为什么每个人都这么忙？
In search of lost time
寻找逝去的时间
Why is everyone so busy?
为什么每个人都这么忙？
Time poverty is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution
时间贫瘠一方面是我们的认知问题，另一方面是时间分配问题
Dec 20th 2014 | From the print edition of The Economist
译者：keyjing
THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?
那些预言听起来如同诺言一般：1930年，约翰.梅纳德.凯因斯认为，未来的工作时间会变短，假期会变长。“我们的子孙们”每天只需“工作三小时”左右-如果他们这么选择的话。在他那个年代，经济和科技发展已经将工作时间大大缩短了，所以没理由相信这种趋势不会继续。新功能汽车，各种省时工具和其他电器设备让我们在生活的方方面面更加快捷灵活。社会心理学家甚至开始烦恼：人们的空闲时间那么多，要做什么呢？
This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.
可惜这个烦恼没有成为世界的紧迫问题之一。无论在哪，人人都显得很忙碌。一家顾问公司的分析师麦肯锡称,在企业界，“时间常年不够用”这个问题苦恼着世界各地的企业家，近年来这个问题变得愈发棘手。对在职父母来说，这种感觉特别强烈。许多人抱怨这些省时小发明反而吞噬了他们更多的时间，堵车时，查收语音留言或收发邮件-有时候同时做这些。
Tick, tock滴答，滴答
Why do people feel so rushed? Part of this is a perception problem. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. Women’s paid work has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than they used to.
为什么人们那么匆忙？部分原因是认知问题。平均来说，发达国家人们拥有的闲暇时间比从前多。在欧洲尤为突出，即便在美国，自1965年正式开始对时间使用情况进行全国范围的调查以来，人们的闲暇时间也略多了。美国人比40年前平均每周少工作12小时-这个数值的下降包括所有与工作有关的事项，比如通勤时间和茶休时间减少了。这期间，女性的工资上涨了，她们进行无偿工作-例如煮饭和打扫-的时间也大大减少了。部分原因是有了洗碗机，洗衣机，微波炉和其他便捷工具的帮忙，另一部分原因是男士们比从前更顾家了。
The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.
所以问题并不是人们的时间不够，而是人们如何看待这个问题。18世纪开始，钟表第一次被用来统一工作时间，自此以后，人们将时间与金钱联系在了一起。一旦时间被金钱量化了，人们就担忧起如何更有效的使用，节省和利用时间。当经济增长，收入增加后，每个人的时间变得更为宝贵。事物一旦越宝贵，似乎就越稀缺了。
Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count, notes Harry Triandis, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois. Larger, wealthy cities, with their higher wage rates and soaring costs of living, raise the value of people’s time further still. New Yorkers are thriftier with their minutes—and more harried—than residents of Nairobi. London’s pedestrians are swifter than those in Lima. The tempo of life in rich countries is faster than that of poor countries. A fast pace leaves most people feeling rushed. “Our sense of time”, observed William James in his 1890 masterwork, “The Principles of Psychology”, “seems subject to the law of contrast.”
伊利诺斯大学社会心理学家哈利.特里安迪斯指出，强调集体之上成就的个人主义文化灌溉了这种-时间就是金钱-的观念，这种观念让人们想要充分利用每一分钟。富裕的大城市，由于工资较高，不断上升的生活成本使人们对时间的重视程度更胜一筹。纽约客们比内罗毕的人们更节约时间，更匆忙。伦敦行人的速度比利马人更快。富裕国家人们的生活节奏比贫困国家更快。节奏快的地方让人们感到匆忙。正如1890年威廉.詹姆斯在他的名著“心理学原则”中写到的，“我们的时间观念似乎与想法背道而驰。”
When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter. Workers who are paid by the hour volunteer less of their time and tend to feel more antsy when they are not working. In an experiment carried out by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House at the University of Toronto, two different groups of people were asked to listen to the same passage of music—the first 86 seconds of “The Flower Duet” from the opera “Lakmé”. Before the song, one group was asked to gauge their hourly wage. The participants who made this calculation ended up feeling less happy and more impatient while the music was playing. “They wanted to get to the end of the experiment to do something that was more profitable,” Mr DeVoe explains.
