Liah Greenfeld When the Sky Is the Limit: Busyness in Contemporary American Society HOW LONG AGO WAS IT THAT I WAS ASKED TO WRITE THIS ESSAY ON busyness for Social Research—a year, perhaps more? I agreed on the spot: the subject seemed interesting and had been bothering me for some time. But I couldn’t do anything with it until a week before the deadline. I was too busy, o f course. Now I have to drop every thing else to write it, and it drives me mad. Perhaps, if I were better organized.. . . Still, there were too many things to do, it would have been impossible to add another. First, there were all those other arti cles which I committed m yself to write earlier, along with several dissertations to read, edit, and pass, hopefully with a recommenda tion for distinction: there were classes to teach and students—half a score o f them, at least—to see through depressions, break-ups with boyfriends/girlfriends, deaths in the family, assorted crises o f iden tity. There were political conflicts to attend to and lectures to give on topics of the moment, across the Atlantic or just in Canada, which meant arranging travel, making sure that my courses were taught and nobody committed suicide while I was away; that the dog was not over-traumatized, my mother did not feel lonely, my son did not forget to get up and still got enough sleep. The well-being of these latter three, o f course, had to be assured even when I was here, on a daily basis, for there is always a possi bility—a high probability, actually—that one’s efforts in this respect social research Vol 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 315 may lead to the opposite o f what one wishes to achieve and have to be corrected the next day. Then, I had to spend some quality time with my husband—romantic dinners tete-a-tete, little signs of atten tion, relaxing by the fire, which must be kept burning—all usually squeezed into some late hour after all the panicked e-mails to clamor ing editors (“Sorry, sorry, sorry—I promise the essay will be sent to you tomorrow!”) and soothing phone calls to desperate students, friends, or relatives (“There, there, the winter/summer/boss/overwork is not so bad, it can be, in fact, worse, and it certainly will get better”) and before falling into bed, dead for all intents and purposes. And then, of course, there were holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations o f achievement, and all the shopping, and cooking (not that I cooked that much—with all the nice specialty places around), and thinking of presents, and dressing up, and the exhausting job of being joyful, and maybe even playful___ Gosh, we lead busy lives. Most of the people I know no longer have the time, even occasionally, to stop and think. And yet, this is not because we accomplish or do so much. In fact, in comparison with other historical and some contemporary societies, we do not. Think, for instance, about the masses of itinerant agricultural laborers who participated in the gang system in early industrial England after 1834, so vividly described by Ivy Pinchbeck (Pinchbeck, 1969 [1930]: 86-87). This form of labor organization was an answer to the demand for an irregular work-force that arose with the development of large-scale commercial agriculture. Bands of workers of all ages and both sexes, under the direction of an overseer, moved from farm to farm as their services were required. They worked long hours for little pay, and most of them depended entirely on what they earned doing so. “One of the worst features of the system,”writes Pinchbeck, “was the physical hard ship and unnecessary fatigue imposed on both old and young on their journeys to and from work in all seasons and all weathers. In winter if the task was fairly near, a two-joumey day was worked; the gang set out at 7 a.m., returned at mid-day, and went again from 1 p.m. to dark; but 316 social research in summer the gang...