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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The Cult of Busyness

This is part of a special series, We’re Reemerging. What Does the World Look Like Now?, which considers in real time how we cope while living through a historic time. It’s also in the latest VICE magazine. Subscribe here.

Gwen Clarke’s pre-pandemic days started at 5:45 in the morning. She went to the gym near her apartment in Astoria, Queens, then commuted 40 minutes to her job as a digital content producer. She often worked late into the weekday evenings, and at least one weekend day. After work, she would grab a drink—or several��with co-workers, before returning, exhausted, to her apartment.

The past year has been different. Because of COVID-19, the 26-year-old moved home to Southampton, New York, and the pace of life slowed down.

“I wake up in the morning and I don’t have to get right out of bed,” Clarke said. “I used to close my eyes, count to three, and jump out of bed before I could talk myself out of it. Now I can sit and be cozy and scroll on my phone and do whatever the hell I want for nearly two hours before I get up and start my day.” Her work-from-home days are easily interrupted with midday walks or yoga.

In a nutshell, she’s been freed from the tyranny of busyness. Busyness is not only about packing each day with as much as possible, but also the value placed on doing so: Being busy makes people feel good about themselves, and they use busyness, voluntarily, to signal their worth to others. “Working in TV production, I have always thought that being busy is a good thing,” Clarke said. “It means that the people around you trust you. I definitely have this feeling that being busy means you are important.”

Busyness is a powerful social signal, though a somewhat counterintuitive one. At the turn of the 20th century, economists predicted that the ultimate symbol of wealth and success would be leisure—showing others that you were so successful that you could abstain from work. Instead, the opposite occurred. It’s not free time, but busyness, that gestures to a person’s relevance.

“Being busy made me feel like a valuable resource with abilities that were in high demand,” said Robbie McDonald, a 53-year-old from Vancouver who worked long hours at a nonprofit before the pandemic. “It fueled my insecurity and impostor syndrome. The busier I got, the more I would take on, for fear of seeming irrelevant. I definitely wore the busy badge of honor, complaining about it to colleagues and friends, but I was secretly proud that so many people relied on me to get things done.”

Yet there are indications that people don’t want to slingshot themselves back to a world that determines their value based on how busy they are. A rash of articles has recently expressed a sense of foreboding at returning to the veneration of an overloaded life. In April, New York Magazine wrote about “The People Who Don’t Want to Return to Normalcy,” quoting a man named William who felt that during the past year, for the first time, he “had a great excuse to do nothing… It was the best. I feel guilty saying it.”

In an advice column for the Cut, one reader wrote, “I’m not ready for isolation to end.” The Wall Street Journal announced that the pandemic’s end means the “return of anxiety.” “Many are relieved by the lack of choices and the ability to engage with others almost entirely on their own terms. And they’re not sure they’re ready for it all to end,” the psychologist Peggy Drexler wrote for the Journal. In the last year, McDonald told VICE she has grown blissfully accustomed to her new routine, which “doesn’t include 5 a.m. Teams chats or emergency Saturday meetings about Facebook comments.”

The pandemic offered a rare window of opportunity for some people to become literally less busy, and perhaps more importantly, to get perspective on their cultural beliefs about busyness. Instead of being caught up in the inertia of always projecting a busy life, they had time to reflect on how they used busyness to define themselves—and how it led to stress and the conflation of productivity and self-worth.

Of course, experiencing this slowing down of life in order to gain these insights reflects a certain amount of privilege—but that’s kind of the point. Research has found that busyness is most often assumed as a status symbol for higher-paid workers. The people who value and signal busyness are not typically hourly or gig workers, sociologists told VICE. Busyness in the lower classes is less a symbol of success and more a byproduct of a lack of time autonomy, overwork from low wages, and a lack of social safety nets.

It’s higher-paid workers who were more likely to reap the benefits of the status of busyness, and they are also the ones more likely to have recently tasted a slower, less busy kind of life. If the past year could change the way they glorify being busy, could it help to knock down busyness for everyone as the aspirational state to strive for and maintain?

“I can’t go back to the frenetic pace,” McDonald said. She recalled one recent morning when she found herself sitting on a log at the beach, watching a crow drop sealed clams from the air and swoop down to pick out the meat. “It seemed so simple and so easy. I started to question if my life could look like that.”

In 1840, it was briefly cool to walk a turtle on a string around the Parisian arcades. “You did that to signal time abundance, to signal quite how little you did or how much leisure you had, because that was a sign of status,” said Tony Crabbe, a business psychologist and the author of Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much.

The turtle walker’s “leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. It was also his protest against their industriousness,” the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote.

This is what Thorstein Veblen, a 19th century economist, wrote about in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen thought that elites of the future would participate in “conspicuous leisure,” as a signal to others of their success. This idea was epitomized in Downton Abbey, when Maggie Smith’s character, Violet Crawley, asked, “What is a ‘weekend’?” “The joke, of course, is that the dowager countess is too aristocratic to even recognize the concept of a week divided between work and leisure,” wrote busyness researchers in the Harvard Business Review.

Veblen wasn’t the only one predicting a future of leisure as a status symbol. In 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture, later published as Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in which he foresaw that people in the year 2028 would work only 15 hours a week thanks to a productive economy and technological innovation. With so much leisure time, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won,” Keynes wrote.