当人们视时间为金钱的时候，常常用尽时间来取得金钱的最大化。时薪制的员工不愿无偿贡献自己的时间，不工作的时候更感坐立不安。多伦多大学的斯坦福德.德沃和朱利安.豪斯做了这样一个实验，要求两组人听同一段音乐-歌剧“拉克美”中的“花之二重唱”，时长86秒。在听歌前，一个小组被要求估计他们的时薪。参加这个评估的实验对象在歌曲播放过程中，情绪并不高涨也比较没有耐心。德沃解释道：“他们想尽快结束实验好做点有效益的事。”
The relationship between time, money and anxiety is something Gary S. Becker noticed in America’s post-war boom years. Though economic progress and higher wages had raised everyone’s standard of living, the hours of “free” time Americans had been promised had come to nought. “If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago,” he noted in 1965. He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.
盖瑞 S.贝克尔在美国战后的繁荣年间就注意到了时间，金钱和焦虑的关系。尽管经济和工资的增长提高了人们的生活水平，但美国人被许诺的“闲暇”时间却没有了。他在1965年指出“相比一个世纪以前，如今人们更为谨慎的利用时间了。”他发现人们的薪水增加后，会倾向于将更多时间花在工作上，因为多工作能让他们多赚钱，因此工作时间价值的不断增加也增加了工作压力。闲暇时间变得让人焦虑，因为人们觉得他们需要更明智的利用时间，要么干脆就不休息了。
The harried leisure class焦虑的有闲一族
Being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still
越忙越有钱，越有钱就越忙
That economic prosperity would create feelings of time poverty looked a little odd in the 1960s, given all those new time-saving blenders and lawnmowers. But there is a distinct correlation between privilege and pressure. In part, this is a conundrum of wealth: though people may be earning more money to spend, they are not simultaneously earning more time to spend it in. This makes time—that frustratingly finite, unrenewable resource—feel more precious.
鉴于20世纪60年代有各种诸如搅拌机和修草机的省事新发明，当时看来，经济繁荣让人们感到时间不够有点奇怪。但优越感和压力明显相关。从某种程度上来说，这是富裕的一个难题：尽管人们可以赚更多钱买更多东西，但他们却没有更多时间花赚来的钱。这使有限而不会再现的时间更为宝贵。
Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas at Austin calls this a “yuppie kvetch”. In an analysis of international time-stress data, with Jungmin Lee, now of Sogang University in Seoul, he found that complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from well-off families.
德州大学奥斯汀分校的丹尼尔.哈默梅什将此现象称为“雅皮士的抱怨”。首尔西江大学的李重敏做的一项全球时间压力数据分析显示，那些抱怨时间不够的大多来自富裕家庭。
Even after holding constant the hours spent working at jobs or at home, those with bigger paychecks still felt more anxiety about their time. “The more cash-rich working Americans are, the more time-poor they feel,” reported Gallup, a polling company, in 2011. Few spared a moment to feel much sympathy.
即便用于工作的时间或花在家里的时间保持不变后，高收入人群对他们的时间还是感到很焦虑。民意调查公司盖洛普在2011年的调查结果显示，“越是赚钱多的美国人越觉得他们的时间不够用，”很少有人抽空去感同身受。
So being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still. Staffan Linder, a Swedish economist, diagnosed this problem in 1970. Like Becker, he saw that heady increases in the productivity of work-time compelled people to maximise the utility of their leisure time. The most direct way to do this would be for people to consume more goods within a given unit of time. To indulge in such “simultaneous consumption”, he wrote, a chap “may find himself drinking Brazilian coffee, smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading the New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife—all at the same time, with varying degrees of success.” Leisure time would inevitably feel less leisurely, he surmised, particularly for those who seemed best placed to enjoy it all. The unexpected product of economic progress, according to Linder, was a “harried leisure class”.
