Hard-Pressed to Have Fun : Yuppies Take Leisure Time as Seriously as Work and That’s Why They Can’t Relax, Experts Say
Didi Lacher doesn’t go to a professional manicurist because she can’t stay still long enough. (“To sit there and do nothing drives me nuts.”)
Going to the beach is out of the question (“I don’t find it relaxing to lie there like a lump”). And to endure checkout lines, she arms herself with a book.
“It makes me tense to waste time,” says Lacher, 38, a New York banking executive who normally puts in a 10-hour workday. Yet relatively speaking, she is taking it easy these days, she says, leaving herself time to run Saturday errands and to “veg out” on Sundays at home in her bathrobe.
Like Lacher, a generation that took to their jobs in the 1980s like children to lollipops is facing a new challenge in the 1990s: learning to have fun. The buzzword in the workplace is downshifting, as some fast-trackers put on the brakes by choice--even refusing promotions.
But as people opt for more free time, they face the question of how to use it. Raised on a puritanical work ethic and bred on the pragmatic belief that every good idea has a purpose, Americans are finding more than ever that they are little equipped to enjoy their leisure.
For inveterate workaholics, learning to relax has been a problem for decades, and fruitfully filling retirement years has become a familiar dilemma. Now, in the increasingly fast-lane lives of many people, the conundrum of leisure-less leisure is hitting them mid-stride.
“Most people can’t stand leisure. They are afraid of freedom,” says Chaytor Mason, a USC psychology professor who has been helping group therapy patients learn to relax for almost 40 years.
When faced with excess leisure time, people tend to exhibit a variety of symptoms: guilt, nervousness, depression and stress, plus a sort of knee-jerk recreational competitiveness. The problem is particularly acute for 1980s-style yuppies. Blue-collar workers tend to plan more straightforward, Angst- free activities such as hunting and picnics, experts say.
For white-collar relaxation-seekers, learning to enjoy leisure means a radical about-face. From 1973 to 1987, Americans chipped their free time down by more than a third to 16.6 hours a week, according to a series of Louis Harris surveys. One mid-decade study even found that numerous respondents said they enjoyed work as much as they did recreation.
Today, many people still find little unstructured time in their lives. Tim Claffey, a vice president and creative director of a major national advertising agency in Chicago, plays guitar and drums at local rock clubs, turns out for most of the city’s professional hockey and basketball games, attends theater performances three times a week and in his “spare time” is converting the garage of his weekend home on Lake Michigan.
Recently, after his 16th client meeting and a conference on a charity benefit to help underprivileged youths, Claffey says, “I called in sick and stayed home and didn’t answer the phone.”
Indeed, when Americans do make room for fun, the nation’s handful of leisure watchers--there are thousands of experts studying work--say they face free time with the same methodology they use in business: organizing their activities, filling up on hobbies and taking vacations in tour groups.
“People are frantically trying to carry work values over into leisure,” says Jeffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure time at Pennsylvania State University. “They’re maximizing the yield on a given amount of time, and that is thinking in production terms.”
According to Godbey, would-be bons vivants try to have more fun faster, grabbing their food at drive-through joints rather than dining graciously in restaurants and skimming quick-read magazine stories instead of indulging in quiet, prolonged reading periods.
To make matters worse, leisure philosophers say, earnest fun-seekers rely on a host of sophisticated equipment, from speedometers for walking to professional racing-bike togs for weekend spins around the neighborhood and the socially correct wine for their dinner parties.
“Our leisure has been highly commodified,” Godbey notes. “We are very judgmental about these material goods. If they’re not just right, we feel we couldn’t be enjoying ourselves.”
Plugged into TVs, CDs and VCRs, at times the frenzied are unaware of their hyperactivity. Friends of a would-be Couch Potato, a former corporate attorney for General Electric in suburban Connecticut, say he needs so much mental stimulation that he can rarely relax even while watching television. Ever restless, he pushes the TV’s remote-control buttons--click, click, click--switching channels every few seconds for up to 20 minutes.
Observes UC Berkeley sociologist Neil Smelser, who has studied the good life in California, “It’s fighting against the work ethic that leads people to have great fantasies about complete passivity. But people don’t really enjoy the good life so much. They sit around feeling that they ought to be out doing something to justify their existence.”
“Work is the answer to hard religious and existential questions: ‘Who am I? What am I doing here?’ ” says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a University of Iowa historian specializing in leisure. “Many of us don’t like to meet those questions head on.”
Indeed, the widespread concept that a perfect job can be the most satisfying part of a person’s life “is one of the central myths of the 20th Century,” Hunnicutt says.
Moreover, specialists say that when engaged beyond a certain degree, the leisure time that people thought ideal proves to be deadly. Godbey, who has asked nearly 2,000 students what they would do if someone could support them for the rest of their lives, found that virtually all would take the money and keep their jobs.
For Camille Marchetta, a Hollywood scriptwriter for “Dynasty,” “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest,” a three-month break between projects is the leisure-time limit. After that, she acknowledges, “My mood starts to get blacker and blacker. It’s a real depression, with constant fatigue.”
“ ‘Oh, I’m so old,’ ” she starts to think. “ ‘Is this what my life is? Why don’t I ever accomplish anything?’ It doesn’t matter what I’ve accomplished three months before.”
Each night Marchetta mentally ticks through her plans for the following day.
“I’ll think, ‘Tomorrow I really must go to the supermarket and it would be very good if I went to the gym. Then I’ll come home and work from X to X hour. Oh, and I have this dinner date,’ ” she says.
