Gemma Speck

If your needs were fulfilled, you rested.

There was no guilt attached to that.

Guilt, we have to remember, is a social, but more importantly, moral emotion.

It derives mainly from social attitudes or other people kind of telling you that you're doing something wrong.

It doesn't just come up naturally without social influence or narratives about good and bad.

So what exactly from then to now has changed in our social attitude?

we have to fast forward to the industrial revolution mainly and this is so interesting to think about when clocks started to enter the workplace feels weird to say but honestly that was a major shift the historian ep thompson he wrote about this in a very

classic piece on industrial capitalism.

It's this very famous paper, and he basically says when clocks were introduced into factories and into workplaces, that is when stuff went downhill.

They were used to enforce discipline.

They were used to enforce higher output, to basically coordinate the movements of the workers and the machines, but also to keep track of how many hours somebody was being paid for rather than output.

lateness, idleness, they were then treated as an economic problem.

If you were late for work, you weren't just late for work because somebody was sick.

That was a productivity issue.

There was money being lost based on your choices.

Once time is measured in that way, we basically as a society begin to learn that there is always some kind of cost to rest or to not working.

That

you know, that's time not being spent properly and we might lose out if we're not on the go all the time.

There is kind of a further social cultural element to that, to why we panic with not being busy enough or occupied by tasks.

And I think that element is that not being busy means we could be out of a job, means that there isn't enough work to go around, means that you are not worth the cost to an employer.