早在1970年，瑞典经济学家斯特凡.林德就发现，越忙越有钱，越有钱就越忙。和贝克尔一样，他看到人们工作时间的增加会迫使他们最大化的利用闲暇时间。最直接的方式是在单位时间内尽可能多的消费。纵容自己“快速消费”，他写到，一个小伙子“可能喝着巴西咖啡，抽着丹麦雪茄，咪着法国白干，读着纽约时报，听着勃兰登堡协奏曲，逗乐着他的瑞典妻子-同时做着这些事情，取得不同程度的效果。”他总结道，闲暇时间不再让人放松，特别是对那些最该享受的人来说。林德将这种经济增长的意外产物称为“焦虑的有闲一族”。
The explosion of available goods has only made time feel more crunched, as the struggle to choose what to buy or watch or eat or do raises the opportunity cost of leisure (ie, choosing one thing comes at the expense of choosing another) and contributes to feelings of stress. The endless possibilities afforded by a simple internet connection boggle the mind. When there are so many ways to fill one’s time, it is only natural to crave more of it. And pleasures always feel fleeting. Such things are relative, as Albert Einstein noted: “An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
各种便捷产品的出现反而让时间变得紧巴巴的，人们还要在众多产品中选择买哪一个，看什么节目，吃什么东西，这反而提高了空闲时间的机会成本（也即，选择一件东西就损失了选择另一件东西的可能性），也让压力增加了。仅仅一个互联网就提供了无穷无尽的选择，搅乱着我们的头脑。当时间可以用来做各种各样的事情时，渴望更多的时间也是自然的。时间还是相对的，欢乐的时光总是短暂，就如爱因斯坦说的：“跟一个美女坐在公园椅子上时，一小时好像一分钟，但坐在热火炉上，一分钟就好像一小时那么漫长。”
The ability to satisfy desires instantly also breeds impatience, fuelled by a nagging sense that one could be doing so much else. People visit websites less often if they are more than 250 milliseconds slower than a close competitor, according to research from Google. More than a fifth of internet users will abandon an online video if it takes longer than five seconds to load. When experiences can be calculated according to the utility of a millisecond, all seconds are more anxiously judged for their utility.
意愿被瞬间满足也会让人更无耐心，让人觉得还可以做很多别的事情。谷歌的一项研究表明，如果一家网站的网速比同类别网站慢于250毫秒以上，人们就不会经常访问这个网站了。如果一个游戏要5秒以上的时间加载，有1/5的 用户就会退出游戏。当体验能以毫秒计算，判断每一秒的效用就更为焦急了。
New technologies such as e-mail and smartphones exacerbate this impatience and anxiety. E-mail etiquette often necessitates a response within 24 hours, with the general understanding that sooner is better. Managing this constant and mounting demand often involves switching tasks or multi-tasking, and the job never quite feels done. “Multi-tasking is what makes us feel pressed for time,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “No matter what people are doing, people feel better when they are focused on that activity,” she adds.
像电子邮件和智能手机这种新技术使人们更加没有耐性，并且焦虑。电子邮件一条不成为的规则是需要在24小时内回复，通常人们的理解是越快越好。人们需要不时切换任务或同时处理多项任务来处理这种持续而频繁的需求，这样的情况使工作似乎永远也做不完。加拿大温哥华英国哥伦比亚大学的心理学教授，伊丽莎白.邓恩说，“同时处理多项任务让我们感到时间紧迫；但能专心做一样事情让人感觉更好，无论做的是什么。”
Yet the shortage of time is a problem not just of perception, but also of distribution. Shifts in the way people work and live have changed the way leisure time is experienced, and who gets to experience it. For the past 20 years, and bucking previous trends, the workers who are now working the longest hours and juggling the most responsibilities at home also happen to be among the best educated and best paid. The so-called leisure class has never been more harried.
然而时间的短缺并不仅仅是由于认知问题，时间分配也是个问题。人们工作和生活方式的改变也改变了度过闲暇时间的方式，以及谁来享受闲暇时间。过去20年与以往的趋势不同，工作时间最长并且家庭责任最重的恰巧是那些高学历高收入人群。所谓的有闲一族其实比以往任何时候都忙。
Racing to the top攀上高峰
Writing in 1962, Sebastian de Grazia, a political scientist, cast a withering eye across the great American landscape, dismayed by all the relentless industry and consumption. “If executives are so powerful a force in America, as they indubitably are, why don’t they get more of that free time which everybody else, it seems, holds to be so precious?” Perhaps it is fortunate de Grazia did not live to see the day when executives would no longer break for lunch.
1962年，政治学家塞巴斯蒂安.德.葛拉齐亚，对全美范围内无处不停歇的工业和消费感到失望，充满惆怅的说道：“如果美国的高层们如此有权有势，他们的确如此，那为什么他们不多获取一点其他人似乎非常珍惜的自由时间呢？”现在的高层甚至都不午休了，德.葛拉齐亚没有见证这一幕实则幸哉。
Thirty years ago low-paid, blue-collar workers were more likely to punch in a long day than their professional counterparts. One of the many perks of being a salaried employee was a fairly manageable and predictable work-week, some long lunches and the occasional round of golf. Evenings might be spent curled up with a Sharper Image catalogue by a toasty fire.
