Stuff To Blow Your MindIn the 1970 book “Future Shock,” futurist Alvin Toffler outlined a vision of post-industrial society in which rapid technological and social changes outstrip the average human’s ability to cope. More than half a century later, how does this idea hold up and are contemporary humans victims of future shock? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss how it seems to be panning out.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on Future Shock, an example of that most interesting class of artifacts. A book of predictions about the future written more than fifty years ago, which is always fun. So if you haven't listened to part one yet, you should go back check that out first, but to briefly refresh here, Future Shock was an extremely influential, best selling futurology book published in the year nineteen seventy by an author named Alvin Toffler, and though only Alvin's name appears on the copy that I read, a lot of retrospective sources attribute these works to Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Alvin was Heidi's husband, and they were apparently major collaborators in developing ideas for the book, so a lot of retrospective looks at it credit both Alfin and Heidi, so we might say Toaffler or the Toafflers. Like most futurology books, Future Shock contains a lot of predictions about the future, some quite prescient, others that sound absolutely absurd with hindsight. But the real core of the book is not its specific predictions about what's going to happen twenty or thirty years down the road, but in its description of a mass psychological condition that the authors say is already evident at the time of the book's writing, brought on by the technological environment of what the Tafflers call super industrial society, and this would be the next technological leap forward after the Industrial Revolution. This is the technology environment beginning in roughly the mid twentieth century, and we got into more detail about this last time. But basically, according to the Tofflers, future shock is a way of experiencing a world in which technology, and downstream from that, economics and culture are all themselves changing and changing the world at an ever accelerating rate, and this leads to a variety of mass psychological distress similar to what has been called culture shock. Culture shock is when a person is plunged into a foreign culture and they don't understand the customs, don't know how to communicate, don't know how to interact with or make sense of the world around them, and suffer increased anxiety and other symptoms of psychological distress until they either become acclimated to the culture and figure out how to interact with it, or go home. Future Shock is like that, but it's for one's own culture and the way it is changed around us by technology. Except with the future Shock, you can't fix it by going home. The past is gone and the world is just going to keep changing, and it's just going to keep changing faster and faster. And this leads to, according to them, this feeling of widespread distress. People feel that there's something wrong about modern life. It's everything's too hurried. Something is just like something about the world is just bugging and harassing me, and I never feel safe for at home or like I can figure out what's going on. And of course, they say, of course, if this were true, it would have negative downstream effects on physical and mental health, which they talk about by creating this state of heightened stress and the other symptoms brought on by future shock. So we wanted to revisit this book and give it a look fifty years on. What do we think they were right about? What do we think they were wrong about? What are some of the interesting insights in the book. What are some of the funny things about the book. Last time I think we ended up. Do we get into the predictions about how children are going to have to learn how to pilot submarines in school?
No, I don't think you brought up the submarines. This was definitely something that had been jettison from my brain since my my original reading of the book. Tell us about the submarines, Joe, I don't.
I mean, there's just a bit. One of the big predictions for the future is that more and more of human life is going to take place on and underneath the ocean because there are a lot of natural resources to harvest there, which in a way is true. There there are a lot of natural resources there, but we haven't really shifted to ocean based cultures the way the book predicts. And in the chapter about education, I do recall there's a paragraph where it says something about how, you know, obviously children in the future it might be more advantageous for them to learn the skills of navigating a submarine environment and maybe maybe like piloting submarines and stuff. Then it will be to learn the learn the you know, the dead languages of the past or something.
Yeah, yeah, it turns out the Sea Lab future hasn't really caught on like they thought it might.
But like we said, there are other parts of the book where they offer insights that at least I thought we're pretty on target and do describe things that have happened in the last fifty years quite well. So maybe today we're going to start off by getting into some of the features of this future shock world that they describe and predict. And so the Toplers identify three big characteristics of super industrial society that they think will play a major role in inducing this state of future shock. Those elements are transience, novelty, and diversity. Basically, the world brought on by these changes in technology is going to be a world in which things just kind of situations arise more quickly and fade away more quickly without giving you time to adjust to them. That's the transience also, but there's a physical transience of things around us and of relationships between people. So there's a faster coming and going of the situations of life. That's transience. There is not which is obviously just like new things that you're not used to are going to be constantly coming into being, and you will have to get used to them somehow. And this includes everything from you know, technology and consumer products, to business and economic relationships, to things in culture like the family arrangements and social groups and stuff like that. And then finally diversity. There will just be more and more different kinds of things in the world for you to keep track of and select between and try to understand.
