What to Do With all Our Free Time

For much of the twentieth century, futurists and other labor experts were predicting ever shorter workweeks. In the mid-1920s, for example, Julian Huxley said that the two-day workweek was “inevitable” because of the simple fact that “the human being can consume only so much and no more.” John Maynard Keynes observed in the early 1930s “when we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will … we must turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our leisure.”

Forty years ago, futurists peering into their crystal balls were still predicting that one of the biggest problems for coming generations would be what to do with their abundant spare time. I remember hearing this prediction often. In 1967, for example, testimony before a Senate subcommittee claimed that by 1985 people could be working just twenty-two hours a week or twenty-seven weeks a year. Exactly when they stopped talking this way I am not sure, but they did stop. No one sits around today trying to figure out how to spend their free time. On the contrary, the topic of conversation is usually how to get some. Virtually everyone I know is time desperate.