Well-off people in the western world are nowhere close to working just three hours a day, nor do they parade around reptilian symbols of how much free time they have. They boast of their busyness instead. “Just as being leisurely around 1900 was a status claim, being unmanageably busy at the turn of this century was a status claim based on the fact that the busiest people also tended to be the richest,” said Jonathan Gershuny, a professor of economic sociology at University College London and a co-director of the Center for Time Use Research.

Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor of business in marketing at Columbia Business School, studies how busyness replaced leisure as the form of “conspicuous consumption.” By being busy, a person signals to others how they themselves are a scarce resource on the market. Not having time to rest indicates that you’re in demand, and that your intellectual capital is highly valued. As a result, others consider you to be higher status.

This form of status signaling can even be found in personal relationships that have nothing to do with “work.” Over the last 20 years, Ann Burnett, a retired professor of communication and women and gender studies at North Dakota State University, has collected letters that families send out over the holidays. As Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, described, “Words and phrases that began surfacing in the 1970s and 1980s—’hectic,’ ‘whirlwind,’ ‘consumed,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘constantly on the run’ and ‘way too fast’—now appear with astonishing frequency.” People were consistently bragging to others about how busy they are. Bellezza and her colleagues have similarly documented celebrities on social media complaining about their busy schedules and lack of time.

Bellezza’s work has shown that these busyness signals make other people think you’re important. In one of Bellezza and her colleagues’ studies, they found that people who get groceries delivered were perceived as busier and higher class, and a woman wearing a Bluetooth headset had a higher status than another wearing headphones. When people were asked to read imaginary letters from a friend, one letter described how “crazy busy” a person was, while the other said his life was “relaxed.” The participants thought the busy letter writer to have more money, have better skills, and have a higher social status.

But the paradox and masochism of busyness is also laid bare: the study found that while people aspire to be more like a busy person, they also con- sider the busy person to be less happy. An obsession with busyness also taints how people spend what little leisure time they have, Bellezza said, by wanting leisure to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible—called “productivity orientation.”

This phenomenon is stronger in American culture. In an Italian sample, people thought the reverse: that the relaxed letter writer must be better off since, after all, his life was so relaxing. “I noticed that in the U.S. that wasn’t the case,” Bellezza said. “Instead, people brag about how much they work. It’s almost like a badge of honor—the fact that you never take holidays, even if you could afford to.”

This ethos can be found in a 2014 Super Bowl commercial for Cadillac, a luxury car: A well-off man with a nice house and suit brags about not taking his vacation time. “Other countries, they work,” the actor said. “They stroll home, they stop by the cafe, they take August off. Off. Why aren’t you like that? Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven, hard- working believers, that’s why.”

Another reason why Keynes’ vision of a shorter work day hasn’t come true is inequality, according to Judy Wajcman, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London.

“There’s a class of managerial and professional workers who have done very well and whose wages sort of increased phenomenally,” she said. “But there’s been a huge increase in low-paid service jobs, where the minimum wage has absolutely not kept up.”

This is a crucial component of signaling busyness: Most people don’t earn enough money to have increased leisure time; “busyness” is more often a badge of honor for those with salaried jobs, Wajcman said. “People that are paid by the hour may be more likely to define busyness in terms of, ‘I have to have this job—in fact I have to have two jobs in order to pay the bills,’” Burnett said.

Past research has found that those people who lament being busy the loudest haven’t actually experienced a huge increase in working hours—busyness is more of a feeling and state of mind than a reflection of labor. The Swedish economist Staffan B. Linder came up with the phrase the “harried leisure class,” which means that as people accrue wealth, they have more consumption available to them, and pack their day with more activities.

“What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”

In their studies, Bellezza said that when they told people that a person was busy or working all the time, participants assumed that it was for a white collar job. If they were told it was a blue collar job, the boosting in status a person got from being “busy” wasn’t as strong as for a white collar job.

“It’s so class specific,” Wajcman said. “Gig workers don’t talk about this. There’s no status from the busyness of an Uber driver or an Amazon worker in a warehouse. It is completely an upper middle class managerial notion that busyness is a good, positive thing.” When it comes to gig work or lower-paying forms of labor, Wajcman said that the experience of busyness is not experienced as a signal of high status, but of a lack of control over their own time.

The pandemic may push people, especially the privileged, to recognize that the ways they’ve wielded busyness is a construct, and one they may try to resist in the future. A small behavioral shift that Burnett recommended, even pre-pandemic: When people ask you, “How are you?” Resist the temptation to say, “I’m so busy.”

“We have to think about our basic interactions with people and think about how you’re portraying yourself and responding to these basic questions. You have to be intentional.” There are many downsides to the culture of busyness, Burnett said. “And honestly, the upside of it being something to brag about is just not worth it.”

A small but passionate resistance against the dominance of busyness existed before the pandemic, said Carl Honoré, the author of The Power of Slow, and one of the leaders of the global Slow Movement—a crusade to slow life down. The Slow Movement, as Honoré has written, urges people to live life by “savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.”

Honoré first realized he was rushing through the moments too fast when he noticed himself speeding through bedtime stories with his son. “I had a lightbulb moment,” he said. “I thought, is this really what I want my life to be? Where I’m racing through it, instead of living it? What a life of speed, busyness, distraction, multitasking, stimulation, impatience does is that it walls you off from who you are. You become your to-do list. You become a ‘human doing’ instead of a human being.”

