Article excerpt. Elizabeth Dunn. Social Psychologist, University of British Columbia; Co-author, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending

The pace of life is increasing; people are working more and relaxing less than they did 50 years ago? As it turns out, there is very little evidence that people are now working more and relaxing less than they did in earlier decades. In fact, some of the best studies suggest just the opposite.

So, why do people report feeling so pressed for time?

A beautiful explanation for this puzzling phenomenon was offered by Sanford DeVoe, at the University of Toronto and Jeffrey Pfeffer, at Stanford.

They argue that as time becomes worth more money, time is seen as scarcer. Scarcity and value are perceived as conjoined twins; when a resource – from diamonds to drinking water – is scarce, it is more valuable, and vice versa. So, when our time becomes more valuable, we feel like we have less of it. Indeed, surveys from around the world have shown that people with higher incomes report feeling more pressed for time. But there are lots of plausible reasons for this, including the fact that more affluent people often work longer hours, leaving them with objectively less free time.

DeVoe and Pfeffer proposed, however, that simply perceiving oneself as affluent might be sufficient to generate feelings of time pressure. Going beyond past correlational analyses, they used controlled experiments to put this causal explanation to the test.

DeVoe and Pfeffer’s work can help to account for important cultural trends. Over the past 50 years, feelings of time pressure have risen dramatically in North America, despite the fact that weekly hours of work have stayed fairly level and weekly hours of leisure have climbed. This apparent paradox may be explained, in no small part, by the fact that incomes have increased substantially during the same period. This causal effect may also help to explain why people walk faster in wealthy cities like Tokyo and Toronto than in cities like Nairobi and Jakarta. And at the level of the individual, this explanation suggests that as incomes grow over the life course, time seems increasingly scarce. Which means that, as my career develops, I might have to force myself to take those turns a little slower!