friends who draw work at the
time that the work is done and they don't care if it's done or not.
Right.
Or people who don't really think that they should be spending their weekends and setting
emails.
I think that if you have the privilege to access employment, there's no job that is worth
destroying your mind or your life.
My mom didn't know how to cook because she works six days a week all day.
She comes home.
She does not want to cook.
But we will go together to an eatery and together, traditional Mexican places are known
as selling signs for expeditions, eating.
When I came to the US, it's the first time I saw a restaurant telling you that you
had the table for a maximum amount of time.
Right.
You have the time that I've never seen before.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, we have reservations but nobody tells you you have to live at 1130, right?
Yeah, right.
You live when you want or when they close.
But nobody's going to come and time you whether you're using the table too much.
Right.
It's a word in Spanish called Sobre Mesa and it's sort of the after dinner conversation.
Ah.
And that is so much of a social practice that there's a word for it and it's called over table,
right?
So it means that it's right after eating on the table.
It is expected that you will linger and continue conversation rather than just get up and
live.
Right.
What's the rush?
What's the hurry?
Yeah, exactly.
Where in the US, it feels like even our productive approach to work is also when we're eating.
But I know it is also the fact that dinner or supper also has all our social components
to it.
So it is common that people would go from work maybe to meet their family, their children,
maybe to meet their friends.
Right.
But I also think that the culture is a little bit more gregarious.
That motivates people, even in work spaces to socialize.
When practice that we have, it is going away because of fast food and stuff like that.
But because our lunch times are very long, that are about two hours because it's the main
meal.
There are various restaurants that offer multi-course meals and people usually go from their offices
to those places to it as a group.
And the two hours of the break allow you to have a more of an engagement with your co-workers
than a half an hour lunch in your desk.
This is during the weekdays?
This is during the weekdays.
Oh.
Can you describe this meal to me?
I'm so jealous.
Yes.
If it's a working class, it's called la comida corrida.
Uh-huh.
So it's like, I don't know if there is a direct translation, like a meal or in sequence where
you get a soup and then you get either rice or pasta or something and then you get a main
course with a sire and a cert.
Oh, sounds so good.
It's not only the gastronomical practice which is interesting on its own, but also if you
have office workers that go to the place like this in groups of four or five, sit together
and are sharing a table for an hour or two, the social engagement in that office is different.
Of course.
And when everybody is sitting in the cubicle and their office, but I think that the embedding
of social practice in the day makes a big difference in this case for the 9 to 5 or 9 to 7
worker.
In Mexico, we have become more of a victim of the corporate culture.
The minute we have lost the ability to have that kind of social brigade is launched.
Oh my gosh, Becca, I just had yesterday a supposedly social gregarious lunch with a friend
in from out of town and the whole time we were still like looking at our watches.
I want you to make sure you get back for your meeting and I was checking to make sure
I wasn't going to be late.
So it's really difficult.
We're still at work even when we take the time to eat that way.
I mean, I think one of the things Nacho is pointing out is that it's too big a burden to
ask people to create that time for themselves.
You need to make space for it socially and culturally.
There has to be a kind of common understanding that, you know, hanging out with your friends
or even your coworkers in a different way is important.
And that's just how your day plays out rather than how can I figure out how to finagle
away to be social with the people who are important to me.
Right. And as Nacho was saying, this multiple course lunch and these additional hours that
people give themselves during the work day, there's this sort of freedom they have to go
have that meal together and really enjoy it.
And you know, some of the happiest countries in the world, some of their primary metrics
of their happiness include that freedom to make decisions and social support, you know,
both of which could be understood as time related in a way.
They have the flexibility to make decisions about their time and invest that time in strengthening
their relationships.
I mean, do people in those countries just work less?
Do they just have more time on their own to play with?
Well, the three happiest countries in the world, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, aren't
that far off from the average American work week in terms of average hours worked.
And the average American work week, which is around 38.8 hours, according to data from 2022,
is not that far off from Denmark's average work week, which is around 33.4 hours.
Iceland's is around 35.5 and Finland is around 35.
So it's not so much a matter of not having enough hours in the day, which was so surprising
to me.
Which suggests that we don't require a whole lot of additional time necessarily.
It's not about finding more time, but figuring out a different way of conceptualizing that
time in order to experience the kind of enjoyment and freedom that Nacho is talking about.
Right.
What I find worrisome and I see in my students sometimes is that sometimes you ask people
who aren't rich as you and they don't have an answer to that question.
If you don't have an answer to that question, I will be worried.
I think that's a question that you have to find an answer for.
What kind of answers do they give you, if any?
Well, sometimes nothing because sometimes the time is just going to tick tock, right?
Or I'm a very addicted to social media.
So I'm not going to, I'm not going to bring any kind of moralism to that.
It's okay if you look at Facebook, but you need to have something that is for you a
little bit more enriching in your leisure time in order for you to develop a sense of value.
To it.
I have a student that was doing crocheting in class and she really loved that.
Sometimes they tell me I like to paint.
I think that one of the cool places universities, a private one's very particularly because
they have this structure of after curricular social activity that is built and regulated
by the university and it takes over time of the students.
So the students never develop the ability to develop meaningful leisure time on their own.
They're here all day, they live here.
And I think that if you graduate from that to the world.
Right.
I've seen some of my students just, they don't know what to do with themselves after their
job is done.
It might be that some people don't just don't even develop the skill to be in with.