When the pandemic began, Honoré said many people wrote to him asking if he was pleased that the world was grinding to a halt. “At no point have I ever been over the moon,” he said. “A pandemic is a total nightmare for everybody, in lots of different ways. But I do think that there can be a silver lining. What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”

The Slow Movement is part of a larger trend to “decelerate.” Giana Eckhardt, a professor of marketing at King’s College London who studies deceleration, said she noticed that even pre-pandemic there was a rise in deceleration-type activities, like meditation or yoga retreats, pilgrimage routes, and “slow travel,” where the focus isn’t on cramming in sightseeing activities, but staying in one place for a longer period of time and experiencing the quotidien lifestyle. One extreme example comes from South Korea, where some overworked and busy people check into a fake prison, called Prison Inside Me, which opened in 2008. Shut into a cell, people reduce their stress by removing all forms of outside busyness.

If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well.

The phrase “deceleration” is an attempt to seek relief from “social acceleration,” a phrase coined by a professor of sociology and political science named Hartmut Rosa. He defined social acceleration as an “increase in episodes of action or experience per unit of time”—essentially more things per minute on average per day: more things made, more emails sent, more friends to go out to drinks with, more activities to bring children to.

Acceleration leads to busyness in and of itself, which is also called “time sickness,” or “a sense of urgency; time is running out, there is not enough of it, and we must run faster and faster just to keep up,” Eckhardt wrote in a paper on deceleration.

In response, people seek out oases of deceleration, which is not the same as just flopping down on the couch and watching Netflix. Eckhardt and her colleagues went to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, where they interviewed people and asked them what they were getting out of it. More than 300,000 people from 161 countries completed the trek in 2017—and many were not there for religious reasons, Eckhardt said, but rather to find a way to slow down.

Her work describes three elements that create an experience of deceleration: embodied deceleration, technological deceleration, and episodic deceleration. Embodied deceleration is the physical slowing down of your body: walking or riding a bike versus moving your body around in cars, planes, or buses. Technological deceleration is not giving up technology, but feeling like you have a sense of control over it. And episodic deceleration is having fewer episodes of action per day. “Not feeling like you’re running from meeting to meeting at work, and then you have to run to pick up your kids and drive them to three different activities at the same time as you’re trying to cook dinner,” Eckhardt said.

Episodic deceleration isn’t just about lowering the number of activities, but also the number of activities you have to pick from. If someone achieves all three things—say when walking a pilgrimage—then much of the stress and overwhelm from living a socially accelerated life tends to drop away.

The irony is that deceleration can often be a refuge predominantly for the privileged. After all, who has the means for retreats or slow vacations? Eckhardt argued that because of this, there was a slight shift before COVID in which deceleration was becoming a signal of wealth and status—more in line with Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. For example, take Arianna Huffington’s rest and relaxation brand, or Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week, which promises to teach how to “Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”

During the pandemic, more people, albeit still privileged, have had access to at least one of these modes of deceleration in their everyday lives. Any increase in the number of people accessing deceleration is a good thing, Eckhardt said. If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well. Eckhardt thinks it may be a turning point when the status symbol of busyness finally has some meaningful competition.

“I think in terms of an overall rhythm of life, what people do, will they want to go back to commuting on a subway for an hour to an office five days a week? No, they don’t,” Eckhardt said. “Do they want to go back to getting up at 5 a.m. to go to an exercise class before then doing an hour-long commute? No. I think there are a lot of things about the rhythms of daily life of this past year that people are going to work hard to maintain.”

Eckhardt said that if we want to maintain deceleration after COVID, we should try to maintain the three specific facets of deceleration. But it may be more crucial for us to try to value deceleration as a desirable social signal.

“Try to remember the feeling of making your own food and sharing it with your household, rather than running back to eating many meals out and on the go,” she wrote in the Conversation. “As you emerge from lockdown, try to maintain practices like stopping work to eat your lunch in the middle of the day, and take tea breaks, preferably with others and outdoors when you can. There is much value to be gained from having the rhythm of your daily life be one that you can savor.”

Kevin Roose wrote in April in the New York Times about the “YOLO economy”—the observation that mid-career adults are “abandoning cushy and stable jobs,” to pursue remote work, slower and more easygoing living locales, and fewer daily obligations. But as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen pointed out, many people who are changing careers aren’t just doing it because YOLO, but because the past year has traumatized, exhausted, and pushed them to the edge. Busyness status as a reward just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Emphasizing the pleasure and social benefits of deceleration can help shift attention away from busyness. In Post-Growth Living, the philosopher Kate Soper describes an alternative form of a pleasurable life as a release of “the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today.” She writes that leisure and slowing down is not always about fun or biking in the park. It’s about having time for mental health and grieving too.

Beyond an individual pace of life, slowness can be a way to advocate for others. The slow food, slow fashion, slow design, or slow city movements have emphasized not only a slower pace, but a pace that’s paired with ethical consumption and production—including better living wages, minimal environmental impact, and better quality of life.

Honoré has neighbors who have had the time to volunteer during the past year, and have told him that it’s an activity they’re going to continue. “A big part of slowing down is about creating the time and the space and the patience to build up relationships,” Honoré said. “And not just friends, but also to be of service to other people.”