30年前，低收入的蓝领工人们长时间工作的可能比其他领域的人要大。工薪一族们的福利之一是相对可控且意料之中的工作周，长长的午休，偶尔来一场高尔夫。晚上可能在点着火炉的房间里，舒服的蜷着看电视。
But nowadays professionals everywhere are twice as likely to work long hours as their less-educated peers. Few would think of sparing time for nine holes of golf, much less 18. (Golf courses around the world are struggling to revamp the game to make it seem speedy and cool—see article.) And lunches now tend to be efficient affairs, devoured at one’s desk, with an eye on the e-mail inbox. At some point these workers may finally leave the office, but the regular blinking or chirping of their smartphones kindly serves to remind them that their work is never done.
但如今职场人的工作时长比起教育程度比他们低的同伴们要多上一倍。几乎没人有时间打上一场九洞迷你高尔夫，更别说18洞高尔夫了。（全世界的高尔夫球场都在努力改造球场，以期让高尔夫运动变得又快又酷—查看文章）现在的午餐时间倾向于时效性，在自己的座位上扒拉两口，眼睛还盯着邮箱的收件箱。这些职员总要离开办公室的，但经常查看智能手机，或者手机时常有消息也提醒着他们，工作永远做不完。
A Harvard Business School survey of 1,000 professionals found that 94% worked at least 50 hours a week, and almost half worked more than 65 hours. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006. According to a recent survey, 60% of those who use smartphones are connected to work for 13.5 hours or more a day. European labour laws rein in overwork, but in Britain four in ten managers, victims of what was once known as “the American disease”, say they put in more than 60 hours a week. It is no longer shameful to be seen swotting.
一项哈佛商业学校的调查显示，1000名职场人中有94%的人每周至少工作50小时，工作时间65小时以上的几乎占了半数。另一项研究表明，拥有本科学历的美国男人，每周工作超过50小时的比例从1979年的24%增加到了2006年的28%。根据另一项最近的研究，智能手机使用者中，有60%的人每天工作时间为13.5小时甚至更长。欧洲劳动法对员工加班有所限制，而英国10个经理中有4个都得了曾经一度流行的“美国病毒”，他们每周工作的时间超过60小时。如此投入工作不再让人觉得可耻。
All this work has left less time for play. Though leisure time has increased overall, a closer look shows that most of the gains took place between the 1960s and the 1980s. Since then economists have noticed a growing “leisure gap”, with the lion’s share of spare time going to people with less education.
长时间的工作让休闲时间变少了。但其实总体上人们的休闲时间增加了，仔细观察一下可以发现这些都发生在20世纪60年代到80年代。自那以后，经济学家们注意到了这个不断增加的“休闲差距”，有大把闲暇时间的反而是那些受教育程度不太高的人。
In America, for example, men who did not finish high-school gained nearly eight hours a week of leisure time between 1985 and 2005. Men with a college degree, however, saw their leisure time drop by six hours during the same period, which means they have even less leisure than they did in 1965, say Mark Aguiar of Princeton University and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago. The same goes for well-educated American women, who not only have less leisure time than they did in 1965, but also nearly 11 hours less per week than women who did not graduate from high school.
普林斯顿大学的马克.阿吉亚尔和芝加哥大学的艾瑞克.赫斯特以美国为例，在1985到2005期间，没上过高中的男人每周的闲暇时间有将近8小时。而同一时期，那些手握大学文凭的男人的闲暇时间减少了6小时，也就是说他们的空闲时间比1965年的时候还要少。同样的情况也发生在教育程度良好的美国女人身上，她们的空闲时间不仅比1965年要少，比那些高中都没毕业的女士每周要少了近11小时。
What accounts for this yawning gap between the time-poor haves and the time-rich have-nots? Part of it has to do with structural changes to the labour market. Work opportunities have declined for anyone without a college degree. The availability of manufacturing and other low-skilled jobs has shrunk in the rich world. The jobs that are left tend to be in the service sector. They are often both unsatisfying and poorly paid. So the value of working hours among the under-educated is fairly low by most measures, and the rise in “leisure” time may not be anything to envy.
什么原因造成了这种富人时间少而穷人时间多的巨大差距呢？部分原因归结于劳动市场的结构性变化。没有大学文凭的人的工作机会减少了。发达国家制造业和其他低技术含量的工作也不多了。剩下的工作多集中在服务业。通常这些工作不那么让人愉悦，薪水也不高。因此按照通常的标准衡量，教育程度不高的员工，他们工作时间的价值就不那么高了，所以“空闲”时间的增加也没什么好羡慕的了。
来源：微信
寻找逝去的时间
Why is everyone so busy?
