![]() ![]() This always-always condition struck me as the most peculiarly modern anxiety: It’s the Sunday scaries, all week long.ĭerek Thompson: The workforce is about to change dramatically Such is the psychological misery of an undirected person for whom an urgent need to overcome idleness-to find purpose-becomes a source of stress. And at the bottom of his rankings, registering an “unparalleled level of unhappiness,” were those whose plight may sound puzzling: people who, though they almost always felt underscheduled, also almost always felt rushed. ![]() He found, as other workplace studies have shown, that Americans are surprisingly fretful when not absorbed by tasks, paid or otherwise. Considerably less happy than the just-rushed-enough, he said, were those with lots of excess time. We may constantly complain about our harried schedules, but the real joy-killer seemed to be the absence of any schedule at all. In an essay for Scientific American summarizing his research, Robinson offered a strenuous formula for joy: “Happiness means being just rushed enough.”ĭespite the headline focus on happiness, Robinson’s most unexpected insights were about American discontent. Their schedules met their energy level, and the work they did consumed their attention without exhausting it. Robinson reviewed more than 40 years of happiness and time-use surveys that asked Americans how often they felt they either were “rushed” or had “excess time.” Perhaps predictably, he concluded that the happiest people were the “never-never” group-those who said they very rarely felt hurried or bored, which isn’t to say they were laid-back. ![]() If only we could navigate our divided lives with seamless ease-except what if ease isn’t what most of us really want? In 2012, the University of Maryland sociologist John P. Guilt about recent lethargy kicks in as productivity mind gears up, and apprehension about workaday pressure builds as leisure mind cedes power. For several hours a week, on Sunday evening, a psychological tug-of-war between these perspectives takes place. In leisure mode, the thrumming subsides, allowing us to watch a movie or finish a glass of wine without considering how our behavior might affect our reputation and performance reviews. When we are under the sway of the former, we are time- and results-optimizing creatures, set on proving our industriousness to the world and, most of all, to ourselves. Imagine the 21st-century worker as accessing two modes of thinking: productivity mind and leisure mind. The deeper cause, I thought, might have something to do with the modern psychology of time. But capitalism also exists Monday through Saturday, so why should Sunday be so uniquely anxiety-inducing? He said that the culprit was clear, and pointed to late-stage capitalism’s corrosive blend of performance stress and job insecurity. S everal months ago, I got into a long discussion with a colleague about the origins of the “Sunday scaries,” the flood of anxiety that many of us feel as the weekend is winding down and the workweek approaches. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. This article was published online on December 13, 2020. ![]()
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