Yeah. Yeah, so let's let's break it down a little bit here, Yeah, because it definitely helps to sort of single in on some of the key examples they bring up, because they ultimately bring up so many different examples and illustrations of what future shock is that it's it's easy to just sort of think of it as this big amorphous thing. So one of the key concepts that the toplers bring up a lot is that of over choice quote, the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are canceled by the complexity of the buyer's decision making process. So in this freedom becomes unfreedom as one suffers from a kind of hyper decision fatigue. And they also offer that there may be a social variation of over choice as well, as one suffers from an inability quote to create a sensible integrated and reasonably stable personal style. Now, I don't know about that last part personally.
If I understand this idea right, it's that you know, when there's just like too much freedom and variety to choose from in how to style yourself, like to decide to like, hey, am I a biker or am I a hippie or am I a whatever, that it's actually kind of paralyzing to have all these options.
Yeah, And I mean, I would be very interested to hear from listeners out there as far as personal style is concerned. Here if you've ever felt over choice or something like over choice concerning your personal style, I don't know. I think of my own experience and I look around in the world around me, and it seems like people, yeah, have more choices than ever, but they still seem to figure it out. If they're paralyzed by over choice regarding whether to be a biker or not, they don't seem to express it. I was just just saw somebody's social media post the other day and they had like a picture of their boyfriend there and they like were clearly decked out like a nineteen seventies biker, and I was like, well, they chose something and they're committing to it. They don't seem to be paralyzed by choice.
Here a seventies biker, So this is a were wolves on wheels biker, not like a fifties biker.
Total yeah, total seventies biker. Look. And you know because even now, like if you choose biker, you do get to choose which decade. Right, there are multiple choices, but not necessarily overchoice.
Do I want to be like Roger Korman biker, like a Marlon Brando biker, or do I want to be a were wolf on.
Wheels exactly psychomania? You have your choice.
I think one of the big differences is that the earlier bikers bathe more.
They do get grevier. In the seventies, everything get a little gravier, all right, now, as far as decision fatigue goes, this being related to this concept of over choice, A lot has been written about decision fatigue over the years. I know it was particularly hot as like a buzzword, you know, maybe ten to fifteen years ago. I don't think everything has been quite worked out concerning decision fatigue. I think we all know that feeling when we have trouble making yet another decision in the day, often late in the day or laid in a shopping trip, and we often wind up making questionable purchasing decisions, or that seems to be the case. That's the argument of decision fatigue.
Yeah, I haven't checked in on the empirical research on decision fatigue, but I can say from personal experience it seems to be a real thing. I mean that there is an increasingly sort of taxing cumulative effect on the mind of having to make decisions over and over, and your desire to continue making decisions definitely goes down, and the more you have had to do it, and probably also your ability to use your rational faculties when making those decisions goes down as part of that cumulative effect, which may be a reason that you know, like certain sales interactions are structured a certain way that like, you know, you've already had to make a bunch of decisions about investigating these cars and stuff, and then right at the end, when you are just like weary of this process, they hit you with upsells and stuff, and you're just like trying to get this done and get out the door. And so maybe you give in, even if it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, Yeah, it does seem to either be a reality or touch on a very firm reality when it comes to sales interactions, because it has become something that that various salespeople depend on now in terms of just over choice more generally, you know, as far as my own experiences go, I guess I have felt something like over choice at times. Given, especially when you're thinking about extensive digital catalogs of movies or books. There have been plenty of times where I have my e reader device out and I'm looking for something to read, and I end up, you know, just browsing a lot, downloading some samples, and then eventually I get sleepy and go to bed and I haven't actually read anything I've In the past, I had this experience with some of the big digital catalogs of movies online where I'll go on there and I'll start looking around at interesting looking films, looking at posters, looking at who's in them, and then seeing what are some like related films, and I end up spending like, you know, an hour even looking around at films, never pick out something to watch, get sleepy, go to bed. Yeah, and even Reno reached the point where I'm just like I just can't decide, and I realize I'm not going to make a decision and I just need to do something else.
Yeah, this is an extremely common thing with browsing movie selections on streaming services. I've also really noticed this with music, and in a way, this makes me very sad. I cannot help but conclude my connection with music has become less deep and less fulfilling. I think as a result of streaming services just having available anything I want to listen to. I know I had a deeper and more enjoyable relationship with music when I had a more limited selection of music to choose from, and it was hard to find things I wanted to listen to.
