Over the past two decades, we’ve been reallocating our time away from offices, malls, and classrooms… and toward home and solitude. Hyunsoo Rim illustrates…
With our Covid-induced lockdowns now a moderately foggy memory for most, the last few years have turned out to be a continued normalization for many of the habits that defined the pandemic era.
Peloton bikes are now doubling as coat racks; the banana bread craze has cooled; Zoom’s share price is almost back to where it started; millions of people have gone back to clothes shopping in person; and companies like Del Monte are stuck with mountains of unsold canned fruit that’s no longer flying off the shelves.
But one seismic lifestyle change has proven far more permanent than any fitness fad or panic-buying spree — and it turns out to be part of a much longer trend that’s been building for decades: Americans are spending more time at home, and alone. And not everyone has the means to break that growing trend…
[Rim uses infographics to chart American’s use of time…]
… According to the annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS) — a self-reporting survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — an average American’s typical day still breaks down pretty much the same as it did 20 years ago. Roughly a third still goes to sleep, a fifth to leisure and sports, and, perhaps most surprising to anyone feeling burned out, just one-sixth to work. The rest goes to household chores, meals, and everything else. The survey does, of course, represent the average, with many retirees likely skewing the work figures down.
But if you look closer, the routines underneath tell a different story about how the collective American experience has changed.
Over the past two decades, Americans have gained about 30 minutesof sleep per day — now averaging over nine hours, more than ever — and spend roughly 11 more minuteson household activities such as cooking, cleaning, and pet care.
Where did those extra hours come from? It seems like we’ve carved them out of work commutes, mall trips, and in-person classes… activities that usually have us interacting with others out in public in some way.
Some of this shift can certainly be explained by demographic factors — America is an older country than it was in 2003, as birth rates have dropped. Nevertheless, on aggregate, the figures are pretty staggering for a nation of 340+ million people — and the sharp rise in the pandemic era suggests at least a decent amount of the shift is behavioral.
Indeed, in 2003, the average American spent 7.7 hours per day at home, according to the ATUS data compiled by IPUMS. By 2024, that rose to 9.1 hours, with the pandemic only accelerating the climb…
… what’s more striking is how time once spent outside or with others has steadily moved in the opposite direction…
… As more of our daily lives have moved home and online, the same shift is reshaping how we unwind. Since 2003, time spent socializing and communicating — from hanging out with family and friends to hosting events — has fallen 24%, while travel time is down 26%…
… But not everyone is experiencing the shift in the same way. As evidence for the K-shaped economy — where some groups thrive while others struggle — becomes harder to ignore, income is proving to be a strong differentiator.
In fact, households earning under $35,000 now spend about 10 hours a day at home, almost an hour and a half longer than those earning $150,000 or more. The pattern holds for time spent alone, too, with a two-hour daily gap between the lowest- and highest-income groups…
… wealthier Americans aren’t just spending less time at home; they’re more likely to pay their way out of it, with restaurant meals instead of cooking, pilates classes instead of home workouts, or washer-dryer combos instead of hours tied up in chores.
For the very wealthiest, that logic even goes further: according to a recent survey by Long Angle, nearly two-thirds of multimillionaires now outsource housekeeping, while about half pay for gardening services and two-fifths employ nannies.
Of course, time at home and alone isn’t inherently negative — as researchers note that, for many, solitude can be valued as a way to rest, think, or create. But when more of your day is taken up by unpaid chores and low-cost, home-bound leisure, that retreat indoors starts to look less like a choice…
Americans are spending more time at home and alone — and money determines who can opt out. Eminently worth reading in full: “Home. Alone.” from @sherwood.news.
* Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (August 28, 1988)
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As we contemplate our calendars, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that kids across America could “go out” even as they stayed in: they were invited for the first time into Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, as the series premiered on NET (which later became PBS). The show had had earlier local incarnations in Canada, then in Pittsburgh, where the national show was birthed and produced. Michael Keaton, who worked for the Pittsburgh public television station WQED at the time, often helped out with Roger’s show. And future horror director George A. Romero worked on the show shooting short films.
Detail from Adams Synchronological Chart of Universal History created by Sebastian C Adams in 1881, a visual representation of world history, spanning from 4004 BCE to 1881 CE (the David Rumsey Map Collection)
A companion of a sort to last Friday’s post: In the 19th century, the linear idea of time became dominant. As Emily Thomas explains, that has had profound implications for how we experience the world…
‘It’s natural,’ says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘to think that time can be represented by a line.’ We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen line ahead. We ride an ever-moving arrow – the present. However, this picture of time is not natural. Its roots stretch only to the 18th century, yet this notion has now entrenched itself so deeply in Western thought that it’s difficult to imagine time as anything else. And this new representation of time has affected all kinds of things, from our understanding of history to time travel.
