Work-life balance as it has traditionally been understood, where there is a discrete separation between work and leisure, and between the professional and the personal sphere, appears to be a thing of the past. To most Gen Y-Fi:ers, work will be an all-consuming thing not because it is forced upon them, but because they choose it. As members of an educated, global elite, Gen Y-Fi:ers are among the privileged workers who can view work as a means to self-fulfillment, not merely survival. They’re part of a small but by some accounts growing segment of the population, which Richard Florida terms “the Creative Class.” Florida, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, defines the Creative Class as a group of workers whose economic function is to think up new ideas, create new technology, and produce creative content based on today’s most important currency—knowledge. Members of the creative class are engineers, designers, artists, writers, planners, analysts, managers, and other “creative professionals.” He estimates that approximately 30 percent of the American workforce is part of the Creative Class (up from 10 percent in 1900 and just 20 percent as recently as 1990).

Florida wrote a series of influential books (The Rise of the Creative Class; Cities and the Creative Class; and Flight of the Creative Class) documenting the make-up and impact of the creative workforce. His and other studies show that cities that attract and retain members of the Creative Class prosper and grow, while those that do not stagnate.  Florida’s theory, which is not without critics, is that the presence of certain types of individuals—rather than businesses—is the key to economic growth. Moreover, the Creative Class—the future of the American economy, if you buy his argument—envisions their work and lives in a different way than other groups. In a 2003 Washington Monthly article titled “The New American Dream,” Florida wrote that:

The rise of the creative sector has also changed the way people work, as well as their expectations. The American Dream is no longer just about money. Better pay, a nice house, and a rising standard of living will always be attractive. But my research and others’ show another factor emerging: The new American Dream is to maintain a reasonable living standard while doing work that we enjoy doing.

Theoretically, Florida’s analysis and conclusions about the importance of the Creative Class should give its members quite a bit of agency and power. And there is anecdotal evidence that some businesses are increasingly striving to meet the needs of a creative workforce. Urban planners have been the most visible group to embrace Florida’s message: city’s across America are trying to improve their ranking on Florida’s “creativity index,” which includes tolerance (presence and acceptance of diverse communities), talent (basically a crude measure of individuals with at least college degrees), and technology (tech infrastructure and firms), in order to attract the Creative Class.

Still, despite all the attention given to the Creative Class in recent years, so far the ability of this group of workers to command the kind of workplace, policy, and cultural changes that they would need to really flourish has been limited. This is because those workers that find themselves part of Florida’s Creative Class on paper, have no sense of group identity in real life. Creative Classers don’t organize; they don’t agitate or lobby as a collective whole for increased workplace flexibility, for example. Workplace realities seem to happen to them, rather than by them; and when potentially negative changes occur, they have almost no recourse individually.

In the CNN article , “Welcome to the Weisure lifestyle,” Thom Patterson attributes the new term weisure to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who claims that: “Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous.” In his book, “Elsewhere USA,” Conley claims that Americans are working more and more, which necessitates the mixing of work and leisure. But, in addition, people are “more willing to let work invade their leisure time because, for a lot of Americans, working has become more fun,” Patterson writes.It isn’t as though everyone’s job is suddenly more enjoyable. There are still plenty of tedious jobs out there. The people who are having more fun, according to Conley, are the professionals defined by Florida as the Creative Class.

Creative Classers have embraced weisure, upping the ante once again on their commitment to work. But what has been the response from employers and society? Are workers getting anything back, in the form of an easier time with the “life” part of the equation, in exchange for their renewed commitment?

What are your experiences?

- Astri and Liz

Image via Wikipedia

I was thrilled that the New Yorker online chose to write up a little ditty on the site the Days of Yore yesterday. As I’ve mentioned here before, the Days of Yore interviews artists about the time before their breakthrough. The goal is to inspire young artists currently struggling to find an audience by showing that those we idolize now were once doing grunt work and living in pest-filled apartments too. This week, we are featuring one of my absolute favorite writers, Anne Fadiman. Fadiman is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Book Review prize, and the L.A. Times Book Prize. Fadiman has also written two books of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007), and edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005), and the 2003 edition of Best American Essays. She has won a National Magazine Award for reporting, a John S. Knight Fellowship in Journalism, and has written for a wide array of publications, including Civilization, Harper’s, Life, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Fadiman was a founding editor of Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, and is a former editor of The American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly. She is currently the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale University.

