Reviews

On the go 24/7
Tired of having too much to do?
The backlash against moving so fast.
By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff
February 20, 2003

Bobbi Carrey had it pretty sweet while she was working in corporate America.

She spent 15 years in financial services, four of them as a senior vice president at Fidelity Investments. She was financially independent. She owned a house in Cambridge and a second home in Westport. She amassed a fine collection of art, photographs, and books.

But about two years ago, “worn out, and worn down from the emotional exhaustion of it all,” she decided to call it quits and do something she'd wanted to do all her life.

She became a cabaret singer.

It may not be lucrative, but she’s happier than ever. And now she is joyfully downsizing, moving from “a life of accumulation to a life of de-accession.” She’s selling her summer home. She’s selling her art and book collection. She’s distributed her “incredible wardrobe of executive women’s clothes” to consignment shops and charities.

“I feel like I’d accumulated too much,” said Carrey, a single mother in her 50s who just released her first CD. Two electric bills, two heating bills, two lawns to mow, and two refrigerators to fill got to be too much for her. “As much pleasure as I used to get out of going to Westport, I don’t feel like I need a place to get away any more. I really don't need as many things in my life now to counter the 24/7 life.”

Call it a backlash against 24/7, that shorthand for being on the go 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Or call it, as former secretary of labor Robert Reich has written, “a rising chorus of American voices resolving to slow down.”

No matter what you call it, the fact is that as the realities of a fast-changing economy dictate that Americans stay competitive, work harder, move faster, and be busier, there are growing indications that many are looking for a more balanced way to live, and are seeking ways–big and small–to put the brakes on in the workplace and also at home.

“I really believe that a lot of worker bees in this country are saying, ‘What the hell am I doing?’” said Richard Laermer, author of “TrendSpotting” (Perigree), a book that analyzes trends in American society. “Down time? What’s that? There is no down time. When businesses failed in 2000 and 2001, a lot of people went home and said, ‘I need a break from all this.’”

Consider Charlie Ravioli.

He first came to public attention last September in Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article about his daughter Olivia’s imaginary playmate, Charlie Ravioli. Gopnik wrote that Ravioli’s outstanding trait is that “he is always too busy to play with her.” When Olivia tries to reach him–by cellphone–she always gets his machine. She can hardly ever make their schedules mesh because he’s always working. They “grab lunch”–when he doesn’t cancel. He even has someone answer his phone and announce he’s in a meeting.

Gopnik had no way of knowing he'd be hitting a hot-button issue for Americans: our exasperation with our national culture of busyness. “Busyness,” he wrote, “is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us.”

The response from readers was remarkable, Gopnik said in a recent telephone interview. “I’ve never had anything like it.” He was inundated with letters and e-mails from readers who related to Olivia’s frustration over a frenzied existence driven by cellphones, pagers, Palm devices, and other icons of the digital economy. They were relieved to discover that someone else had put a name to it, to know “this isn’t just my trauma,” he said. Two Hollywood producers even contacted him about doing “Charlie Ravioli, the movie.” A minister in California built a sermon around him.

“If you Google it,” said Gopnik, “you find people using Charlie Ravioli as an idiom for ‘my intimate but inaccessible friend.’”

There's nothing new about the idea that Americans are very busy people. Busyness may be our way of being us, as Gopnik observed, but there are signs that we are fed up with the 24/7-ness of our culture and are looking for a new way to be us.

“Too many of us are living joyless existences,” said Enola Aird, a Yale Law School graduate who left a high-powered corporate practice to stay home with her children and now works in the New York area as an activist for children and families. “We are doing well materially, but we are wiped out most of the time, overbooked, and tired. The idea that we have to keep going 24/7 is, in my view, no longer acceptable.”