And while those who were able to slow down the most remained the most privileged, the pandemic gave others the ability to access the kinds of social services that give people more autonomy over their time and busyness. There were larger and more substantive safety nets—like increased unemployment and eviction bans. (Petersen has framed this kind of support as a “permission structure.”)

Other kinds of top-down policy approaches could maintain these revelations about busyness, so that individuals don’t have to act on their own. Brunello Cucinelli, an Italian entrepreneur, mandates a sit-down hour and a half lunch, and requires his employees to leave at 5 p.m. Or take “right to disconnect” laws in France, where workers don’t have to respond to work emails on weekends, or after a certain time on weekdays. If policy enables (or forces) people to slow down, then it doesn’t matter if busyness is overhauled completely as a social signal—the system will demand it.

Will these changes stick? Or will we go right back to worshipping busyness at the cost of everything else? Bellezza isn’t as optimistic about deceleration replacing busyness as the leading social status signal, but she acknowledged that when she started studying busyness, there wasn’t any discussion about deceleration at all. She’s glad it’s entered the conversation, and tries to practice deceleration in her own life.

Steven Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University who studies post-traumatic growth, said that because the pandemic brought death and mortality to the fore, it made people reevaluate their relationships, and what they wanted out of life. Taylor feels hopeful that if enough people change their value systems, that will enact larger change.

“Social systems can change,” he said. “They’re influenced by the people who live within that system. Changes in attitudes lead to changes in behavior. And both attitudes and behavioral changes lead to changes in social structures.” If leisure and shorter workdays were once valued, it’s possible we could value them again.

And during post-traumatic transformations, one change that Taylor has observed is that people are less interested in work. “They love to spend their time doing nothing in particular, just enjoying being in the moment and being alive in the world,” he wrote in the Conversation.

Clarke said she’s soon moving back to New York City after a year of being away. She said that while she’s excited to be closer to friends, restaurants, and city life, she wants to hang onto the good parts of slow. “I enjoy my slow mornings, and some slower work days that allow me to escape to the grocery store or for a walk outside,” she said.

“Don’t get me wrong—I still have days where I am booked solid from 9:30 a.m. through 6:30 p.m.,” Clarke said. “But I have a whole new perspective on being busy, and I understand now that you don’t have to be slammed to be considered valuable.”

Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.

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rueur · 4 years ago

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Morning Pages No. 57

Thursday 20th August - 9:27am

I’ve done everything I need to do for the morning, except eaten but I’m not too fussed about that. I used mouthwash, and I’m feeling pretty clean. Popped a pimple. I have work at 2:30pm, and I’m looking forward to it because I get to leave the house, and I know it’s going to be an easy shift. I kinda still want to watch Indiana Jones, but I also want to play a little Pokemon, and maybe I also want to be productive, because I’ve spent the last few days being really, really productive and it feels weird to actually have ‘free time’ now, but I also deserve some free time. I’ve been working too hard.

I had a phone call with Sarah last night. That went for about an hour. I took it outside with my headphones on, like just sitting on the side of the house by the carport with Lonzo’s red saddle jumper draped across my knees, as I stitch up that velcro patch that’s been coming off. I managed to do one entire side of the patch, so there’s just the other long side and then the short top that’s left. I’m keen to do that today. Or I can bring it to work and do it at work, but I feel like that may be a slap in the face for my managers, I don’t know. It’s true that we just don’t have a lot to do at work right now, so it would make sense to just bring things in, but at the same time, I have so much time at home. I shouldn’t be bringing chores into work. They don’t know that I actually don’t have that much time at home.

Sarah’s been having a weird couple of months with Rishi, so we chatted about everything and she was asking me what she should do in order to get their relationship to a place where talking about sensitive issues comes with more stable terrain, or more familiar territory. I spoke to her about the past three years with Evan, and the necessity to lay a groundwork on how you handle arguments. Sometimes it can feel like when you’re fighting, you fight in different ways and need different things from each other in order to attain closure. But when you need different things at the same time that neither of you are able to give, it can feel in that moment like you’re just totally incompatible. Evan and I have had our fair share of those fights, where he doesn’t want to say anything either because he doesn’t entirely know what to say in order to accurately express how he feels, or he simply doesn’t want to say anything out of concern that it’ll make things worse or just upset me further. But then because I’m full of nervous energy most of the time, and because I need to hear communication from him, him being stoic and speechless usually ends up just making me upset anyway. And it’s curious, but it was only during my conversation with Sarah that I realised that Evan and I haven’t had an argument like that in a long time now, like an argument that’s filled with awkward, tense, silent pauses because neither of us wants to speak. It’s actually a lot easier for us to hash things out now because Evan expresses himself more efficiently now. And I think it’s just because we’ve been together long enough at this point to understand how to speak to one another, and how to attain closure by working together to address our grievances. It only took like three years and one minor break-up to get to this point, but now I mean...we’re strong. We don’t have any doubts about one another, and about our equal commitment to this relationship. It’s nice, actually, to be in a space where for the first time, my partner is equally committed to me as I am to them. It’s really nice. And Sarah deserves that too.

