American Idle

Never before has an entire generation had so much time in which to do so little.

(Illustration by Koren Shadmi)

`HOW YA BEEN?" THE GROCERY- STORE CLERK ASKED THE WOMAN IN front of me. "Busy, busy, busy," she answered wearily. "Me too," said the clerk, and everyone around nodded sympathetically. * Of course they were busy. They were baby boomers, as I am, and you can conjugate the boomers like this: I am busy; you are busy; he, she, and it are busy. We are so busy that we must hire strangers to organize our closets and our children's birthday parties. We are too busy to cook, to write letters, to read books; too busy to kick our shoes off and set a spell. We have hammocks, yes, but they retain their original shapes. * Why? How can a population with so many timesaving devices be so chronically time-deprived? * Just two generations ago, my husband's grandmother raised five children in rural South Carolina, with nothing we boomers have. Unassisted by Ronco, she cooked three meals every day - big meals, with homemade biscuits and pies, and protein that once had lived in her yard. Before she served chicken, she'd have to kill one. After the meals, she'd wash the dishes - by hand, with water carried in from a well - then worked on the farm with her sharecropper husband and tended to the garden and animals. Oh, and in her spare time, she made soap, quilts, and her daughters' clothes.

She was busy. Comparatively, the baby boomers are not. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much." But that was four years before the baby boom began. Now, never before have we had so much time in which to do so little.

Don't believe me? Think about the length of time it took to clear a half-acre lawn of leaves when you were a kid with a 2-foot rake, compared to now, with your monster rake and your leaf blower. How long did it take to drive to Blockbuster and peruse the shelves, as opposed to adding to your Netflix queue? Speed dialing, speed dating, direct deposit, and rotisserie chickens have added hours of leisure to our lives. Technology means we no longer have to watch the commercials during Lost or rewind a cassette tape. We can get a tan in 20 minutes, book a flight in two.

Remember CliffsNotes? In college, if you didn't have time to read a book, you could drive to a bookstore, buy a copy, and cut your study time in half. Today, you need not schlep to a bookstore; CliffsNotes are online and free, saving you the interminable two minutes it takes to add to your Amazon cart and check out. Meanwhile, typing displaces handwriting, e-mail replaces snail mail, and teenagers can conduct entire hourlong conversations in acronyms. Lost consonants alone have given us a free hour or two.

Armed with the gleaming gadgetry in my kitchen, my husband's grandmother could have finished a day's work before noon and returned to bed with a goblet of Perrier and an unabridged book. Why can't we? Why don't we strip our lives of unnecessary stressors, forgo the Turbo iced coffee, and serenely sprawl in front of our flat-screens, decidedly unbusy. We could be a new species: American Idle.

Ah, but nature abhors a hand-held vac. Every minute preserved by the Dustbuster must be channeled elsewhere, or we'd find ourselves alone in that hammock with (oh, the horror!) our thoughts. And so we baby boomers have squandered the glorious leisure for which our in rural South Carolina, with nothing we hand-to-mouth ancestors longed. Even as our food processors and microwaves and milkshake makers whir in stainless-steel kitchens, surveys say that one-quarter of us read no books last year. Of course not; we have no time.

We have no time, because to have some would make us uneasy. If we're not busy, busy, busy, we must be lazy, lazy, lazy. So we spackle, filling the scary holes of free time with activities of dubious worth. There's an hour freed up by the Whole Foods hot bar, let's fill it training for a six-hour marathon! Or scrapbooking! Or intensive mothering, or Fantasy Football, or recreational blogging, or applying aged cedar mulch around every tree in the yard!

There's a time-sucker for every persuasion. We choose a couple, think of "excellence" (the socially acceptable code word for "perfection"), and damn ourselves to lives of false urgency. Like the Mad Hatter, we murder time; like the Thane of Glamis, we murder sleep; like the Wonder Pets, we murder sanity. There's a solution, I'm sure; I'll think of it when I'm finished alphabetizing my spice rack.

Jennifer Nicholson Graham is a freelance writer in suburban Boston. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.