Yesterday I happened to come across a tweet about how we were all so crushed by work these days that we had no time to cook meals etc. Is this true? Here's some data on how many hours employed people work each day:
Over the past two decades, the number of people holding down multiple jobs has declined, and the number of hours worked each day has increased about four minutes.
In other words, not a lot has happened. We work almost exactly as much as we did 20 years ago, and holding down multiple jobs is also almost exactly the same as 20 years ago (though down on a trend basis).
There are other issues, of course, like employers who screw with their workers by refusing to set a schedule each week, or requiring them to close up one day and then open up the next. And I don't know how these numbers look if you bin them by income level. Still, in the most general sense, the work environment today for must of us hasn't changed in at least two decades.
The dissolution of the home/work distinction is probably another effect to keep track of. Twenty years ago, you weren't getting requests from the boss/clients/teammates rolling in outside of work hours, but now, for a lot of folks, that's how things are.
Not to say that's how things are for everybody, or even perhaps for very many people, but probably true for the sort of person who is going to tweet about how "these days" work crowds out everything else . . .
Jeez Kevin, keep this up and people will run out of things to whine about.
The share of families with both parents working full time increased 15 points from 1970-2015.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/11/04/raising-kids-and-running-a-household-how-working-parents-share-the-load/
I would expect it's crossed over to being a straight majority in the ensuing decade. That is more time dedicated to wage employment, and so less time available for the everything else that makes up the hurly burly of life.
Also, productivity gains over those decades should have made things better, rather than kept more or less the same.
The lines of best fit don't seem to be appropriate here. They are heavily influenced by the pandemic happening in the 2nd half of the data. Still, the conclusion that not much is happening is a fair conclusion.