I think a major contributing factor is that Rishi’s our age, he’s younger. Like Ashwin, but Ashwin also has a job and has somewhat of a direction he knows he may like to follow, with being the practice manager. But Rishi’s unemployed, he has no streams of personal income aside from his parents, and a business that’s just not moving fast enough yet for him to be profiting off of it. And Sarah also said he may be spending on overheads prematurely, like a warehouse space and an EMPLOYEE. The boy is living boldly. I mean I understand that though, it can be tricky being an entrepreneur and not having any real groundwork to follow when it comes to plotting out your career trajectory. ‘Entrepreneurship’ is just stabs in the dark until you find something remotely similar to what you’re looking for, and then just making it work from there. One of the articles I had to write for this month was on why you don’t need a lot of capital to start your own business. One of the major points made by other entrepreneurs is that if your idea can’t make money unless you have $10,000 or something, then your idea probably isn’t as strong as it could be. Some people say they need money for marketing, like in order to get their product out there...but then at the same time, you have a lot of online businesses that get their start from just playing the social media game really, really well. You don’t necessarily need to pay Facebook or Instagram for a promoted platform or anything like that, not if your product is good enough and fills enough of the gap in the market that you’ve sussed out.

Whenever I think of the phrase ‘gap in the market’, I think of people patching up water pipes and shit with duct tape, like just the most haphazard pipe in the world that’s filled with duct tape patches of all shapes and sizes. That’s what ‘the market’ looks like to me. People like to pretend that civilisation is orderly, completely organised to the point where the world exists off of squares and grids, linear systems. I know that’s not the case now, especially since lockdown, but I knew it during my undergrad too. You can just see the cracks more readily now, and you can see the desperation of the bodies that govern us - be they governmental or corporate - as they try to ‘keep the economy afloat’ like it’s the only thing that matters. I know it’s also easy for me to talk because I still have a job, but for the past few years I’ve had the bare minimum of a job. Twelve contracted hours a week, it’s usually lucky for me to make $400. And now that there’s no commissions it’s lower than that. The way that I see my job is that it only really covers rent, and if I want to support the rest of my life, I’ll absolutely need to take on students and have as many SEO jobs as I can hold.

Anyway, Sarah and I chatted about a lot of things, but mostly it was about Rishi and what she should do. She also told me she’d been asking Amy for advice and Amy’s response to Sarah’s qualms have been a little bit more defensive or protective, I should say. It’s because of everything that had happened with Sonny. Also it doesn’t help that apparently both Rishi and Sonny are scorpios, and Amy’s doubly wary for that reason too! Evan and I were talking about how much we enjoy being pisceans, and the more I think about it right now, the more I realise that I actually do love being around other pisceans. I feel like I just get their energy, their nature, and I know what to expect from them because it’s all me too. Amy’s also a piscean, which is just the most fitting thing ever. Our emotional intuition is off the charts, and I’m yet to meet a person who’s as in tune with themselves as Amy is.

It’s 9:50am, and I feel like I’m making good time with these pages this time around. I struggled through yesterday’s, and I think it’s because I knew I just had a mound of work waiting for me once I’d typed out these pages. But I know that all I need to do for the rest of today is just chill out and wait for it to be 2pm, when we’ll leave so I can make it to work! It’s going to be an easy day. If anything, all I should task myself with today is organising both the zoom chat with Steve and the zoom chat with Dan. That sounds like a perfectly fine workload. I’m just not sure when I’ll be able to organise either of those chats. I feel like I should prioritise Steve, just because I haven’t dedicated much time to Julie’s project because of the agency this week, but I did tell Julie ahead of time, so I’m not feeling badly right now. Also, Dan’s still getting stuff together, so it’s going to be a pretty preliminary conversation. Even so, I should get in touch with both of them today.

I feel like I need to go to the bathroom again. Second poop! Oh second poop, how long must you plague me for? How do I absorb you into my first poop? Or am I just always doomed to feel the nagging pains of second poop on every commute for years and years to come? I kind of regret writing this out...but hey, it’s my stream of consciousness. Penny!

Yesterday’s 21 Days challenge was to interact with our Abundance Accountability Buddy (AAB), and mine is a woman named Penny. Nichole and Amy were paired together, and Evan has both Braden AND Anthony, so initially I felt a little iffy about being paired with a complete stranger, but at this point I just trust Sarah and I believe she paired Penny and I together for a reason that I’ll come to know through interacting with this person. I’m hopeful that our chats turn familiar and we share some pretty nifty insights with one another. And that maybe I’ll make a friend? I’m not entirely sure how old Penny is. I had a look through her profile pictures out of curiosity, and there are two women in a lot of them: one older, one younger. At this point, Penny might either be the mother or the daughter, I don’t know! I mean, I know it doesn’t matter too much, but I just don’t know how to handle the text speech. I feel like I text differently when it comes to people from different age brackets or different personal backgrounds, I don’t know! But I trust Sarah! She paired us together consciously, for a genuine reason. And I will talk to Penny and only through talking to Penny, will we both come to realise what that reason is. I mean at the same time, it may have also been completely random.

It’s a beautiful day, as I can see it out of my big front window. I’m honestly digging the long grass in the front yard, even though I know it cannot be encouraged. Maybe I’ll ask Evan to mow it at some point today. Or we can do it together tomorrow. There are some dog poops that I could pick up, and I could work on clearing the garden beds at the very least. I’m still keen to plant some lavender and rosemary along the house. It’ll complement the house’s muted colour scheme really nicely. Interesting...with a greater number of paragraphs, my word count for these pages has gone from an average of around 2100, to now 1993. I should write more paragraphs. 2000.