Fadiman has more charm as a writer than anyone I’ve read in years. I mean, when was the last time you couldn’t put an essay collection down– an essay collection!– because you were laughing so much?? Exactly.

Here is some gold from her interview:

I’m afraid my salad days consisted, so to speak, of smallish piles of rather wilted lettuce. I lived with a roommate on East 84th St. in New York, in an apartment where the roaches outnumbered the paying tenants by a ratio of several thousand to one. My roommate was an editorial assistant whose daily schedule was enviably structured. She strode briskly from our apartment each morning, dressed for success, long before I’d even risen and put on my working garb of old jeans and a T-shirt. We cooked inexpensive meals from the Joy of Cooking my mother had sent me, often purchasing ingredients from the Hungarian food stores that still predominated in our neighborhood in the mid-70s. I stayed up very late every night, occasionally galvanized to action but mostly staring at my typewriter and failing to write.

Read the entire interview here!

Go get inspired.

- Astri

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I’ve spent the last week at the annual conference of the International Time Use Research Association.  You laugh, but this year’s conference is in Paris. Win!

I’m typing this up from a computer lab at Sciences Po (an elite French university that has educated most of the country’s presidents but  doesn’t believe in air conditioning). Also, the keyboard is silly.

Time– it may very well be our most important and, uniquely, most equally distributed resource. Of course, how we spend it is another matter. The economists, sociologists, and developmental psychologists here have disected time use up the wazoo and here are some highlights:

Mothers still do about three times as much housework as fathers: In the United States, Liana Sayer (Ohio State) found that mothers do about 2.5 hours of housework per day while fathers do about 45 minutes. Other researchers used fancy models to confirm that when women marry and when they transition to parenthood, they increase the amount of time they spend on housework significantly. Men reduce the amount of time they spend doing housework at both transitions. Gents: 1, Ladies: 0.

Highly educated women compensate for smartness by throwing themselves into housework: Martine Dribe, of Lund University, found that even in egalitarian Sweden when highly educated women have children they increase the amount of housework and childcare that they do more than less educated women and far more than their male partners. This is especially the case for women who have higher degrees than their men-folk. Though economists like to predict that the partner with the highest earning potential will be the one to continue working more and pass on the housework, it doesn’t play out that way. Non-traditional women apparently try to compensate for being smart and awesome by taking on traditional roles to the extreme. Female absurdity knows no bounds.

Lots of TV watching isn’t necessarily bad for kids, as long they don’t have a TV in their room and especially if they watch TV with their parents: This comes from Australian data and links to outcomes in literacy and school performance. Now watch Law & Order.

Instead of learning the value of a dollar, encourage your kids to learn the value of pi: My own little contribution (with Suzanne Bianchi) compared the time use of immigrant and native-born teenagers in the U.S. We found that immigrants work less (about 3.5 hours less per week than native-born American teens) and study significantly more (again a difference of about 3.5 hours per week.) While there may be somthing uniquely American about encouraging your children to hold down a part-time job during high school–that good old Protestant work ethic–our findings suggest that one way immmigrants achieve better upward educational mobility than Americans who have parents with equally low education levels is by eshewing burger flipping to hit the books. Even though their parents might need the financial help just as much, if not more, than working class native-born American parents, there may be a value placed on education in immigrant families that really pays off.

And now, I’m on vacation! Best use of time ever.

- Liz

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“Anne Bogart is one of the most innovative and influential American theatre directors working today. The former Artistic Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Jon Jory, has called her “the most important acting and directing theorist since Stanislavski and Brecht.”

Bogart is the winner of two Obie Awards for Best Director for No Plays No Poetry But Philosophical Reflections Practical Instruction Provocative Opinions and Pointers from a Noted Critic and Playwright (1988) and The Baltimore Waltz (1990), and the Bessie Award for Choreographer/Creator for South Pacific (1984). She was a 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellow, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Artistic Associate Grant in 1986-87. In 1992, she co-founded the Saratoga Theatre Institute (SITI), where she currently serves as Artistic Director. She also heads the Graduate Directing Program at Columbia.