Let’s journey back to ancient Greece. Amid rolls of papyrus and purplish figs, philosophers like Plato looked up into the night. His creation myth, Timaeus, connected time with the movements of celestial bodies. The god ‘brought into being’ the sun, moon and other stars, for the ‘begetting of time’. They trace circles in the sky, creating days, months, years. The ‘wanderings’ of other, ‘bewilderingly numerous’ celestial bodies also make time. When all their wanderings are ‘completed together’, they achieve ‘consummation’ in a ‘perfect year’. At the end of this ‘Great Year’, all the heavenly bodies will have completed their cycles, returning to where they started. Taking millennia, this will complete one cycle of the universe. As ancient Greek philosophy spread through Europe, these ideas of time spread too. For instance, Greek and Roman Stoics connected time with their doctrine of ‘Eternal Recurrence’: the universe undergoes infinite cycles, ending and restarting in fire.
Such views of time are cyclical: time comprises a repeating cycle, as events occur, pass, and occur again. They echo processes in nature. Day and night. Summer to winter. As the historian Stephen Jay Gould explains in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), within the West, cyclical conceptions dominated ancient thought. It’s even hinted at in the Bible. For example, Ecclesiastes proclaims: ‘What has been will be again … there is nothing new under the sun.’ Yet, Gould writes, the Bible also contains a linear conception of time: time comprises a one-way sequence of unrepeatable events. Take Biblical history: ‘God creates the earth once, instructs Noah to ride out a unique flood in a singular ark.’ Gould describes this linear understanding of history as an ‘important and distinctive’ contribution of Jewish thought. Biblical history helped power linear ideas of time.
Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries, sometimes blurring into one another. After all, we live through natural, cyclical seasons and unrepeatable events – birth, first marriage, death. Importantly, medievals and early moderns didn’t literally see cyclical time as a circle, or linear time as a line. Yet in the 19th-century world of frock coats, petticoats and suet puddings, change was afoot. Gradually, the linear model of time gained ground, and thinkers literally began drawing time as a line…
[Thomas explores four key developments that fueled the shift, chronography (the development of timelines), Darwin and the emergence of the concept of evolution, chronophotography, and theories in math and physics of a “fourth dimension” (then explored by Einstein and Bergson, Mary Calkins and Victoria Welby, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and so many others…]
… Today, conceiving of time as a line remains widespread. Timelines are everywhere: in the history of evolution, the history of video games, and the history of chocolate. There’s even a timeline of timelines. And the effects of this line of thought (pun intended) are still with us. Philosophers continue to debate the reality of past and future: just check out this bumper encyclopaedia article on ‘Presentism’, ‘the view that only present things exist’. Time-travel stories run rife. Back to the Future. Groundhog Day. The Time Traveler’s Wife. Historians have largely dropped Victorian faith in the progress of humanity, yet progress stories about particular areas remain. For example, take this timeline: it straightforwardly depicts technological progress over time. All these ideas are powered by the notion that time is a line. Were we to reshape our idea of time, perhaps these other ideas would also find themselves bent into new forms…
As we wonder at Yeat’s widening gyre, we might send echoing birthday greetings to Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu; he was born on this date in 1689. Better known simply as Montesquieu, he was a French judge, historian, and political philosopher.
Montesquieu is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented (if not always observed) in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word “despotism” in the political lexicon. His anonymously published The Spirit of Law (De l’esprit des lois, 1748; first translated into English in 1750) was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, and influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States in drafting the U.S. Constitution.
We may all received time uniformly, but we tend to experience it wildly differently. Jonny Thaw had an issue with the way that we commonly refer to years-in-history, more specifically to the use of BC and AD (or BCE and CE) as a demarcation…
2025 AD? Wah?
I know that I live in 18 AiP (after iPhone)(as of 43 AL (after laptop)) and that makes it much easier because its talking about things that I KNOW
I don’t know an anno domini, i dont know a christ, let alone trying to comprehend what came before them??
So he did somethng about it: he created Improved Relative Time, which lets one create a categorical suffix appropriate to one’s own interests/experience.
For example, this year is 2025 AD (or CE)… but it is also 5000 AA (After Astrolabe) or 2400 AADRM (After Animal-Driven Rotary Drill) or 26 AG (After Google) or 3800 AOL (After the Origin of Language) or 585 APP (After the Printing Press) or 7500 AS (After Sailing) or 2500 ATS (After Toe Stirrup) or 123 AVC (After Vacuum Cleaner) or 2400 AW (After Wheelbarrow) or 133 AZ (After Zipper).
Dozens more examples (with links to sources), in what amounts to an amusingly formatted timeline, at Improved Relative Time.
* Seneca the Younger
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As we articulate the arc of history, we might recall that it was on ths date in 1965 that Bob Dylan entered the UK pop chart for the first time with “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” which peaked at #9 three weeks later.