#sarah #morningpages #streamofconsciousness #57 #artistsway #21days #penny

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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I became a fan of indoor group cycling classes the first week my tiny Chicago gym started offering Johnny G’s spinning classes in the mid-’90s. Since then, I’ve spent countless hours (and dollars) at studios riding various bikes to nowhere. Having an instructor hollering at me, loud music pumping, and others around me to compete with are crucial for my motivation. I’m not the only one. For the last decade, indoor cycling studios like SoulCycle and Flywheel have been booming.

I was skeptical when my building added two Peloton bikes to our workout room in New York City. But this is not a normal stationary bike. I’ve been riding it two to three times a week for several months. My gym has sent me several pleading emails wondering when I’m coming back.

Peloton bikes come with a large screen attached to the handlebars so that users can either take live cycling classes that are streamed in from Peloton’s New York City cycling studio or choose from thousands of others available in the archive. Once you plug in headphones and clip into the pedals, the experience feels uncannily like the real thing, except without the commute.

Peloton is not like the exercise bikes and NordicTracks of yore that largely ended up as clothing racks. It’s managed to harness the energy, connection, and competitiveness of a live group fitness class. Thanks to a methodical “casting” system for instructors and a well-tended and well-studied community presence on Facebook, people are exceptionally loyal to the exercise modality. The company was founded in 2012 and delivered its first bike in 2014; it boasts having more than 1 million users.

The Peloton at-home bike. Peloton

Now, at-home, “connected” fitness options, like Peloton’s answer to SoulCycle, are ascendant. There are an abundance of class streaming apps, like the audio app Aaptiv, the so-called “Spotify of fitness,” that you only need a phone to use. But increasingly, more companies have been inspired by Peloton’s success to the point that they are asking customers to commit to pricey home equipment. There are now several Pelotons of rowing (Hydrow, Cityrow), a Peloton of weight training (Tonal), a Peloton of boxing (Rumble), and a Peloton of group cardio studio fitness (Mirror).

Like a lot of things that emerge from the wellness industry, Peloton comes at a steep price. It costs $2,000 for a bike, and that’s before you add in the monthly streaming service. The company is valued at more than $4 billion and an IPO is likely imminent. Since people are busier and boutique fitness is more popular than ever, it’s not surprising that a business that accounts for both of these things is thriving. Peloton’s success is also a convincing sign that high-priced fitness has been normalized. It wasn’t long ago that SoulCycle’s high class prices were raising eyebrows, but now people are willing to pay up for a stationary bike of their own at home.

Over the last decade, traditional gyms started to lose some of their customers to so-called boutique fitness studios that usually offer one very specific type of group class, like barre or stationary cycling. SoulCycle became the most visible of these, frequently garnering headlines (and cult comparisons) because of its $30-plus price tag for one 45-minute cycling class and the evangelism of its customers (or “warriors,” as they prefer to be called). But a rumored SoulCycle IPO was taken off the table this past spring because of “market conditions.”

According to a recent market survey published in Fast Company, the at-home fitness equipment market is worth $14 billion and 54 percent of Americans surveyed expressed interest in buying at-home equipment. (Currently, according to IHRSA, about 60 million Americans have gym memberships, spending $30 billion on them.)

Peloton is very popular and is still growing. It has more than 1 million customers, including anyone who has used a Peloton bike or taken a class. It’s sold 250,000 bikes since launch, bringing in $300 million in revenue in 2017, according to the Wall Street Journal. After raising $550 million in funding in August, the company is now valued at $4.15 billion. Its CEO and founder John Foley, who did stints at Evite and Barnes and Noble before starting Peloton, has suggested that the company will pursue an IPO in 2019. It just launched in Canada and the UK.

On top of the $2,000 price tag for a Peloton bike, the streaming service, where you can access hundreds of classes, is $39 a month. If you opt out of the streaming service, you only have access to three sample classes. Peloton is also about to start shipping treadmills, which cost almost $4,000, with the same streaming model. The company says it has pre-sold 10,000 so far. Alternatively, you can work out on a non-Peloton machine of your choice using your phone and an app-only membership which costs about $20 a month, but you can’t stream this onto a Peloton bike’s screen and game your way out of the $39/month tab.

At home on the bike, the screen is large, and the instructor is front and center, often looking straight into the camera and calling out by name riders who have reached certain milestones, like their 100th ride. You can see the silhouettes of riders in the studio in the mirrors behind the instructor, bathed in a violet light. Metrics like speed, calories, output, and mileage all scroll continuously on your screen, and a leaderboard on one side shows you how you’re doing compared to everyone else.

In the cycling studio, 12 different instructors record classes about eight to 12 times a week each, in front of a live group of actual riders at an NYC studio; a separate treadmill studio is ramping up its offerings as the treads start to ship. Classes at the studio are $32. Lunchtime classes, which are hard to fill with paying customers, are often free.

Ally Love teaches a live class at the Peloton studio in New York City. Peloton

Taking a live Peloton class at the company’s fitness studio feels like being in a TV show about a spin class, because that’s essentially what it is. The lights, cameras, and some scripted patter of the instructor are clues that this class is different from SoulCycle, Flywheel, or any of the other popular spinning classes that have taken over gym culture in the past decade. There are cameras mounted on the ceiling that zip around getting shots of the instructor from different angles, ultimately feeding the footage to a huge, high tech video studio in the basement level.