为什么每个人都这么忙？
Time poverty is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution
时间贫瘠一方面是我们的认知问题，另一方面是时间分配问题
Dec 20th 2014 | From the print edition of The Economist
译者：keyjing
THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?
那些预言听起来如同诺言一般：1930年，约翰.梅纳德.凯因斯认为，未来的工作时间会变短，假期会变长。“我们的子孙们”每天只需“工作三小时”左右-如果他们这么选择的话。在他那个年代，经济和科技发展已经将工作时间大大缩短了，所以没理由相信这种趋势不会继续。新功能汽车，各种省时工具和其他电器设备让我们在生活的方方面面更加快捷灵活。社会心理学家甚至开始烦恼：人们的空闲时间那么多，要做什么呢？
This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.
可惜这个烦恼没有成为世界的紧迫问题之一。无论在哪，人人都显得很忙碌。一家顾问公司的分析师麦肯锡称,在企业界，“时间常年不够用”这个问题苦恼着世界各地的企业家，近年来这个问题变得愈发棘手。对在职父母来说，这种感觉特别强烈。许多人抱怨这些省时小发明反而吞噬了他们更多的时间，堵车时，查收语音留言或收发邮件-有时候同时做这些。
Tick, tock滴答，滴答
Why do people feel so rushed? Part of this is a perception problem. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. Women’s paid work has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than they used to.
为什么人们那么匆忙？部分原因是认知问题。平均来说，发达国家人们拥有的闲暇时间比从前多。在欧洲尤为突出，即便在美国，自1965年正式开始对时间使用情况进行全国范围的调查以来，人们的闲暇时间也略多了。美国人比40年前平均每周少工作12小时-这个数值的下降包括所有与工作有关的事项，比如通勤时间和茶休时间减少了。这期间，女性的工资上涨了，她们进行无偿工作-例如煮饭和打扫-的时间也大大减少了。部分原因是有了洗碗机，洗衣机，微波炉和其他便捷工具的帮忙，另一部分原因是男士们比从前更顾家了。
The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.
所以问题并不是人们的时间不够，而是人们如何看待这个问题。18世纪开始，钟表第一次被用来统一工作时间，自此以后，人们将时间与金钱联系在了一起。一旦时间被金钱量化了，人们就担忧起如何更有效的使用，节省和利用时间。当经济增长，收入增加后，每个人的时间变得更为宝贵。事物一旦越宝贵，似乎就越稀缺了。
Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count, notes Harry Triandis, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois. Larger, wealthy cities, with their higher wage rates and soaring costs of living, raise the value of people’s time further still. New Yorkers are thriftier with their minutes—and more harried—than residents of Nairobi. London’s pedestrians are swifter than those in Lima. The tempo of life in rich countries is faster than that of poor countries. A fast pace leaves most people feeling rushed. “Our sense of time”, observed William James in his 1890 masterwork, “The Principles of Psychology”, “seems subject to the law of contrast.”
伊利诺斯大学社会心理学家哈利.特里安迪斯指出，强调集体之上成就的个人主义文化灌溉了这种-时间就是金钱-的观念，这种观念让人们想要充分利用每一分钟。富裕的大城市，由于工资较高，不断上升的生活成本使人们对时间的重视程度更胜一筹。纽约客们比内罗毕的人们更节约时间，更匆忙。伦敦行人的速度比利马人更快。富裕国家人们的生活节奏比贫困国家更快。节奏快的地方让人们感到匆忙。正如1890年威廉.詹姆斯在他的名著“心理学原则”中写到的，“我们的时间观念似乎与想法背道而驰。”
When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter. Workers who are paid by the hour volunteer less of their time and tend to feel more antsy when they are not working. In an experiment carried out by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House at the University of Toronto, two different groups of people were asked to listen to the same passage of music—the first 86 seconds of “The Flower Duet” from the opera “Lakmé”. Before the song, one group was asked to gauge their hourly wage. The participants who made this calculation ended up feeling less happy and more impatient while the music was playing. “They wanted to get to the end of the experiment to do something that was more profitable,” Mr DeVoe explains.
