Possibly tangentially relevant: UK pop songs have become sadder over the past few decades.

I looked up average hours worked per year, of those working, in the OECD stats. I know the US is high on the international scale, but I thought it would be climbing, and it's not. Of course some aspects this doesn't reflect are: involuntary part-time status (quantitative); frequency of double-income households (qualitative).

1950: 1,963 hours
1960: 1,948
1970: 1,902
1980: 1,813
1990: 1,831
2000: 1,834
2005: 1,795
2010: 1,774
2013: 1,783
2016: 1,783

Australia is 1,669; Canada 1,703; France 1,472; Germany 1,363; Japan 1,713; Mexico 2,255; Spain 1,695; Sweden 1,621; UK 1,676.

2: professionals work a lot more than they used to. The expected number of billable hours for lawyers has gone up a lot since 1950.

I work a lot more than I did in 1950.

When everybody smoked, there was less anxiety because smoking is the best anti-anxiety medication ever until what you get anxious about is cancer and heart disease.

2: What is the denominator in that series?

Are the numbers in 2 official hours worked? I know many people who "officially" work 9-5 but in fact work a lot more than that.

Source.

Average annual hours worked is defined as the total number of hours actually worked per year divided by the average number of people in employment per year. Actual hours worked include regular work hours of full-time, part-time and part-year workers, paid and unpaid overtime, hours worked in additional jobs, and exclude time not worked because of public holidays, annual paid leave, own illness, injury and temporary disability, maternity leave, parental leave, schooling or training, slack work for technical or economic reasons, strike or labour dispute, bad weather, compensation leave and other reasons. The data cover employees and self-employed workers. This indicator is measured in terms of hours per worker per year.

I'm not sure if the OECD collects the data itself or asks each member labor ministry to produce data to these specifications.

How much of the decrease is due to more women entering the workforce part-time, bringing down the average number of hours worked? I know that's the case for Japan (where unrecorded overtime is also a real problem).

People are more anxious because there is now an entire, very lucrative, industry devoted to making suburban white people afraid and they have sufficient power to pass the fear on down the line.

Are your children eating Tide Pods?

Nine essential nutrients your children are missing if they aren't eating Tide Pods.

anxious and stressed

Change == stress to some first approximation

One of my favorite false but useful factoids is that the cumulative change an any 50-year period of modern history is equal to the cumulative change of all human history before that; a power law scaling.
This would go a long way toward explaining The Flynn Effect.

I'm an anxious lonely sadsack but it's entirely my fault because I'm procrastinating on important things, staying at home, not going to any AA meetings, and not calling friends I have allowed to drift away. I am getting plenty of exercise and taking showers but otherwise hiding at home with my family. it's barely possible I have deep-seated psychological problems, although I'm not depressed. I was in some sense happier when I had a job because I like to talk to people, and was an unexpectedly good salesperson at my store. I do text my mom. also, 10 is right.

Having a job is nice for certain types of jobs. When I had to get stuff done, but didn't have a job (i.e. graduate school), I was always anxious. I was much better at social things once I got a job also, though I still kept letting friends drift away. But, I think most of the driftees were probably Trump voters, so maybe I was just ahead of the curve.

I can't text my mom because she doesn't know how to work a cell phone.

My brother keeps trying to get her to Facetime, but that's failed also.

My mom doesn't proofread her emails. It's fucking annoying.

My mom takes four hours to write an email that says "We can get a guy out to fix the dryer on Wednesday" and sends me drafts to edit.

I can't phone my mother in her nursing home because she's too depressed to pick up the phone unless a carer happens to be in the room and passes it to here, when she explained, in tears, to my sister that I had told her I wouldn't see her any more because I was going to spend all my time with my new wife and family. I have no wife. I had told her I was going to be away on a work trip for four days, which was true. I have no good idea how to cope with this but no doubt something will turn up. Maybe big print on sheets of A4 paper might work as reminders.

I'm a little taken aback by the number of my friends who are on antidepressants.

I'm surprised they haven't stopped you snooping through their bathroom cabinets yet.

Well, they'd have to be home to do that.

||

Bat Signal for gswift.

Does anyone have an e-mail address for GSwift. I had an e-mail address, but I'm wondering if it's any good, since I got some sort of spam from it.

I have a cop question for him. If anyone sees him around here or can e-mail him, please ask him to e-mail me at the linked address.

Thanks,
BG

|>

20: I am so very sorry, King. My question for gswift relates to a safety issue involving my parents. It's all awful.

I'm feeling somewhat torn about pretty much openly expressing no confidence in the leadership of a department at work. On one side it resembles office politics I hate. On the other hand, I just want to get some fucking work done and that department needs to do its fucking job.

re: 7

My official working hours are about 60-70% of my actual worked hours, at the moment. And no-one is recording that information anywhere. It's unpaid, unrecorded overtime.

I suspect that's pretty common. Friends of mine who work in more blue collar jobs, on the other hand, and more junior people in my job, also tend to paid very directly for the hours they work. Or rather, we (management, senior tech people) tend not to ask them to work extra hours, because we feel it's not fair on them, or ethical.

However, that does mean that when push comes to shove, and there's some crisis, or work required has expanded for some reason or other, there's a certain level of person who just does the death-march style end-of-project stuff, and those people work a lot of unpaid time.

However, maybe the overworked middle layer in a lot of jobs isn't statistically significant? I don't know.

I've found with my job that having to learn new things all the time has led to some significant bleed over into "non-work" hours because of the overlap of what I want to learn for general learning purposes, and what I end up doing at work. For a while, my attempt to cut back to a normal work week meant also not spending time on other things, like getting better at programming.

I guess I've solved that problem now by being pretty sure I'm going on the job market again within the next year, so there's motivation to learn new things and to try to wrap up things I do at work more nicely so that a future person can take them on, or if they go in another direction, at least understand what I was trying to do.

Probably on topic: The House Republicans are proving that taking food and medical care from the poor isn't close to as bad as they get.

29: what in particular are you referring to?

Once again shouting "Hillary's emails" in a burning house.

31: how is that worse?

Hourly workers are working shorter work weeks. Salaried workers are working longer hours since employers don't have to pay them for extra time or overtime.

Baby boomers didn't invent anxiety. Does anyone else remember The Split Level Trap about the psychological problems and alienation of suburban life? Baby boomers didn't invent shitty click bait journalism either.