The term 24/7 got into the vernacular around the mid-1990s, mainly in relation to businesses and other institutions in the financial sector that needed to operate nonstop to stay competitive in a global marketplace. Soon, it extended to workers who were connected to the office even at home, via cellphones, pagers, computers, and now text-messaging systems and virtual private networks. Americans don’t just work long, they work fast: “Pruning minutes and seconds and hundredths of seconds has become an obsession” in America, author James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book, “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” (Oxmoor House).

Now, Americans are 24/7-ing outside the workplace, too. We’re in such a hurry at home that even Martha Stewart has capitulated. The homemaking doyenne’s newest magazine, “Everyday Food,” uses the words “fast” and “easy” on the cover, and includes a salmon dish with a 5-minute prep time and a three-ingredient fettuccine Alfredo. We barely have time to chop our lettuce: Sales of bagged salads have shown double-digit growth in the past two years, exceeding $2 billion last year, according to ACNielsen, a market research company. According to a new Nielsen study, half of all heads of household “are too tired to put much time or effort into evening meal preparation, and two-thirds are constantly looking for faster ways to do household chores.”

“Dual-income households, long commutes, kids involved in multiple activities all add up to busy, time-pressed families,” said Nielsen spokesman Matt Bell.

We’re too busy, even, for children to play. This is the era that brought us the term “play deprivation,” describing the fact that kids are so shortchanged on playtime that they barely know how to play creatively.

They do, however, know how to organize their time. “Here’s a commentary on the times: My third-grader walked into class on the first day and was handed a planner,” said Dean McFarlin, a professor of management at the University of Dayton and a specialist in organizational psychology, in a telephone interview. “He has to list the things he does every day, and parents have to sign off on it.”

How fast are we going? Even faster now than in 1999, when Gleick wrote ׄFaster,” which explored the American penchant for doing things quickly. “All the issues I wrote about in the book have intensified,” Gleick said in a telephone interview.

Indeed, they’ve intensified to such a degree that second-day air delivery seems pokey to us. Leisurely dinner parties are on the decline, according to the Wall Street Journal, supplanted by quick “happy hour” fetes where guests are greeted, chatted up, then hustled out the door. (One Connecticut hostess reportedly turns down the heat between courses and doesn’t offer dessert, the better to get guests out early.)

“I have had clients who are not employed but are going as fast as people who are,” said architect Sarah Susanka, author of “The Not So Big House” (Taunton), which advocates living in homes that serve spiritual needs as well as practical ones. “They’re doing volunteer work. They’re in their kids’ schools. We’ve created this kind of pressure cooker where you have to be doing, doing, doing, and this means we never have time to stop and be quiet and take a contemplative look at why we are living this way.”

Is it realistic to expect we’ll be able to put the brakes on?

“I think people will burn out, ultimately,” predicts Andrew Zolli, author of the “Catalog of Tomorrow: Trends Shaping Your Future” (Que), published this year. Life without down time, he believes, “is unsustainable.”

Some people, though, don’t want to wait for a major cultural shift and are becoming part of a backlash against 24/7-ness.

Signs are registering on many different fronts. Last fall, for example, Barnard College hosted a conference on feminism and motherhood, to raise awareness about the importance of motherhood and home life in a fast-paced business-oriented society that devalues it.

“The pace and the values of our culture leave us very little time to care for ourselves and to care for each other, and instead of insisting on more time for ourselves and our families, we have just gone along, struggling to keep up,” said speaker Enola Aird, one of the organizers, in a kind of call to arms to conference participants. “We must restore a sense of reasonable limits.”

Suggestions of a backlash also are showing up in American demographic patterns. Sociologist and demographer Kenneth Johnson of Loyola University-Chicago has spotted a trend he calls “rural rebound,” a significant migration of Americans to non-metropolitan areas to escape the pressures of fast-paced city life and find a home that is “not as anonymous,” he said. “We’ve found, much to our surprise, that rural or non-metropolitan parts of the US are growing, and that's only happened in the 20th century one (other time), in the 1970s,” said Johnson. “It’s one of the ways people are trying to deal with 24/7.”