当人们视时间为金钱的时候，常常用尽时间来取得金钱的最大化。时薪制的员工不愿无偿贡献自己的时间，不工作的时候更感坐立不安。多伦多大学的斯坦福德.德沃和朱利安.豪斯做了这样一个实验，要求两组人听同一段音乐-歌剧“拉克美”中的“花之二重唱”，时长86秒。在听歌前，一个小组被要求估计他们的时薪。参加这个评估的实验对象在歌曲播放过程中，情绪并不高涨也比较没有耐心。德沃解释道：“他们想尽快结束实验好做点有效益的事。”
The relationship between time, money and anxiety is something Gary S. Becker noticed in America’s post-war boom years. Though economic progress and higher wages had raised everyone’s standard of living, the hours of “free” time Americans had been promised had come to nought. “If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago,” he noted in 1965. He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.
盖瑞 S.贝克尔在美国战后的繁荣年间就注意到了时间，金钱和焦虑的关系。尽管经济和工资的增长提高了人们的生活水平，但美国人被许诺的“闲暇”时间却没有了。他在1965年指出“相比一个世纪以前，如今人们更为谨慎的利用时间了。”他发现人们的薪水增加后，会倾向于将更多时间花在工作上，因为多工作能让他们多赚钱，因此工作时间价值的不断增加也增加了工作压力。闲暇时间变得让人焦虑，因为人们觉得他们需要更明智的利用时间，要么干脆就不休息了。
The harried leisure class焦虑的有闲一族
Being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still
越忙越有钱，越有钱就越忙
That economic prosperity would create feelings of time poverty looked a little odd in the 1960s, given all those new time-saving blenders and lawnmowers. But there is a distinct correlation between privilege and pressure. In part, this is a conundrum of wealth: though people may be earning more money to spend, they are not simultaneously earning more time to spend it in. This makes time—that frustratingly finite, unrenewable resource—feel more precious.
鉴于20世纪60年代有各种诸如搅拌机和修草机的省事新发明，当时看来，经济繁荣让人们感到时间不够有点奇怪。但优越感和压力明显相关。从某种程度上来说，这是富裕的一个难题：尽管人们可以赚更多钱买更多东西，但他们却没有更多时间花赚来的钱。这使有限而不会再现的时间更为宝贵。
Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas at Austin calls this a “yuppie kvetch”. In an analysis of international time-stress data, with Jungmin Lee, now of Sogang University in Seoul, he found that complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from well-off families.
德州大学奥斯汀分校的丹尼尔.哈默梅什将此现象称为“雅皮士的抱怨”。首尔西江大学的李重敏做的一项全球时间压力数据分析显示，那些抱怨时间不够的大多来自富裕家庭。
Even after holding constant the hours spent working at jobs or at home, those with bigger paychecks still felt more anxiety about their time. “The more cash-rich working Americans are, the more time-poor they feel,” reported Gallup, a polling company, in 2011. Few spared a moment to feel much sympathy.
即便用于工作的时间或花在家里的时间保持不变后，高收入人群对他们的时间还是感到很焦虑。民意调查公司盖洛普在2011年的调查结果显示，“越是赚钱多的美国人越觉得他们的时间不够用，”很少有人抽空去感同身受。
So being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still. Staffan Linder, a Swedish economist, diagnosed this problem in 1970. Like Becker, he saw that heady increases in the productivity of work-time compelled people to maximise the utility of their leisure time. The most direct way to do this would be for people to consume more goods within a given unit of time. To indulge in such “simultaneous consumption”, he wrote, a chap “may find himself drinking Brazilian coffee, smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading the New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wife—all at the same time, with varying degrees of success.” Leisure time would inevitably feel less leisurely, he surmised, particularly for those who seemed best placed to enjoy it all. The unexpected product of economic progress, according to Linder, was a “harried leisure class”.
