The Good Old Times

The 'good old times' -- all times when old are good --
Are gone...
- Byron, The Age of Bronze

I've been reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. While exploring various reasons for a society failing to perceive environmental degradation, Diamond mentions "creeping normalcy" or "landscape amnesia", referring to the tendency for people to become accustomed to large changes if they occur slowly and gradually.

One such change, it seems to me, is the increasing busyness of life. Perhaps the 9-to-5 office job was always a myth for most people, but it certainly seems that people I know work longer hours now than people did when I was a kid, though I wasn't paying a lot of attention then. Certainly if you go back farther, people worked much longer hours: in 1900, manufacturing workers put in 55-60 hours a week over 6 days (source). And average weekly work hours have remained stable from 1976 to 1993. However, since 1981, the proportion of Canadian adults working more than 40 hours per week has risen (source - PDF), so more people are indeed working more (though more people are also working less than 35 hours per week). And according to Whaples' report (op. cit.), "Although median weekly hours were virtually constant for men [since 1950], the upper tail of the hours distribution fell for those with little schooling and rose for the well-educated."

But even our leisure time seems to be busier nowadays. There are certainly many more things to occupy us: every year brings 600 new movies, 2000 new video games, and at least 275,000 new books, not to mention the ever-increasing torrent of Internet forums, blogs, and social networking sites.

When I was a kid, I spent uncounted hours playing with the same Legos, listening to the same few LPs, rambling around in the same woods, and rereading the same books (I read The Lord of the Rings something like a dozen times). Now there are so many new books and games, so much new music, it seems to me I seldom have time to experience any single book, game, or album in depth.

This reminds me of a poignant bit from Bill Bryson's Lost Continent (1989):

[I] wondered why it was that I had been so enchanted by this place when I was five years old. Were childhoods so boring back then? I knew my own little boy, if driven to this place, would drop to the ground and start hyperventilating at the discovery that he had spent a day and a half sealed in a car only to see a bunch of boring log cabins. And looking at it now, I couldn't have blamed him. I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

Maybe less is more. Maybe I should just stop now and go reread something.