Yeah, I definitely remember back when I had to buy an album, even if it was a digital album, Like, all right, i've spent my ten, twelve bucks whatever it is for the week. I can't rationally buy another album this week or maybe even this month. So this is the one I'm going to listen to, and I'm either going to like it or I'm going to find reasons to like it. I'm going to rationalize this purchase. But nowadays, yeah, you can try anything, and you and I find myself off in giving the new material just little or no time to impress me, and it's got to really impress me otherwise I just you know, it stays tagged, stays in the list, but I might not listen to it again for another year.
I hate that this is true about me, but I think it is now.
I will say that with movies in particular, I find it I'm encountering it less these days for a couple of reasons. First, I think the monolithic selection that was originally provided by some of these big, big box streaming platforms, there's been a you know, there's been a fracturing, there's been a contraction of their offerings. And also we've seen the resurgence of physical media. So I find myself going to like Atlanta's own videodrome more often these days, looking around there, and you know, I can feel overwhelmed by the physical selection as well, But there's something different about that physical selection and knowing that, like, Okay, in maybe fifteen minutes, I need to leave here, and I'm either leaving empty handed or I'm leaving taking a chance on something.
I think it may well be that your decision to go to videodrome and get the physical media. Might be kind of like the person who chooses says I'm a biker or I'm a hippie. You know, it's part of your personal style. You are in a way a movie nerd. You're a guy who goes to videodrome.
Yeah, yeah, so I would be interested to hear from everyone else out there on this. Do you feel over choice or something like over choice or even just doing decision fatigue in any area of your life that relates to what we're talking about here, all right, now, the next big one, this is something that, of course, you know, we could easily talk at length about. And that's the idea that it's a world of accelerating change, The idea that you know, one just feels simply overwhelmed by the rate of change in the world social, technological et cetera, with of course, all the additional avenues of change brought on by both. So the rate of change outstrips our ability to adapt. And meanwhile, the book argues, old stabilizing institutions fall away or become less important, so the guide rail you've been following through this storm of change might suddenly just not be there. Anymore or it gets shakier. And and you know what am I supposed to do now? Because I've been depending upon this system to get me here Now, they write that humans are famously grad at adapting, right, I mean, that's like humanity's thing. We can adapt to all sorts of situations and events in life, and we've adapted a great deal as humans have have have taken over the world. But at the end of the day, they say, we're still organisms. We're still quote unquote biosystems, and quote all such systems operate within inexorable limits, they write, quote we might We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive system and it's decision making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over stimulation.
Yeah, and in some ways I see this as overlapping with what we were just talking about. So in a world where there is so much diversity of things to choose between, and so many decisions you can or have to make, that of course is a type of stress. But also increasingly accelerating changes in the culture around you force you to make new choices because they are they're essentially they're obliterating the stable habits that you establish for yourself that allow you to go through life without having to make too many choices. Habits in a way are just a way of alleviating choice stress, you know, like I don't have to think about what I'm going to do now I know what comes next. And we do this with all kinds of things in our lives. When the world around you is just changing faster and faster, it's harder for you to stick to habits, and thus it's just forcing new decision stresses onto you all the time.
Yeah. I mean even you know with technology obviously, you know, in user interfaces, even as they make changes with various interfaces to make it easier or supposedly make it easier, like you still then have to adapt to it. And I think we all encounter this all the time, like, oh now my phone screen is different. Now this interface is different, and maybe it's actually going to be better, but I still have to learn it all again, and there's no telling when this will happen again, and then I have to relearn it once more. Yeah.
And one of the examples they talk about in the book. This kind of relates to their discussion of planned obsolescence, the fact that there are all kinds of consumer choices people are forced to make, essentially because the you know, manufacturers want to find a way to sell the new thing, even if the new thing isn't actually all that better. They've just they're trying to find ways to keep the economic activity churning, which is still forcing you to learn something new and make new decisions. Maybe maybe they can convince you that, oh no, this, actually this new thing is actually better. I do want the new thing, but is it?
Yeah, it's it seems so rare these days. I mean, this is where this aligns up with a lot of truth. It's so rare these days where you find a product where it's like, oh, this works really well and I don't think I'll ever have to replace it. There's no way they could improve upon it. It seems almost bad for business when that's the case. You know, Like I have a coffee making device that I use all the time, and I did manage to break it once whilst bringing in on a flight, but otherwise it's simple, it doesn't break. There's nothing really new you get for it, except for filters, you know, or if you do lose or break apart. And at times I'll wonder, it's like, wow, what's the plan with this company? Like how can they you can only like expand usage of this so much? How are you going to sell additional ones to people who use the product?
Yeah, well this ties into one of the next things that they talk about, which is which is transience and the economic or connsumer. One of the big economic or consumer manifestations of transience is just everything around you being more and more disposable, physically coming into your life for a shorter and shorter period of time.