早在1970年，瑞典经济学家斯特凡.林德就发现，越忙越有钱，越有钱就越忙。和贝克尔一样，他看到人们工作时间的增加会迫使他们最大化的利用闲暇时间。最直接的方式是在单位时间内尽可能多的消费。纵容自己“快速消费”，他写到，一个小伙子“可能喝着巴西咖啡，抽着丹麦雪茄，咪着法国白干，读着纽约时报，听着勃兰登堡协奏曲，逗乐着他的瑞典妻子-同时做着这些事情，取得不同程度的效果。”他总结道，闲暇时间不再让人放松，特别是对那些最该享受的人来说。林德将这种经济增长的意外产物称为“焦虑的有闲一族”。
The explosion of available goods has only made time feel more crunched, as the struggle to choose what to buy or watch or eat or do raises the opportunity cost of leisure (ie, choosing one thing comes at the expense of choosing another) and contributes to feelings of stress. The endless possibilities afforded by a simple internet connection boggle the mind. When there are so many ways to fill one’s time, it is only natural to crave more of it. And pleasures always feel fleeting. Such things are relative, as Albert Einstein noted: “An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
各种便捷产品的出现反而让时间变得紧巴巴的，人们还要在众多产品中选择买哪一个，看什么节目，吃什么东西，这反而提高了空闲时间的机会成本（也即，选择一件东西就损失了选择另一件东西的可能性），也让压力增加了。仅仅一个互联网就提供了无穷无尽的选择，搅乱着我们的头脑。当时间可以用来做各种各样的事情时，渴望更多的时间也是自然的。时间还是相对的，欢乐的时光总是短暂，就如爱因斯坦说的：“跟一个美女坐在公园椅子上时，一小时好像一分钟，但坐在热火炉上，一分钟就好像一小时那么漫长。”
The ability to satisfy desires instantly also breeds impatience, fuelled by a nagging sense that one could be doing so much else. People visit websites less often if they are more than 250 milliseconds slower than a close competitor, according to research from Google. More than a fifth of internet users will abandon an online video if it takes longer than five seconds to load. When experiences can be calculated according to the utility of a millisecond, all seconds are more anxiously judged for their utility.
意愿被瞬间满足也会让人更无耐心，让人觉得还可以做很多别的事情。谷歌的一项研究表明，如果一家网站的网速比同类别网站慢于250毫秒以上，人们就不会经常访问这个网站了。如果一个游戏要5秒以上的时间加载，有1/5的 用户就会退出游戏。当体验能以毫秒计算，判断每一秒的效用就更为焦急了。
New technologies such as e-mail and smartphones exacerbate this impatience and anxiety. E-mail etiquette often necessitates a response within 24 hours, with the general understanding that sooner is better. Managing this constant and mounting demand often involves switching tasks or multi-tasking, and the job never quite feels done. “Multi-tasking is what makes us feel pressed for time,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “No matter what people are doing, people feel better when they are focused on that activity,” she adds.
像电子邮件和智能手机这种新技术使人们更加没有耐性，并且焦虑。电子邮件一条不成为的规则是需要在24小时内回复，通常人们的理解是越快越好。人们需要不时切换任务或同时处理多项任务来处理这种持续而频繁的需求，这样的情况使工作似乎永远也做不完。加拿大温哥华英国哥伦比亚大学的心理学教授，伊丽莎白.邓恩说，“同时处理多项任务让我们感到时间紧迫；但能专心做一样事情让人感觉更好，无论做的是什么。”
Yet the shortage of time is a problem not just of perception, but also of distribution. Shifts in the way people work and live have changed the way leisure time is experienced, and who gets to experience it. For the past 20 years, and bucking previous trends, the workers who are now working the longest hours and juggling the most responsibilities at home also happen to be among the best educated and best paid. The so-called leisure class has never been more harried.
然而时间的短缺并不仅仅是由于认知问题，时间分配也是个问题。人们工作和生活方式的改变也改变了度过闲暇时间的方式，以及谁来享受闲暇时间。过去20年与以往的趋势不同，工作时间最长并且家庭责任最重的恰巧是那些高学历高收入人群。所谓的有闲一族其实比以往任何时候都忙。
Racing to the top攀上高峰
Writing in 1962, Sebastian de Grazia, a political scientist, cast a withering eye across the great American landscape, dismayed by all the relentless industry and consumption. “If executives are so powerful a force in America, as they indubitably are, why don’t they get more of that free time which everybody else, it seems, holds to be so precious?” Perhaps it is fortunate de Grazia did not live to see the day when executives would no longer break for lunch.
1962年，政治学家塞巴斯蒂安.德.葛拉齐亚，对全美范围内无处不停歇的工业和消费感到失望，充满惆怅的说道：“如果美国的高层们如此有权有势，他们的确如此，那为什么他们不多获取一点其他人似乎非常珍惜的自由时间呢？”现在的高层甚至都不午休了，德.葛拉齐亚没有见证这一幕实则幸哉。
Thirty years ago low-paid, blue-collar workers were more likely to punch in a long day than their professional counterparts. One of the many perks of being a salaried employee was a fairly manageable and predictable work-week, some long lunches and the occasional round of golf. Evenings might be spent curled up with a Sharper Image catalogue by a toasty fire.