Yeah, but why is it shorter than all of the other months? Timothy Taylor has the story…
I understand why the calendar adds an extra day to February every four years. The revolution of the earth around the sun is approximately 365 and one-quarter days. Every four years, that adds up to one additional day, plus some extra minutes. The modest rounding error in this calculation is offset by steps like dropping the extra day of leap year for years ending in “00.”
But my question is why February has only 28 days in other years. After all, January has 31 days and March has 31 days. If those two months each donated a day to February, then all three months could be 30 days long, three years out of four, and February could be 31 days in leap years. Every other month is either 30 or 31 days. Why does February only get 28 days?…
… The answer to such questions leads to a digression back into the history of calendars. In this case, Jonathan Hogeback writing at the Britannica website tells me, it seems to settle on the Roman king Numa Pompilius back around 700 BCE, before the start of the Roman Empire. The ancient Roman calendar of that time had a flaw: it didn’t have nearly enough days. As Hogeback writes:
The Gregorian calendar’s oldest ancestor, the first Roman calendar, had a glaring difference in structure from its later variants: it consisted of 10 months rather than 12. In order to fully sync the calendar with the lunar year, the Roman king Numa Pompilius added January and February to the original 10 months. The previous calendar had had 6 months of 30 days and 4 months of 31, for a total of 304 days. However, Numa wanted to avoid having even numbers in his calendar, as Roman superstition at the time held that even numbers were unlucky. He subtracted a day from each of the 30-day months to make them 29. The lunar year consists of 355 days (354.367 to be exact, but calling it 354 would have made the whole year unlucky!), which meant that he now had 56 days left to work with. In the end, at least 1 month out of the 12 needed to contain an even number of days. This is because of simple mathematical fact: the sum of any even amount (12 months) of odd numbers will always equal an even number—and he wanted the total to be odd. So Numa chose February, a month that would be host to Roman rituals honoring the dead, as the unlucky month to consist of 28 days.
This discussion does explain why February would be singled out, since it was the month of rituals honoring the dead. In Numa’s calendar, the 355-day year would be made up of 11 months that had the lucky odd numbers of 29 or 31 days, plus unlucky February.
The discussion also explains why months that start with the prefix “Oct-” or eight, “Nov” or nine, and “Dec-” or ten, are actually months 10, 11, and 12 in the calendar. Those names were originally part of a 10-month calendar year.
But questions remains unanswered: Why did the Romans of that time view odd numbers as lucky, compared with unlucky even numbers? I suppose that explaining any superstition is hard, but I’ve never seen a great explanation. A Dartmouth course on “Geometry in Art and Architecture” describes Pythagorean feelings about odd and even numbers. For those of you keeping score at home, Pythagoras lived about two centuries after Numa Pompilius. The Dartmouth course material summarizes aspects of “Pythagorean Number Symbolism”:
Odd numbers were considered masculine; even numbers feminine because they are weaker than the odd. When divided they have, unlike the odd, nothing in the center. Further, the odds are the master, because odd + even always give odd. And two evens can never produce an odd, while two odds produce an even. Since the birth of a son was considered more fortunate than birth of a daughter, odd numbers became associated with good luck…
[Taylor recounts the recurrence of this theme, from Virgil to Shakespeare…]
… While I acknowledge this history of a belief in odd numbers, as a person born on an even day of an even month in an even year, I’m not predisposed to accept it. But it’s interesting that modern photographers have a guideline for composing photographs called the “rule of odds.” Rick Ohnsman at the Digital Photography School, for example, describes it this way:
This is where the rule of odds comes into play, a deceptively simple yet powerful tool in your photographic arsenal. It’s all about arranging your subjects in odd numbers to craft compositions that are naturally more pleasing to the eye. Unlike more static guidelines, the rule of odds offers a blend of structure and organic flow, making your images both aesthetically pleasing and impressively compelling.
The revised calendar of Numa Pompilius couldn’t last. With only 355 days, it didn’t reflect the actual period of the earth revolving around the sun, and thus led to further revisions which are a story in themselves.
But when you think about it, the question of February having 28 days all goes back to Numa Pompilius and the superstitions about odd numbers. The modern calendar has 365 days in a typical year. You might think that the obvious way to divide this up would be to start off with 12 months of 30 days, and then add five days. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians had a calendar of this type, with five “epagomenal” or “outside the calendar days added each year.