Yeah. And so they talk about this at length in terms of products certainly, and you know, we've always heard bits of this like oh, the furniture of these days, this is not meant to last old days. We had the same furniture our whole lives and that was passed down to us from our grandparents, that sort of thing. But in the book they also apply it to things beyond products, like relationships, jobs, cultural institutions, and more. And I think a lot of these examples do ring with a certain amount of truth. For instance, people having to reskill, you know, to keep pace with changes in technology, you know, people having to change careers multiple times during the course of a lifetime and so forth.
There was one part in this section of the book that I actually found quite interesting where it made me think about how there are different types of materialism of you know, one material goods, whereas you know, usually when you think about materialism, that's just like, oh, I want to buy something, I want to own something and have it. But there is a big difference. There's a big emotional and psychological difference between wanting to buy something that you will keep and form a relationship with versus wanting to buy something that you will use and then discard and get a different thing that feels different. And they use the example of dolls that like, traditionally, you know, a child might form a strong emotional connection with one doll and then keep that one doll over many, many years. And then they talk about the idea of toy companies trying to introduce new models of relationships with dolls where you would like, trade in your old doll, maybe trade in your old barbie to get a new one, to introduce this idea that you don't just have one doll and have a relationship with it for years, but you're always getting newer, better dolls.
In a way, it's almost hard to process that because it's just how everything is now, you know. I mean, it's like, except for maybe the trade in factor, that actually sounds more sustainable than just having a drawer of old barbies with like their hair all missed up and no clothing on anymore.
Well, I think, yeah, I think that the old barbie is what you do with them now is you make them look weird, right, you like cut their hair in strange ways and like draw on them and stuff.
Yeah, that sort of thing. But yeah, like I actually kind of like the idea of, oh, when you're done with this doll, with this toy, whatever the thing happens to be, let's trade that in, let's pass that on. I don't know, I become more of a minimalist with the sort of thing.
So I guess while we're discussing things that I think the book does get largely right. One of the most interesting and persuasive sections of Future Shock, in my opinion, was the Toffler's discussion of how people use and understand their time and how that's changing due to the technological environment. For example, I thought there was a really interesting observation about how fundamental duration expectation is to the character of our lives. We are creatures that we have no choice but to live in time, and most situations that we are involved in or affected by, come with an unspoken expectation of a certain duration in time. We expect it to take a certain amount of time to make dinner, a certain amount of time to complete the workday, a certain amount of time to travel here or there. And also for longer situations. There are duration expectations for business and employment relationships, length of time at a particular residence, length of a friendship or another type of social relationship, length of a marriage, and sometimes we get these expectations wrong. You know, you can't always predict, but we have to be able to predict the duration of most of these situations with some reasonable degree of accuracy, or we cannot navigate our lives. Everything feels totally out of control. And I think the Tofflers advance a pretty convincing case that in general, in the twentieth century, especially the later twentieth century and superindustrial society, most situations in life are evolving to become shorter and change faster, and this acceleration is too fast for people to adjust their duration expectations accordingly, and this contributes to a widespread feeling that life is overwhelming and out of control and causes people to feel helpless and confused and alienated. And for the most part, I think this diagnosis is largely insightful and correct.
This is fascinating. Yeah, getting into how we think about our time, how we estimate the time duration of things we are going to be involved in, and then yeah, I think we can all think of time just in our regular day to day where you get something wrong and yeah, before long, you maybe you don't feel just like overwhelming anxiety, but you do feel that feeling of well, there's a sense of narrowing, there's a sense of things slipping a little out of your control, moving faster than they should.