30年前，低收入的蓝领工人们长时间工作的可能比其他领域的人要大。工薪一族们的福利之一是相对可控且意料之中的工作周，长长的午休，偶尔来一场高尔夫。晚上可能在点着火炉的房间里，舒服的蜷着看电视。
But nowadays professionals everywhere are twice as likely to work long hours as their less-educated peers. Few would think of sparing time for nine holes of golf, much less 18. (Golf courses around the world are struggling to revamp the game to make it seem speedy and cool—see article.) And lunches now tend to be efficient affairs, devoured at one’s desk, with an eye on the e-mail inbox. At some point these workers may finally leave the office, but the regular blinking or chirping of their smartphones kindly serves to remind them that their work is never done.
但如今职场人的工作时长比起教育程度比他们低的同伴们要多上一倍。几乎没人有时间打上一场九洞迷你高尔夫，更别说18洞高尔夫了。（全世界的高尔夫球场都在努力改造球场，以期让高尔夫运动变得又快又酷—查看文章）现在的午餐时间倾向于时效性，在自己的座位上扒拉两口，眼睛还盯着邮箱的收件箱。这些职员总要离开办公室的，但经常查看智能手机，或者手机时常有消息也提醒着他们，工作永远做不完。
A Harvard Business School survey of 1,000 professionals found that 94% worked at least 50 hours a week, and almost half worked more than 65 hours. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006. According to a recent survey, 60% of those who use smartphones are connected to work for 13.5 hours or more a day. European labour laws rein in overwork, but in Britain four in ten managers, victims of what was once known as “the American disease”, say they put in more than 60 hours a week. It is no longer shameful to be seen swotting.
一项哈佛商业学校的调查显示，1000名职场人中有94%的人每周至少工作50小时，工作时间65小时以上的几乎占了半数。另一项研究表明，拥有本科学历的美国男人，每周工作超过50小时的比例从1979年的24%增加到了2006年的28%。根据另一项最近的研究，智能手机使用者中，有60%的人每天工作时间为13.5小时甚至更长。欧洲劳动法对员工加班有所限制，而英国10个经理中有4个都得了曾经一度流行的“美国病毒”，他们每周工作的时间超过60小时。如此投入工作不再让人觉得可耻。
All this work has left less time for play. Though leisure time has increased overall, a closer look shows that most of the gains took place between the 1960s and the 1980s. Since then economists have noticed a growing “leisure gap”, with the lion’s share of spare time going to people with less education.
长时间的工作让休闲时间变少了。但其实总体上人们的休闲时间增加了，仔细观察一下可以发现这些都发生在20世纪60年代到80年代。自那以后，经济学家们注意到了这个不断增加的“休闲差距”，有大把闲暇时间的反而是那些受教育程度不太高的人。
In America, for example, men who did not finish high-school gained nearly eight hours a week of leisure time between 1985 and 2005. Men with a college degree, however, saw their leisure time drop by six hours during the same period, which means they have even less leisure than they did in 1965, say Mark Aguiar of Princeton University and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago. The same goes for well-educated American women, who not only have less leisure time than they did in 1965, but also nearly 11 hours less per week than women who did not graduate from high school.
普林斯顿大学的马克.阿吉亚尔和芝加哥大学的艾瑞克.赫斯特以美国为例，在1985到2005期间，没上过高中的男人每周的闲暇时间有将近8小时。而同一时期，那些手握大学文凭的男人的闲暇时间减少了6小时，也就是说他们的空闲时间比1965年的时候还要少。同样的情况也发生在教育程度良好的美国女人身上，她们的空闲时间不仅比1965年要少，比那些高中都没毕业的女士每周要少了近11小时。
What accounts for this yawning gap between the time-poor haves and the time-rich have-nots? Part of it has to do with structural changes to the labour market. Work opportunities have declined for anyone without a college degree. The availability of manufacturing and other low-skilled jobs has shrunk in the rich world. The jobs that are left tend to be in the service sector. They are often both unsatisfying and poorly paid. So the value of working hours among the under-educated is fairly low by most measures, and the rise in “leisure” time may not be anything to envy.
什么原因造成了这种富人时间少而穷人时间多的巨大差距呢？部分原因归结于劳动市场的结构性变化。没有大学文凭的人的工作机会减少了。发达国家制造业和其他低技术含量的工作也不多了。剩下的工作多集中在服务业。通常这些工作不那么让人愉悦，薪水也不高。因此按照通常的标准衡量，教育程度不高的员工，他们工作时间的价值就不那么高了，所以“空闲”时间的增加也没什么好羡慕的了。
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因为闲下来是你退休时候才有的事