Left to her own spontaneity, Marchetta might spend an entire Sunday on the telephone to family and friends. “It’s all wonderful,” she says, “but suddenly it’s 2 in the afternoon. If I don’t plan the day I get nothing done--not even enjoying myself.”
However, Hunnicutt points out that historically, cultures have recognized certain activities that are worth doing for themselves.
In ancient Athens, for example, leisure was not justified in terms of work. “Athenians assumed only fools would work,” Godbey says. “The purpose of work was to free yourself from it in order to pursue higher ideals that dealt with self-perfection--contemplation, playing music, writing poetry. Liberal arts in universities sprang from this notion. The servile arts were those that had to do with work.”
Contemporary societies also have varying views of the value of work and play. Emerging nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East take life at a more leisurely pace. “We would call it laziness; they would call it having time for oneself,” says Mason, who has taught students from more than 100 countries.
“Americans are distinctive in organizing their leisure,” agrees UC Berkeley’s Smelser, who points to Latin and French cultures for contrast.
“The French relationship to food and vacation is very different,” he notes. “They are activities that are consummated within themselves.”
In Western cultures, acceptance of the idea of careers and the linkage of job and status did not occur until the 20th Century, Hunnicutt says. The U.S. government gave impetus to the concept when it created federally subsidized jobs for large numbers of people during the Depression.
Two books have been watersheds in the changing attitudes toward leisure in the last century. Economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899, attacked leisure time as a waste and coined the term conspicuous consumption-- condemning the wealthy for using their leisure to demonstrate they were better than the masses because of the money they were able to spend.
By 1962, Sebastian de Grazia’s “Of Time, Work and Leisure” declared that Americans did not want leisure time and confirmed that they were part of a culture bound to the clock.
Leisure became equated with laziness and failure. “It meant you weren’t pushing hard enough at work,” says Amy Saltzman, author of “Downshifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track,” to be published this month.
For those not in the workplace, guilt is also attached to idle time. Speaking of his Penn State students, Godbey notes: “They will tell you all kinds of things about themselves that you might not want to know, but they are loathe to tell you they take a nap during the day.”
Still, some people are beginning to unshackle themselves from the achiever’s ball and chain. To do so, they are returning to the spirit of amateurism during their leisure, learning to enjoy the moment and forget competition, drive and the exploitation of their buddies to cut a deal.
“It’s a trend a lot of companies are going to have to pay attention to,” predicts Saltzman, who has reported on the workplace for the magazines Success and U.S. News & World Report. In interviews with nearly 100 people aged 30 to 50, she found professionals who slow down “tend to be the most productive and successful in their fields.”
Still, many Americans tend to proceed with their dismally dutiful habits even during vacation time. Unlike such leisure-enlightened nations as France and Germany--which have official or de facto six-week annual vacations for all workers--they settle for company policies that usually begin with one or two weeks off a year.
When Americans do travel for pleasure, a significant number still go on packaged tours--about 30% took tours to Europe in 1989--or plan their own trips down to the finest detail.
On a month’s holiday in France with her mother and husband two years ago, Lacher segmented the country into quadrants, establishing touring bases in each, and carried a list of sights she had researched, cross-referencing them in her guidebooks to be certain they missed none.
Mason reports that virtually all of his clients spend their vacations with their parents. “There is a lot of complaining about it,” he says--but even so, people feel beholden to their families and largely threatened by new experiences.
“Americans are very uncomfortable with improvisation. There is a precision about time. It has to have a use,” observes film editor Anne Goursaud (“The Two Jakes”), who has lived in the United States for 20 years after growing up in France.
“I don’t like to plan everything,” she says. “Sure, if you know which hotel you’re going to, you know you’ll get a good bathroom. But you have no adventure--nothing that you don’t already know can be gained.”
Hobbies also can serve as steppingstones away from work. Allen Miller, a 39-year-old corporate lawyer in Manhattan and a six-day-a-week worker who’s in his office on Sundays by 8:30 a.m., has become a serious amateur painter.
“I like the smell and the feel of the paint. It’s transporting,” Miller says with a self-conscious chuckle. He has invested $200 in a French easel and palette, but he insists he is not competing for artistic excellence.
“It’s so hopeless, I don’t have to worry about achievement,” he says. “It’s just fun.”
After an apotheosis on vacation several years ago, Ted Neff, a Los Angeles video cameraman, has also been making a concerted effort to enjoy the moment.
Realizing he was not appreciating life, he has turned for help to a three-volume opus on attaining inner peace. He has given up the roller-coaster thrills of dangerous mountain hikes and adrenaline-pumping movies, and, although he still runs the TV while eating dinner, he recently managed a quiet 20-minute freeway drive, only once flipping on a musical tape and controlling a threatening “feeling of uneasiness.”
Although experts applaud such initiatives, they are split over their significance. “We’re in a cultural trap,” Smelser says. “That’s why you get the paradox of highly organized free time.”
“The work ethic is too strong as a myth,” Hunnicutt agrees. “We’re educating students for work.” As for Americans’ right to the pursuit of happiness, “we’ve pooh-poohed the whole thing.”
Saltzman, however, thinks workaholics can kick their addiction with a little practice. The trick, ironically, is to “figure out ways to get as much satisfaction out of their free time as their work time.”
Such good news, however, leaves Didi Lacher unimpressed: “I wish I were a little less compulsive about organizing things, but I would be fighting who I am.” Besides, she declares, “I don’t schedule thinking about something into my schedule.”