So, because their comments on time use were one of the most interesting things about the book to me, I was wondering, Okay, has anybody looked at this empirically. Do we have like a retrospective that has tried to evaluate their claims and said how do they stack up? I actually did find a paper on this subject. So there was a paper published in the year twenty ten in the Journal of Future Studies by an author named Mika Pantsar, and it's called Future Shock, discussing the changing temporal architecture of daily Life. So, Mika Pantsar is an economist based at the University of Helsinki in Finland. And so this article assesses some of the claim that are put forward in Future Shock that feel correct, but are kind of presented in the book without rigorous empirical backing. They're just sort of asserted, specifically, claims about changes to the rhythms of everyday life. Pants Are writes quote. The main purpose of this article is to examine, in the light of time use research, to what extent and in what ways Tofler's claims about the quickening of life rhythms have come true. And pants Are begins by noting a seeming paradox in the research on time use. Since the time Future Shock was published in nineteen seventy, studies in Western countries have shown that, on average, the amount of leisure time in people's lives has slowly but steadily increased. I think it's not a huge difference, but there's been a gradual increase of a little bit with the exceptions of the United States in Great Britain, where it seems leisure time has actually somewhat decreased in the same period, at least up to the point of the studies pants are sites which are from nineteen ninety two in two thousand and four, can't be sure if the trend continues after that. But even in the rest of the Western countries where people have on average had a little bit more free time, surveys have found people report consistently increased feelings of hurriedness in their lives. So of course it makes sense why people would be feeling more hurried and stressed out in the US and Great Britain on average if people actually have a little bit less free time, But why would they be feeling that in countries where they have more free time than they did a generation ago? And the author argues that quote, the paradox of increased leisure time and feelings of hurriedness become understandable when the focus is shifted from the total amount of free time and duration of activities to qualitative changes in rhythms resulting from various interdependencies between mundane activities. So it may be not so much how much time we have, but how time is structured in our lives. So, first of all, just to review a few interesting empirical findings on people's time use in general. And again remember this was published in twenty ten, so findings coming in after that could change the picture somewhat. But first of all, as a note, it should be said that accounting for people's time use has presented more methodological difficulties than you might at first imagine. So time youse studies are often structured so that you sort your time use into episodes of activity that fit into various categories like paid work or housework or rest or free time. But studies found that there were some uses of time that were kind of difficult to sort into categories, and some events recognized as episodes by the subjects that researchers didn't anticipate, such as Swedish researchers in the nineties discovering that lots of people regard quote coming home as a unique time use episode in the day. Where does that fit in? You know, the time you're arriving at your house and getting settled. So this kind of research isn't as easy as it might sound. Still, there were a selection of interesting findings I wanted to mention. One was that international comparative studies in the seventies and early eighties found that time use varied a lot more based on the level of economic development than on the economic system. So people might have imagined, going, you know, your hypothesis might be that time use is very different on different sides of the Iron Curtain. But instead they found that superpower countries both communists and capitalists, had similar patterns of time use. People used their time much the same way as in the United States and the Soviet Union, but these patterns were much different than how people spent their time in less developed economies on both sides of the Cold War divide. And I think that would kind of stack up with the future shock claim that changes in technology filter down to changes in the rest of culture and in work and in family life, and this is largely what's guiding changes in how people experience time. Okay, there's also some research indicating that in Western countries time use is converging on more uniformity across different demographic categories. So like it used to be that men and women spend their time in more different ways, some studies apparently find that their patterns are coming closer together, though, and the same would be true of differences between social classes. Though even though there might be a trend in the direction of more similarity over time, differences remain and Pantsar also cites research finding that on average, men still had more free time than women, and the rich still had more than the poor, But overall time use studies of this sort revealed that changes between nineteen seventy and this paper in twenty ten are fairly modest in terms of overall time use, with one major exception one big change, which is TV. One of the biggest changes that can be tracked since the time of Future Shock is the average change in the amount of time daily spent watching television. People on average across all Western countries spend a lot of their free time watching TV. Quote in almost all Western countries, the share of television from the roughly six hours of daily free time is nowadays about a third, that is over two hours. Increasingly, TV watching serves as a kind of indicator of the flexibility of daily schedules, So when there is more free time, TV watching sort of expands to absorb that time, and when people have more things to do and they have less free time. TV watching is cut to make the time.
I mean we do, or at least we have been living in an age of prestige television though, I mean the golden age of television with so many great shows.
Surely that is what we're all spending our time on. We're watching the great shows.
Yeah, you get Yeah, you gotta make fun make time for the fun shows too.
Yeah. But Pantzer also says that the inner, of course, is changing these patterns. Again, this was twenty ten, so it seems very likely that the Internet is increasingly filling time that used.
To be devoted to TV.
So maybe today people spend a lot of the time that used to be devoted to TV scrolling social media instead.
Step up. I don't think so.