If I were to give practical advice, which I like to do sometimes is begin by asking to
yourself what kinds of things enrich you and then make a proactive effort to make sure
that they're a part of your day.
You have to be proactive about it in this culture.
So becaue according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans have more
than five hours of free leisure time per day.
Wow.
Do you feel like you have five?
It does not feel like five for sure.
It does feel like five to me either.
Right.
And I think the reason it doesn't is because we don't know what to do with those five
hours of time or however much of it we have.
And so it just kind of evaporates into little pieces.
Instead of using it well, it just vanishes between our fingers.
It makes me wonder, I mean, this is kind of an impossible question to answer.
But it only makes sense to talk about leisure time once you have work time to compare it
to.
Right.
And so back before people had, leisure leisure is essentially an invention of the industrial
revolution.
So when you would have been a peasant working the land and your whole day is worth of
time was just taken up with subsistence from dawn to dusk and then you couldn't do anything
anyway because it was dark.
At least you kind of knew maybe why you were doing the things that you were doing hour
to hour, less of your time would vanish because you had so little of it to start with
and also because you were making use of all of it.
So you almost would prefer to know what you were going to be doing at every hour.
Is there like a decision making component there that makes it harder to know like, okay,
if this is my free time and I just finished my work time, how do I make the decision
about what to do now that it's all mine?
I can use it all over.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
That's exactly it Becca.
It, okay, I'm at work.
Oh, now I'm not at work anymore.
And so now I have to figure out what that means.
Right.
Right.
Now I'm using my time for myself and I'm not at work.
So I really have to make good on the leisure time that I have.
And then by the time I've figured out what I want to do, I've burned through half of it
and don't have it anymore.
But you know when you're a kid and even your leisure time is more structured now is when
you can watch TV because that's when your parents allowed you to or it's time to go brush
your teeth or what have you.
Yes.
Something about that phase of life feels a little better, doesn't it?
In my memory anyway, because you know what's happening next and why.
Yeah, it sounds to me Ian, like having that authority figure telling you how you should
be using your time is helpful in a way.
And as Nacho said, his university students have many of their leisure activities baked
into their day to day.
The place they work is also the place they live and sleep and make friends.
So it makes it easier to decide what to do if everyone's going to the football game
or taking breaks between a study session.
It guards you against the sort of decision paralysis you may have if you have a full Saturday
afternoon free and there are so many more variables in where should you go?
Who do you want to do that thing with?
You know, gathering everyone in one place, scheduling it and then make sure you have a
good time.
And having that external force that is making a decision for you was really helpful because
now you no longer have to make a choice.
And when you make a bad choice and it's your choice, then you feel guilty for it.
You feel I could have made any choice and I did the wrong thing with the time I had
available.
I don't care about what people think.
Not everybody has their privilege, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Some people get pressures because their promotions, their salaries are tied to that.
So we don't have to be free will lose about that.
But I also think that I mean, is I job worth not having a minute to think about yourself,
you know, I don't think so.
How do you think someone who doesn't have that flexibility in their schedule could incorporate
some of these practices in their life?
I don't think you need to be working all the time that you're at work.
Unless you have a boss on top of you or a computer timing you, which happens.
Uh-huh.
I mean, if you are in that, you just don't have a way out, right?
You're just in like a work regime of constant surveillance, right?
Right.
People are known in that situation, bring a book to your desk and read, give yourself
10 minutes every hour to read it.
Hmm.
Right?
I mean, if you're going to eat and work, you might as well eat while you're working and
then take your lunch break and do something else.
Hmm.
People care that they're not being perceived as good enough workers because you are aware
of, of a judgment that other people are going to have of you.
Right.
Right.
But maybe you shouldn't care.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
So Ian, as we're analyzing these work life boundaries, it made me think about our American
cultural norms around work and home and which one people think has more value in their
lives.
And interestingly, I found this data on Americans evolving views about the meaning of life.
And there was a survey conducted from September 2017 to February of 2021 and it sort of
tracked these changes in people's views over this four year period.
And the Pew Research Center asked a sample of American adults to answer the question, what
about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying?
What keeps you going and why?
So what did people say?
Of course, I assumed it was work.
But surprisingly, over the course of those four years, the share of adults who mentioned
their job or career as a source of meaning declined from 24 to 17%, which was already
significantly lower than I thought.
And people were more likely than the initial year in 2017 to mention society as a source
of meaning in life.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Back it almost sounds like we've been faking ourselves out.
A little bit.
Yeah, we believe that everyone else believes that work is where we should derive satisfaction.
Right.
Right.
But in fact, very few of us in America seem to think that that's really the case.
And instead, we want to find it in one another rather than in our workplaces.
That's all for this episode of How to Keep Time.
This episode was hosted by Ian Bogost and me, Becker-Esshied.
I also produce the show.
Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank, fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Rob Smersiac.
Rob also composed some of our music.
The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea
Valdes.
We're taking a quick break next week, and after all this talk about busyness and schedules,
I'm really looking forward to some rest.
That's also the topic of our next episode.
Talk to you then.
Becker, I've been over-sleeping lately and I finally went to the doctor and he recommended
that I sleep on a bed of herbs.
This is ridiculous.
What?
What?
You got to give me a why.
Why?
I've got another one.
You want another one?
Okay, let's do another one because I started laughing too early.
You started laughing prematurely.
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