2006-12-11 19:23:59 · 6 answers · asked by ihaveadream 1 in Politics & Government ➔ Other - Politics & Government
capitalism
2006-12-12 18:27:55 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
The technical term is increased expectations. In the "good old days," people took longer to do their chores, but they had many fewer chores. And it's not just the endless errands and sorting out of things that is normally referred to as chores, but we spend more time in scheduled activities like sports and clubs, we are involved in more time-consuming entertainments such as this Internet that sucks people in by the millions, and in general the time-consuming things have proliferated. When I was a kid, there was no equivalent to the endless hours now spent cruising the malls. Spending that much time shopping was something that happened once a year: we went to the nearest big city for our big Christmas shopping trip.
When I was young back in the 1950s, the big buzz was about "labor-saving devices," and a substantial number of them were household appliances. The next largest category, in terms the ordinary citizen could understand, were new and more complex business machines. (IBM was originally International Business Machines.) What was once done by a small army of clerks and typists is now done by a very few people with a lot of electronic equipment.
Problem is, now we expect everything to happen all at once. Back in the old days, you dictated a letter to a secretary who took it down in shorthand, then typed it on a regular old typewriter, then handed it to you to edit, then retyped it, and handed it to you to sign. Now, it's a thousand boilerplated letters in the time it used to take to complete that one letter.
2006-12-12 03:41:43 · answer #2 · answered by auntb93again 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Necessity is the mother of invention. We have more conveniences because we have less time (because we use our time earning money to "improve our lifestyle").
2006-12-12 03:31:14 · answer #3 · answered by Rainman 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Our new conveniences have eaten away all of our time..watch the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy"...hilarious and dead on! lol
2006-12-12 03:29:23 · answer #4 · answered by lucky 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
because americans, for some crazy reason, think work is a more valuable expenditure of time than enjoying life
2006-12-12 03:31:22 · answer #5 · answered by painfully_average 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I busy putting batteries in all my electronic devices.
2006-12-12 03:32:36 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