However, these types of studies have real limits because, for example, they give an oversimplified picture of what each of these classes of activities really means. What about when you are doing work, like your paid job work on a laptop and you're texting with a friend and watching TV at the same time. What about when you're watching TV while you're cooking dinner for your family. What about while when you're like trying to relax and so you're trying to have rest or free time, but you're constantly being interrupted every few minutes by pings from work, email, or a crying baby that needs to be soothed back to sleep. How do you measure or categorize these types of time use and and understand their qualitative effect on life? So Pantsar says it's probably more important to look at quote the quality of time spent, and especially the inner structure of time use or the architecture of time. So the author here says that there are a lot of studies indicating that when people feel stress related to their time use, a lot of it seems to come from dissatisfaction with the way time is organized, rather than like just how much free time you do or don't have. People seem to feel more stressed when their time is spent in a way that is quote externally directed, being largely reactive to continual surprises. So I'm imagining you know when your time is spent in a way that you did not deliberately and autonomously choose, it's taken up by a bunch of unpredictable stimuli or tasks or bids for your attention, that you feel like you are obligated to react to and don't know what they're going to be ahead of time or when they're going to come in. This can of course be true of the work life, especially for certain professions, but also true of home life, especially for people responsible for home and childcare and time use. Organize this way creates a sense of urgency and sometimes a lack of autonomy, leading to feelings of hurriedness and stress. You know, for a hyper streamlined version of this, I know my own brain reacts exactly this way. It work like My sense of stress with work is almost perfectly correlated to like how many unexpected emails and extra kinds of tasks are coming in asking me to focus on something other than like my main work. And likewise at home, I feel a lot less stress about one big housework project that I chose to do, versus like a bunch of problems that keep popping up without warning that I have to do something about immediately.
That's a problem about about home ownership. Though. All you do is you get all those little pop up problems one after the other in addition to the big ones that you know are coming.
So Pantser calls this the number of quote action episodes that our daily time use is broken up into, and that the number of action episodes is likely to just keep increasing. The differences in these numbers already correlate with differences that we see in people's level of stress about time use.
Quote.
At present, women's time is divided into more pieces than men's, which perhaps explains why women are more stressed than men about their time use. This trend is strengthened by the fact that the overlapping of episodes has increased, especially with women. And so when we look at this idea about the quality or the inner structure of time use, we can find empirical research documenting several changes, and Pantser summarizes them into a table of five main trends. First of all, studies find that in the recent decades, time use is becoming more irregular. Just one example of time use becoming more irregular a shift on average from predictable established meal times to unpredictable ad hoc sessions of eating or snacking, which occur at different times and last for different amounts of time. I will say this is certainly true in my life. I think when I was younger, I ate at more predictable meal times. And I don't know, maybe just that this is something personal, but certainly my eating schedule is way more irregular than it used to be.
Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know. I feel my mine's pretty We run a tight ship around here. Things are pretty solid. But that being said, with a child, sometimes it does take a long time to finish these meals. I don't know, they're still working out exactly why this is the case, but like, sometimes it's like a fifteen minute meal. Other times it's like, all right, we're about the inner hour two of dinner. We don't have time for this.
Another example I thought of, I think people used to have more regularized news consumption sessions on average. On average, people used to have more likely like a standard time for reading the newspaper or watching the evening news. Now, following the news has become a more irregular, ad hoc activity that occurs at less predictable times throughout the day and fills in other bits of free time.
Which is, for a lot, if not most, people, not a good model. I mean, sometimes your profession requires you to stay on the pulse of the news twenty four to seven. But I know for a lot of people, like one of a big bit of like therapeutic advice has been, hey, just pick a certain time to check the news, or find a way where you're getting your news via say a newsletter or something to that effect, so that it's not just you're just constantly dipping in, constantly diving into your news app feed or or worse, you know, your social media related news feed, whatever the case may be. Like setting aside a particular time and saying this is when I will get the news, and then I will get it again tomorrow.
I am not a mental health professional, but I think that is really solid advice. I think confining your news consumption to regularize time periods rather than just like looking at the news in idle moments, is much better for your brain.
I know in my experience, a big one has been cutting out this whole model where if I'm in the car, I'll probably have the news on and listen to the news for a bit. You know, there are a lot of great news programs on the radio and on public radio that I enjoy a lot, and I still may listen to them occasionally. But I felt myself evening out a bit when I started leaning more into like, okay, I'm I'm gonna listen to music, or I'm gonna put on an audio book. If I need something that's non musical, let's do an audiobook instead and set aside time for checking out on the news some other time.
I think that's a very good strategy. Okay, so that's the first thing. Studies find time use becoming more irregular. Second empirical finding time use is becoming more fragmented. We are spending less unbroken time devoted to single activities. There is more frequent switching between different activities and intrusions of one activity on another. I think about myself, and again, it's totally possible this may have more to do with personal, individual life changes unique to me than changes in the broader culture. I don't know. But still I'm reminded of how, like ten fifteen years ago, I would really often, just frequently sit down and watch a whole movie. I would just watch it through from beginning to end, with no interruptions. And in recent year, I mean, obviously now I have a child, but even before I had a child, in recent years, I don't know, the past five years, that idea just seems ludicrous, like it's just a given, and that there will be interruptions of some sort to the movie watching experience. I'll need to break the viewing into multiple sittings. Maybe I'll need to go focus on something else. I'll get an email or text or something I need to respond to, or just something happens that prevents me from sitting down for two hours and paying attention to one thing.