The preference over the last two millennia, at least since the time of Julius Caesar, is to have 12 months, with a few of them being a day longer. But even so, why not in a typical year have five months of 31 days, and the rest with 30? The “problem,” I think, is that most months would then have unlucky totals of an even number of days. By holding February to 28 days rather than 30, you can redistribute two days from February and have 31 days in January and March. Thus, you can have only four months with an even total of 30 days every year (“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November …”), and seven months always with the luckier odd total of 31 days. In leap years, when February has 29 days, then eight months have an odd number of days. I think this makes February 29 a lucky day?…
As we muse on the marking of months, we might recall that it was on this date in 1692 that a doctor in Salem, Massachusetts (generally believed to have been William Griggs), was unable to find a physical explanation for the ailments (fits, pins-and-needles) of three young girls. As other young women in Salem began to evince the same symptoms, the local preacher declared them “bewitched”… and the stage was set for The Salem Witch Trials.
Jonathan Keats on why– and how– clocks that use nature to measure time can reintegrate people into the environment and counteract the calamities of the Anthropocene…
In his studio on the east coast of Vancouver Island, the master clockmaker Phil Abernethy is crafting a timepiece that will be calibrated in a manner that no horologist has ever attempted. It won’t show the minutes and hours of an ordinary human day. Instead, his clock will display time as experienced by some of the oldest trees on the planet.
Using techniques he’s honed over a lifetime, Abernethy will machine the gears by hand in traditional materials such as steel and brass. But the pendulum will respond to the forest: When trees grow quickly, the hours will advance more rapidly; more lethargic growth will result in a slower tempo. Over centuries, the long-term fate of the canopy will be registered on a calendar that may deviate from the Gregorian date by decades or more.
Abernethy has been commissioned to fabricate the arboreal clock by the Nevada Museum of Art. Standing 12 feet tall, the clock will be the first physical manifestation of an environmental timekeeping project I have been developing over the past decade. Some of the clocks in the project respond to rivers; Abernethy’s enlists a stand of bristlecone pine trees in Nevada’s Great Basin as living timekeepers.
Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.
Abernethy’s arboreal clock, in other words, upsets more than just the standards of horology. The environmental calamity known as the Anthropocene is a consequence of a worldview in which all that is not human is construed as a resource — even time itself. Other life forms are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, laid waste at a pace set by the world economy. Factory farming and logging, fossil fuel and plastics production, mining, human construction and infrastructure — all disregard the timing with which nonhuman systems emerge, ebb and flow. The globalized logic of industry, with its planetary supply chain, must keep up with human demand, turning civilization itself into a manifestation of logistics.
Our mastery of the world is a mastery of time. And as every industrialist knows, mastery of time requires the precision of a master clock to provide a temporal standard against which everything can be measured and controlled. Whether regulated by the swing of a pendulum or the oscillations of a strontium atom — as the most advanced atomic clocks are today — the master clock operates without an external feedback mechanism. The clock has become the ultimate authority. To question it would be tantamount to questioning modernity.
The design of Abernethy’s arboreal clock may be novel, but the underlying ideas are ancient. They predate pendulums and gearwork, originating in an era when people observed time in relation to other beings in order for all to flourish together. Ancient but mostly forgotten, these ideas are urgently needed today. Whatever practical use it might have, the arboreal clock is intended primarily to serve as a philosophical instrument…
…
… Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves. We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way. (Mumford astutely described clocks as “power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.”)
All life depends on timekeeping. But nonhuman life treats time as a mixed medium: entangled with the environment, dependent on other organisms…
…
… Near the peak of Mt. Washington in Nevada’s Great Basin, which rises more than 11,600 feet above sea level, the bristlecone pines are as scraggly as the tree in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Until very recently, bristlecones didn’t grow at this elevation. To walk down the slope is to stroll through time, eventually reaching trees that are several thousand years old and as solid as sculpted stone.
Over the past decade, I have gotten to know these trees, visiting with members of the Long Now Foundation, the organization that stewards part of the mountaintop and has partnered with me on the clock at the Nevada Museum of Art. By observing the trees and their embodied experience of time, I have been able to see the inadequacy of my wristwatch.
The trees sensitized me to the time reckoning of other life forms, both plants and animals. They attuned me to the time kept collectively in living systems such as rivers, where the flow rate is affected by the melting of glaciers and the eagerness of beavers, not to mention the unquenchable thirst of industrial agriculture. By gearing the flow of time to match the flow of the Susitna or Matanuska — as I have done in partnership with the Anchorage Museum — fluvial clocks can integrate people into local watersheds.
An arboreal clock can likewise integrate people into the forest. Or to be more accurate, it can reintegrate people into their ecosystems, counteracting the human denaturing of the Anthropocene…
As we think about time, we might also contemplate natural space, and spare a thought for Abraham Ortelius; he died on this date in 1598. A cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer, he created the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World)– “the book that invented the world.”
Ortelius is generally considered one of the founders (with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator) of the Netherlandish school of cartography and geography. He was an important geographer of Spain during the age of discovery– and the first person proposing that the continents were joined before drifting to their present positions.
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