Being busy has become the latest status symbol, according to a study, and a remorselessly full diary is considered to be a marker of success.
As mass production has made luxury goods affordable to large chunks of the middle classes, people have turned instead to the “conspicuous consumption of time” as a way of telling others how important they are, academics at three American business schools suggest.
The change has also been powered by the crumbling of the old social order during the 20th century and the emergence of an economy that depends on the ceaseless flow of ideas, information and niggling 5am emails, they argue.
Marketing experts in the US first analysed 1,100 “humblebrags” — remarks that look like complaints but are actually meant to be interpreted as boasts — tweeted by American celebrities, including the actress Lindsay Lohan. They found that 12 per cent of these statements related to how hard the famous people were working.
In the next experiment they asked 307 people to rate the status of a made-up Facebook friend who either wrote repeatedly about how busy they were or posted updates about their life of leisure. The ostentatiously busy friend was placed significantly higher up on the social ladder as well as being judged to be more in demand and more respectable. For a third strand of the study a separate group of 302 Americans read about a 35-year-old man named Joe, who was said either to work ten hours a day or less than seven.
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The hard-working version of Joe was scored much more highly for status, particularly by people who believed that success hinged on the work ethic.
Silvia Bellezza, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School in New York, who led the study, said that the old ways of signalling social status, such as designer clothes and accessories, seemed to have become diluted as luxuries became more affordable. “Just because I’m wearing a Gucci bag today does not mean all that much, whereas for my grandmother’s generation it would have meant a lot because few people could afford to buy it,” she said.
The cult of busyness does not, however, extend as far as Dr Bellezza’s compatriots. When participants in Italy were introduced to Giovanni, the Italian version of Joe, they accorded him much higher status if he did less work.
The study will be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.