Yeah, sometimes I found this sometimes in my own experience, And I certainly don't mind breaking up a movie watching one half one day and one half the next. Sometimes it's broken up a lot more than that. But at times where there have been times where I've watched an entire movie or the majority of a movie in one setting, And it's a notable experience when that happens, Like generally, it's a testament to how good the movie is that it was able to like suck me in enough that I was able to not get distracted by various other tasks.
Yeah, it feels. It feels significant when it happens now. And the author of this paper relates this finding about time use becoming increasingly fragmented to studies comparing something comparing a couple of concepts called casual leisure versus serious leisure, and the idea here is that they're actually different types of leisure activities. There's casual leisure, which does not require serious concentration, can be easily interrupted, broken into pieces, and there's serious leisure, which requires concentration and has some hierarchical elements. In my own case, I think of like scrolling junk on my phone as casual leisure versus playing and recording music as serious leisure. I get much much more enjoyment and fulfillment from the latter. I would really rather be spending my time doing that, but I often default to the former, to the scrolling, because I know that I only have a short amount of free time and I expect to be interrupted by something, so I really can't get into the committed concentration state necessary for music.
Yeah. Yeah, I also find this in my own life. Like for me, casual leisure is often something like painting a little bit on some minis, which are often on a like a tray next to my work computer. So I'll find on a good day, I may find, you know, a couple of moments to sort of switch seats and do a little bit of painting and then clean everything up, let that dry go back to what I was doing, you know, And I like that. I like having a casual leisure activity that I can dip in and out of. It certainly fits in with like a you know, busy lifestyle, but yeah, that serious leisure when you can is sometimes the kind of thing you you kind of fantasize about, like you imagine yourself locked in a room with your casual leisure activities where you can only do that one thing. Goodness. I think I think of things like, you know, reading a good book on a beach being in a way kind of a serious leisure activity where it's like, what am I doing for the next hour or two? This? This is what I'm doing.
I think when we mentioned in our Weird House Cinema episode on The Never Ending Story that the thing about the movie I remember from childhood being even more exciting than any of the fantasy elements, was just the idea that this kid takes a book and he goes and hides in a room and nobody knows he's there, and he just reads the book all day and nobody comes in and tells him that he has to go do something else. And I remember at the time that just feeling magical, and it still does make me feel that way.
I guess one of the problems that arises out of all this is what you're probably not dealing with just a this this division between casual leisure and serious leisure and having to pin more on casual leisure. But also it's like casual work versus serious work, right, and the day ends up getting broken into like a bunch of like short bursts of activity as opposed to like kind of like deep focus, deep research sort of work that many many jobs require in one form or another.
Yeah, okay, but anyway, that's time is becoming more fragmented this second finding third empirical finding.
Time time use is becoming more overlapped. People are increasingly trying to do multiple different things at the same time. And there may be a few exceptions, but for the most part, if you're trying to do multiple things at the same time, you're probably not doing either one of them very well.
Yeah, yeah, I mean at the same time, it's like you want to catch up on your podcast listening. I mean, what do you do You've put those earbuds in whilst you're doing other things, right.
Yeah, yeah, well, and that does highlight actually I mean, there are certain things that are easier to do simultaneously than others. Yeah, like listening to an audiobook or a podcast or something while you're say, cleaning up the kitchen that's something I do often, or doing other kind of chores, wrote chores around the house. I think that's a different kind of brain division, where you know, the divided attention doesn't suffer too much. I think where it really does suffer, at least in my case, is like, I don't know, trying to work on something while also paying attention to something else.
Like yeah, just like you're cooking, say you're cooking at the same time while also trying to research for something you know, where you're like, okay, that has fifteen minutes put on that timer. Now I have fifteen minutes to do this other task. But you're never really completely into that other task because you know, you have the stove running that sort of thing.
Now, a lot of times in people's lives, it just seems like you have no choice but to multitask because you know you've got two things you've got to do and you only have a certain amount of time. So this is just something that is increasingly true about modern life. Apparently more and more tasks are taking place simultaneously. Another change that studies have found, which is that time use and everyday routines are shifting to new places. Just one example here, people are increasingly trying to do certain time use activities in the car while commuting that maybe used to take place in the home or somewhere else. And then finally last the fifth finding here is quote productivity gains and rationalization achieved by new technology does not generate free time, but rather heightens standards. So I think the illustration here as you imagine some new labor saving device that makes it easier to get your work done faster, or makes it easier to clean your home. Maybe you get a new appliance that does some kind of chore for you that you used to have to do with your hands. Does this generate more new free time in your life? The answer is generally no. Instead, it increases how much people report that they are expected to accomplish whatever, you know, whether that's like paid work or housework or whatever. So there's just sort of like an increasing standard of what you feel you have to do.