The instructor takes care to speak to the camera more than to the IRL class. It felt slightly stilted, a thing that I found weird since it feels so authentic when you’re actually on the bike at home. I felt a little bit like a prop in the room. Brad Olson, senior vice president of member experience at Peloton, acknowledges that having bodies in the physical space to create energy “does translate on camera. Ultimately we’re optimizing for the million members, not for the 50 folks in the room.”

New startups and old stalwarts alike have watched Peloton’s success closely, and they want a piece of that enthusiastic market. While Peloton has called itself the “Netflix of fitness,” new startups are now calling themselves the “Peloton of insert exercise type here.” It’s become the go-to model, including the luxury price points.

Flywheel, a studio-based cycling company with 43 locations all over the country, started offering “Fly Anywhere” classes complete with a $1,999 bike at the end of 2017. In September, Peloton filed a suit against Flywheel alleging that it had stolen its proprietary technology, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Peloton declined to discuss the lawsuit.)

Rumble, a growing boxing club workout that counts Justin Bieber manager Scooter Braun as an investor, just announced a partnership with Technogym. It will be selling a $1,700 bag and $39 per month streaming classes (as well as a $20/month app-only option), but a launch video also suggests that it will offer cycling and running classes, too, and will sell you the necessary Technogym equipment for that.

Then there’s NordicTrack. Perhaps like I was, you might be surprised to learn that NordicTrack makes more than NordicTracks, those wooden at-home cross country skiers that were big in the ’80s and ’90s. It offers three different connected treadmills complete with screens and streaming technology, priced from $1,699 to $2,899. The first year of streaming classes is free, then it’s, yep, $39 a month. There’s also a connected bike, and a rower just launched in November. The company says it has 1.9 million members and has been offering streaming classes on its equipment since 2015.

The surprise in all this is that there are a total of three new connected rowers, arguably the most boring workout and one ripe for disruption. CityRow, a NYC-based rowing group fitness class that intersperses rowing and strength training, launched water rowers for $1,395 and $19/month to stream classes.

The Hydrow at-home connected rowing machine. Hydrow

Bruce Smith, a US national rowing coach, has started Hydrow, complete with a sleek silver rower that is the quietest and nicest looking one I’ve ever tried. It costs $2,199 and streaming is $38/month. Delivery will start in May. The instructors are all professional rowers, and the classes are shot on actual bodies of water in real boats. When you watch it on the screen, it’s pretty engaging.

Finally, there are a few unique things coming. Tonal is a connected weight machine that looks like a giant iPhone hanging on a wall with movable arms attached that slide up and down and adjust to allow you to do multiple strength exercises. The resistance is provided by electromagnets, and the machine automatically adjusts if it senses you struggling. A coach pops up on the screen to walk you through your personalized workout, which is constantly changing thanks to AI. The unit is $2,995 and streaming is $49/month. It currently only ships to San Francisco but will be more widely available soon.

Mirror, as the name suggests, hangs on your wall and streams cardio classes right to your living room. You can see yourself working out as well as follow an instructor. This might be the hardest sell, since you can already do this on your phone through any number of companies. But Mirror offers a lot of interactivity, a heart rate monitor so you can log stats, and obviously a bigger screen. It costs $1,495 plus $39/month.

Peloton clearly made a savvy decision launching at-home connected spinning, a modality which has had a bigger boom than other types of fitness classes. However, diversifying into running shows the company understands that exercisers can be fickle and that it may face some competition.

The Tonal wall-mounted strength training system. Tonal

What does Peloton think of all these interlopers? “We are mostly flattered, and we know there’s opportunity for other players in this space,” Olson says. “We’re watching and seeing what comes up. No one has really taken a bite out of our business yet.” Part of the reason might be because of the extreme devotion users have to the company.

Peloton’s million members are an enthusiastic, vocal bunch. A peloton is a pack of cyclists that stick close to each other in a road race, drafting off one another’s momentum. A lot of the enthusiasm is because of the 12 cycling instructors who teach the classes, without whom there would be little motivation to set foot on the bike. This is ultimately Peloton’s secret sauce, and may be difficult for its competitors to replicate.

Every city has its “celebrity” fitness instructors, those people whose classes fill up instantly. It’s the same at Peloton, except that its instructors can reach over a thousand people each ride rather than several dozen. Instructors interact with riders on their own Instagram and Facebook pages, as well as on company pages. Olson insists that no one instructor is the most popular.

“It is surprisingly consistent across instructors. I give [Fred Klein, chief content officer] all the credit. He comes from a world of television where he casts characters, and he wanted a balanced cast that appealed to different folks,” he says.

There are the hardcore road cyclists, like Christine D’Ercole. There’s Ally Love, who has an unfailingly upbeat and motivational vibe. Cody Rigsby is a former dancer and is known for his fun playlists. Jenn Sherman, who is down to earth, is my personal favorite.

“I like Denis Morton,” says Gil, 43, who’s had a Peloton bike for a little less than a year. “He’s a charismatic guy and he looks good, so that is kind of a motivational factor. He seems like a cool, guy’s guy type of person, so I liked that.” Gil was a road cyclist (“My actual bike is in my closet right now, in pieces”) and had never done spin classes, but got the Peloton when life got very busy with a toddler at home.