She has written several works on the theatre, including, Anne Bogart: Viewpoints, A Director Prepares, and And Then, You Act. Today, she and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints method is one of the most consistently studied in the country. ”

That is what I wrote for the Days of Yore, where Anne Bogart is being featured this week!

Here are some snippets from the interview:

I do not feel avant-garde. Yes, it’s true that I am often described as experimental or avant-garde but really I do not think about making anything new, rather I am totally invested in the past. I mostly study the past. I study history and I believe that the job of the theater is to give voice to dead people who have things left to say. If the word theater were a verb, I think it would be “to remember.”

(…)

When I was younger there was definitely resistance to my work and it was palpable and challenging. There is still resistance to my work. I think that I have made a perfectly good career from consistently bad reviews. And then the reviewers are always asking why I am not doing the kind of work that I was doing five years ago. Well, I want to remind them that they did not like it then.

Read the full interview here!

Now it is time for me to try my hardest to follow Bogart’s advice: “Do not wait for the right circumstances to make your best work.  Make your best work with the circumstances you are in right now.”

Happy soon-to-be 4th of July!

- Astri

Very happily, this weekend I spent Father’s Day with my beloved papa. I was prepared to spend the day biking at the beach, trying to catch up with my 63-year-old dad. But lucky for my seriously out of shape ass (couch shaped, if you must know), the Brazil-Ivory Coast game was on. He told us having my brother and me around was “present enough.” Okay.

Dad shredding, being awesome

So my family, rarely all together under one roof anymore, settled into our old habits: dad and bro on the couch, watching the game; me on the couch, pretending to watch the game but actually doing some work on my laptop; mom…in the kitchen, making cold borsch, fried potatoes and mushrooms, and grilling salmon for next week’s meals.

If, as the New York Times claims, “Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom” my dad is doing a pretty good job hiding the stress. But I suppose you can’t teach an old (beloved) Soviet dog new tricks.

The younger dad set is another story. There’s a fantastic article, also in the Times, about the rising popularity of paternity leave in Sweden (In Sweden, The Men Can Have It All).

I highly recommend you read it. And as you do, try to avoid relegating Sweden to some fantasy-land. Yes, it’s a small country, but that doesn’t negate the amount of civic engagement and political will that goes into constantly seeking to improve a country that already boasts a vibrant economy, progressive policies, and generous benefits.

The gist of the article is that though Sweden has long had paid parental leave (the article claims 13 months, but my understanding is that it is actually 18) that parents can split however they want, in the last 15 years, the government has increasingly encouraged more men to take parental leave.

Today, two of the months must be taken by the father, or the family loses those benefits. Though I’m sure some of you don’t appreciate this strong-arm approach, it’s working. Today, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. This is an enormous shift from just 20 years ago, before the “daddy months” were introduced, when just 6 percent took parental leave.

It appears that Swedes have achieved some sort of tipping point or critical mass, which has catapulted paternity leave from a progressive ideal to an almost quotidian reality. This is great from a gender equality standpoint–the article notes that “a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7 percent for every month the father takes leave”!–but also from a family and personal well-being perspective. Dads get to be hands-on parents, nurturers not just providers. Couples don’t divorce as much. Children have two grown-ups to take care of them instead of one.

It’s not all vikings and unicorns, but  I get the sense that if you asked most Swedish men if they would rather go back to a rigid gender division of labor they would politely decline (“Nej, tack.”).

After digesting this article, I’m left feeling both hopeful and deflated. It’s remarkable how quickly change can happen. On the other hand, we’re so breathlessly far from anything like this in the U.S. We don’t even have guaranteed paid parental leave for anyone, let alone fathers!

I’m certain, if my dad had the opportunity and our culture’s blessing, he would have loved to stay home with us. Pretty sure my mom would be okay with someone else peeling the potatoes once in a while, too.

- Liz