Overwhelmed
Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning journalist and a mother, Brigid Schulte was feeling overwhelmed by the demands of her work and home lives. As journalists do, she decided to find out if she was alone in this feeling and how she could fix it. She was relieved to discover that most working mothers felt as crazed as she did. Few of them were really enjoying “leisure” time. They weren’t complaining; they chose to have children and to work, and they made the best of it. But what about that term women’s magazines are so fond of: “me time”? Was there anything working mothers could do to make their lives feel less like a treadmill gone haywire? Anything they could change?
Schulte interviewed working mothers and examined how not just individual pressures but biological, societal, economic and cultural ones were splintering their days into slivered messes. She explored everything from the wiring of the female brain to male–female income distribution and the current state of gender equality in the workplace and home. She talked to neuroscientists, sociologists, and above all, other working mothers in order to tease out all the factors contributing to our collective overwhelm. And then she sought out insights and answers and inspiration: investigating companies, travelling across Western Europe to meet families and researchers, and seeking out the sages of the age for their wisdom on how to manage time.
Overwhelmed is the story of what she found out. It’s a map of the stresses--individual, historical, biological and societal--that have ripped working mothers’ leisure to shreds, and a look at how it might be possible to put the pieces back together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On her quest to turn her "time confetti" into "time serenity," journalist Schulte finds that, while it's worse for women and hits working mothers the hardest, what she calls the "Overwhelm" cuts across gender, income, and nationality to contaminate time, shrink brains, impair productivity, and reduce happiness. Investigating the "great speed-up" of modern life, Schulte surveys the "time cages" of the American workplace, the "stalled gender revolution" in the home, and the documented necessity for play, and discovers that the "aimless whirl" of American life runs on a conspiracy of "invisible forces": outdated notions of the Ideal Worker; the cult of motherhood; antiquated national family policies; and the "high status of busyness." The result is our communal "time sickness." Schulte takes a purely practical and secular approach to a question that philosophers and spiritual teachers have debated for centuries how to find meaningful work, connection, and joy but her research is thorough and her conclusions fascinating, her personal narrative is charmingly honest, and the stakes are high: the "good life" pays off in "sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, sound economies." While the final insights stretch thin, Schulte unearths the attitudes and "powerful cultural expectations" responsible for our hectic lives, documents European alternatives to the work/family balance, and handily summarizes her solutions in an appendix.