One of the areas of growth on the East Coast, he said, is Dukes County, including Martha’s Vineyard, a trend noted also by Vineyard real estate agent Bill LeRoyer of Harborside Realty.

“We’ve experienced a lot of professional people moving out here and actually commuting to Boston or the South Shore and New York,” he said. “With the advent of the computer and Internet, people are giving up their lifestyle in the big city and corporate world to live in a more relaxed environment.”

Americans also are trying to minimize intrusions into their homes, such as persistent telemarketer calls.

“As technology is able to find us wherever we are, we are looking for ways to let us take back control of our lives,” said Lacy Yeatts of Verizon. They’ve apparently found one of them, and embraced it: Sales of Verizon’s call intercept service have “been unbelievable,“ Yeatts said, referring to the automated service that screens anonymous calls coming into a “caller ID” unit and blocks calls if the callers don’t identify themselves by name.

“In two years, we’ve had more than 1 million subscribers, which is pretty phenomenal for an optional service,” she said.

“You see a backlash brewing in e-mail,” said Robert Reich, now a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, and author of “The Future of Success” (Knopf), an analysis of the new economy and how it’s affecting our lives. “It’s more and more common to receive return e-mail that says, ‘I’m on vacation for two weeks,’ saying, in essence, ‘Don’t bother me.’ People are discovering ways to signal to other people that they are unavailable.”

These are people such as Saverio Mancina, who initiated his own little “private rebellion” against 24/7 culture a year ago, by giving up his cellphone. The Charlestown marketing specialist said he was driven to this decision when he went on vacation to Peru to get a break from his frantic work life and its constant barrage of faxes, e-mails, and phone calls that plagued him even at home. One day he was sitting on a mountain peak at Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, “loving the solitude and the silence,” when a group of American tourists arrived–and one of them pulled out a cellphone.

“He was getting frustrated that he couldn’t get reception,” said Mancina, 36. “I just wanted to say, ‘Why are you doing that? Stop and look around!’”

It was at that point that Mancina decided to make his own small, symbolic gesture of noncompliance with American busyness. “It’s my way of not buying into the idea that people always need to be reached 24/7,” he said.

Architects say they’ve seen weary 24/7-ers convert their houses into retreats by adding luxury spa-like bathrooms or high-end kitchens, “because people want to escape by cooking,” said Boston architect Richard Bertman. Some build elaborate backyard decks, he said, so that “at least people have the image they are going to be able to relax, whether or not they do it.”

“I have reduced the size of bedrooms and increased the size of living rooms,” said Boston architect Jonathan Levi, a professor at the Harvard Design School. “My thesis is that community is what people are talking about when they say they are stressed out. People have become isolated in a way they have never been historically, spatially, physically, and psychologically. We aren’t sharing this time with others. It is solitude we are all experiencing that is causing this sense of time being compressed.”

On the other hand, is it simply in the American nature to live fast, to compress the hours? Gleick suggests it is.

“We live in the buzz,” he writes in “Faster.” “We wish to live intensely, and we wonder about the consequences.”

“We are quite different from the Europeans, by temperament and by culture,” added Reich. “The French, for example, view work as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. They value the time they spend not working, even if it means they make less money.”

He believes, though, that as many jobs disappear with the current bumpy economy, more and more Americans will transition into a state of “forced downshifting that will give them more flexibility and more time to themselves.” As they learn the hard lesson that they are “expendable,” he said, they may also be learning that “life’s not so bad” when they suddenly slow down.

It’s a lesson that financier-turned-cabaret-singer Bobbi Carrey has learned very quickly.

“Not only is it not so bad,” she said, “it’s actually in many ways preferable. It’s a bit like going on a diet. It’s hard to start, but, lo and behold, one day you realize you not only look thinner, you feel better. You’re lighter. For me, that’s what this whole process has been. It's a better life for me.”

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