Yeah, it's like the robot is cleaning the floor now, and now I owe it to the universe to work more to make up for like my laziness or something, you know, I don't know, like sometimes there's kind of this weird like element of guilt associated to it, you know, like if I'm not working, if I'm not fixing something, then I'm somehow like cheating the universe somehow.
So there are some other sections of this paper that are kind of interesting, but I'm not really going to get into stuff about like rhythm analysis and relationship of like biological rhythms to time use in life and stuff. But one of Panther's points here is that while the Tofflers may have gotten plenty of things wrong, their core predictions about coming changes in time use are essentially borne out by the empirical research. They were pretty good at predicting what was going to happen with time, the increasing fragmentation of our time, increasing multitasking, increasing irregularity, shortening of time intervals for doing things that this is basically what has been found by most of the research on this subject. Our time use has become more irregular, more fragmented, and more overlapped. And this it does correspond roughly with people saying that they feel more hurried and stressed out about time. And I think it's quite plausible that changes in technology, and then downstream from that, changes in the economy, downstream changes in culture, the culture of work and of home life and all that are plausibly to blame for this. Now, interestingly, here the author does point out one thing about these time you studies that they do think that the Toffler's got wrong. So Panser says, quote on one point, Toafler was clearly wrong, according to our present knowledge. He expected the society of urgency would kill human interaction and in particular lead to a weakening of the position of the family, the home, the children, and the spouse. In fact, however, and rather surprisingly, both time you studies and value studies conducted over the past few decades tell us about distinct growth of family and home centeredness in the Western world. And then a number of studies are cited here. Furthermore, the new information technology has not moved time use away from the home either. It has done the opposite. So I thought that was really interesting. The Tofflers thought that the technological environment of the super industrial age would weaken family connections and get people to spend more and more time coming and going outside the home. Empirically, people are spending more time at home than ever. Perhaps it did weaken some relationships, Like I think there might be some research indicating a weakening of friendships outside the home and maybe made people less likely to see friends in places outside the home. And maybe now people instead are spending more of their free time like at home with the internet instead of going out and seeing friends and doing things with friends. But I thought that was interesting that it didn't change, It didn't weaken the home based relationships the way they.
Predicted, right right, That is interesting.
But in the end of this paper, Panther says that the empirical studies on time use show that Tofler was mostly correct about our time quote. In the future, if we believe in Toafler, many of our repetitive everyday life routines will disappear as our weekly rhythm of work breaks up with the new communication technology accelerating our pace rather than relaxing it. The duration and number of episodes, their overlaps and mutual couplings, their construction and placement in time and space, and opportunities to affect the placement of activities are to the greatest extent, well being issues. So pointing out again that like this isn't just sort of like neutral information, that like studies about how we use our time, the quality of time spent, and how time relates to say, our expectations about time use. This affects our quality of life and our mental health.
Yeah, there are. It kind of comes back to this idea that, yeah, that we we are adaptive, but we are not so adaptive that we can change in you know, in real time to anything like there are there are hard limits in place. It would seem to just what we can roll with as as creatures.
So I feel somewhat vindicated in that one of the parts of the book that felt strongest to me does seem to be in an at least large part born out by subsequent empirical research. But we could come back to the submarine schools and the organ transplant murder gangs.
Oh yes, the modular temporary humans yeah, and social yeah. Yeah, There's a lot lot more to talk about in that vein, and and also in the next episode, I do want to talk a bit about some of the maladaptive coping strategies that they lay out in the book, which I thought we're very insightful, like talking about, well, how do we how do we find ourselves or potentially find ourselves dealing with future shock without actually dealing with it in an actual beneficial manner. So yeah, we'll be back with at least a third episode on future shock, and yeah, in the meantime, we'll look forward to hearing from anyone out there if you have thoughts on this general concept or some of these related topics we've talked about, like time usage, leisure, activity, and so forth.
I agree that the section about the coping strategies is interesting. Yeah, I'm excited to get into that.
All right, Well we'll go ahead and close it out here, but yeah, right in, we'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder that we are primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But you know, we got a lot, a lot of days to fill up with content these days, constantly working, going from one topic to the next, So we've got listener mail on Mondays, we have a short form Monster Factor artifact on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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