Morton, who has a man bun and is chiseled from his cheekbones on down, is definitely a favorite of many. He even has a Facebook group dedicated to him called “Denis’s Menaces,” which has 5,400 members.

Ally Love, who taught the class I went to live, once appeared on Good Morning America because hosts Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan are Peloton fans. Love is also a model and the Brooklyn Nets’ stadium host during home games. She has more than 90,000 followers on Instagram and admits, a little sheepishly, that she does get recognized a lot. She’s taken selfies in bathrooms with riders. She once met a fan in a hotel lobby in Montenegro. Another fan chased her down yelling before she got into a cab.

“People want to come up and tell you that what you’ve told them affected them, and I think that goes beyond just being famous and recognized,” Love says. After the class I took, she posed for selfies with fans.

Riders share their personal bests on Instagram and interact on their Peloton screens with other riders, who they can follow on a built-in social network and interact with during class, giving virtual “high fives” to each other, the Peloton equivalent of a Facebook “poke.” There are multiple Facebook and Instagram pages whereby hundreds of users interact with their favorite instructors and offer feedback, both solicited and not.

One such rider posted his stats on Instagram: 17.49 miles biked, 960 calories burned, 699 kilojoules of total ride output. For a man in his 40s, as his Peloton profile identified him, user “hjgo” had had a ridiculously impressive spinning session — but his personal best is not what made this workout interesting to his fellow at-home cycling enthusiasts.

“Hjgo” was actor Hugh Jackman, and while he proudly shared those stats, he also accidentally shared his username. “He reached out to our team, and he’s like, ‘Um, can you please change my username?’” says Olson. Jackman was “inundated” by people trying to engage with him, follow him, and give him high fives. (In case you’re wondering, Jackson’s favorite instructor is Alex Toussaint.) A fitness company couldn’t ask for a better free celebrity endorsement.

Peloton crowdsources improvements to its services constantly, often via two Facebook pages it moderates, the Official Peloton Members Page (115,000) and the Official Peloton Mom Group (almost 17,000). “It’s a gift to have 300-plus posts a day from members who are openly sharing their questions, their concerns, and their feedback, which is sometimes pretty harsh. But we love it, and we catalog every single piece of it,” says Olson. He says the brand has made “hundreds” of changes based on customer feedback, such as a feature showing the title and artist for each new song that’s played.

The studio has become a bit of a mecca for riders who don’t live in NYC. One 38-year-old rider, who requested anonymity because of her job, says, “Anytime I go there for work, if I’m in the island of Manhattan, it doesn’t matter where I stay or what I’m doing, I’ll go to the Peloton studio to ride.”

Peloton hosts an event every year called the Home Rider Invasion, which brings Pel-grims to the city for a giant communal ride. It started with groups of riders just showing up, but is now a more organized affair. The first official one brought in 350 riders. This year, the company offered spots for 1,000, and it sold out in three hours. Peloton had to host the riders at Chelsea Piers, a large athletic complex near the Hudson River.

Peloton and its competitors all promise to make a great workout more accessible, complete with a human connection. They’re also all really expensive and require that you have enough space in your home for a large piece of exercise equipment — a double whammy of privilege. The price is likely a limiting factor for a lot of people who could benefit from saving time by working out at home because of job and family commitments, because $1,500 to $4,000 plus $39 a month in perpetuity is a significant investment.

You can use Peloton’s app, and a multitude of other streaming apps, more cheaply, but it’s a different experience, and one that still often requires access to equipment. Olson is well aware of the criticism about the price. The company started offering financing a year ago and doesn’t charge interest for it. Buying a bike on a finance plan plus streaming will set you back a little less than $100 a month.

Since at least 2016 when the wellness industry started to really grow, critics have noted that wellness, a concept that began in the realm of public health as a way to prevent disease, became a luxury and an aspirational product somewhere along the way. $32 spin classes are not affordable for a good chunk of people. But we’re now numb to the price in many ways. Buying a Peloton bike plus streaming, via financing, is about the equivalent of three studio classes a month. Seems like a great deal, right?

The astronomical cost of working out has been normalized. “Most of our research suggests that there’s a large swath of the US population that’s already paying that much or more for fitness, so we think the quality of our offering merits that $97 a month investment,” says Olson. This also suggests that companies like Peloton won’t necessarily make fitness more accessible to a wider group of people. It will likely just see a redistribution of where that money is being spent.

Olson says, “We don’t want to trap you into staying; we want to convince you with the quality of our offering that you should be here.”

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Original Source -> Peloton’s $2,000 stationary bike has totally disrupted working out at home

via The Conservative Brief

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The Cult of Busyness

Gwen Clarke’s pre-pandemic days started at 5:45 in the morning. She went to the gym near her apartment in Astoria, Queens, then commuted 40 minutes to her job as a digital content producer. She often worked late into the weekday evenings, and at least one weekend day. After work, she would grab a drink—or several—with co-workers, before returning, exhausted, to her apartment.

The past year has been different. Because of COVID-19, the 26-year-old moved home to Southampton, New York, and the pace of life slowed down.

“What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”

If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well.

Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.

The Cult of Busyness syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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