It’s been six weeks since I last wrote in this blog, the longest break I have taken since I started it back in 2010 and, hence, a cause for reflection on time and tiredness. In these weeks I have seriously considered closing down the blog, fearing that I simply have no time for it. A blog requires regularity and at the same time this blog has been giving regularity to my schedule with its weekly demands of time. I have finally decided to carry on because, as happens, the editors of Nexus, AEDEAN’s second academic journal, apart from Atlantis, asked me a few months ago to write a piece on the experience of running this blog and I’ve been proofreading the text these days. I found a certain irony in the fact that this has been one of the many tasks preventing me from posting, but as I told the editors the article has also been a timely reminder of why I need to go on writing here.
The six-week break has overlapped, as you may imagine, with an intense bout of marking, which has included editing a whole book with the papers by my MA students (my twelfth project of that kind), and finishing my own book on masculinity in contemporary SF by men. Add to this complicated domestic matters, and an inopportune knee injury. It is beginning to sound as if I am justifying the break when the point is that there has been no break at all but, on the contrary, an overwhelming cataract of work, expanding over the weekends. Part of this avalanche is possibly self-inflicted (I had plenty of time to finish the book) but even that part corresponds to my experience that everything needs to be done as soon as possible because new projects keep appearing all the time. The other part is connected to my teaching duties, which consume plenty of time in tasks that must be done, no matter what. For instance, I have just interrupted writing this post to discuss for 45 minutes with a doctoral student his oncoming yearly assessment. Today, by the way, is a local holiday and I should not be working.
So, technically I have had time enough to continue writing the blog in the past six weeks but not enough energy, which leads me to the central topic of today’s post: time and tiredness.
I’ll begin with that viral TikTok video of last October 2023, showing a young woman in her early twenties, Brielle Assero, sobbing her heart out on her first day at a 9-5 job because, poor thing, she realized then that with commuting and all, she would no longer have time for herself. You could hear the laughter of Spaniards leaving work between 19:00 and 20:00 all the way to America, where this immature, overprotected person lives. There is another conversation on the internet, going on for years, about whether medieval peasants worked fewer hours than us. You can find here a recent article reporting that “If an average American works 1,801 hours per year, or 37.5 hours per week, the average workload of an adult male peasant in 13th-century England was approximately 1,620 hours a year, historians say” (my italics). The female possibly worked 3,650, if she was happy to sleep 8 hours a day. It’s funny, by the way, how this kind of study never worries about the hours that current peasants work, which, I’m sure, are closer to 1,801 than to 1,620. I do have a contract stating that I work 37.5 hours a week, but in Spain the habitual are 40 hours, which Minister Yolanda Díaz is trying to reduce down to 35 as a first step towards a four-day week. This seems to be far more productive and, anyway, it is long overdue. First point, then: we are all tired and grumpy, because we have been told that leisure is central to a satisfactory life but we have no time for it. I have mocked the GenZer tearing up about grown-up life, but at the same time she has all my sympathy. We work too many hours. I’m grumpy, you’re grumpy. She cries.
This leads me to diverse conversations I’ve had with my students these last six weeks. Actually, all my conversations with students have dealt with time. This is going to sound a bit random. I was in the middle of a most interesting conversation with a BA dissertation tutoree, and she suddenly stopped to tell me ‘but enough, I know you’re very busy’. Nooooo! I told her that I’m never busy for airing my brain in intelligent company. In fact, she was right: I had another student at my door waiting for a tutorial. More… I had three separate meetings with students who had failed their exercises because they had not read the corresponding novel: two told me that they have long working hours, the third that he has poor time management skills; all three declared that they decided to do the exercise anyway, hoping it might work. One of the working students actually asked me for help about how to improve their close reading of specific passages without reading the whole novel. I suggested that, perhaps, their job (taking every afternoon from 16:00 to 21:00 and Saturdays, all day) was too much of an obstacle for the degree. Another student, a full-time one, told me that it is next to impossible to cope with the demands of the degree. Let me see: 25 hours per 6 ECTS, 30 ECTS every semester, that’s 750 hours a semester, divided into 18 weeks, a total of 41’66 hours per week. Problems here? Commuting might take two hours a day or more, the 750 hours seem incompatible with paid employment, and, anyway, few persons have the ability to study/read for even two hours every day. Students are anxious, teachers are sad. There are days when I want to cry on TikTok.
Everyone is tired because the number of working hours does not indicate their intensity, or, why not?, the level of enjoyment. I have, for instance, spent two entire working days preparing my new Contemporary Literature subject and having great fun, so I did not mind that these two days happened to be a Saturday and a Sunday. In contrast, the four entire working days (Monday to Thursday) spent marking 70 papers have been excruciating. My arms hurt so much, my brain was melting… Marking took, besides, much of my available energy for the fifth working day of the week; luckily, I had three wonderful BA dissertations to mark by my own tutorees which made that Friday a happy day.
What is so excruciating about marking, you might ask (if you’re not a teacher)? Well, I used to have around 50 papers to mark in January, after the Christmas holiday, but last year my subject was moved to the Spring term, which means that I found myself on 10th June with 70 1500/2000-word long papers to mark after having marked the previous week 70 800-word essays. Crazy, really. In two cases, I stopped correcting the paper when I crossed the 30-minute barrier, for that’s a matter we don’t discuss either: the more care a student puts in their writing, the more energy the teacher can employ in assessing the content rather than correcting the text. The best exercises are always the best edited and presented; the worst ones are invariably poorly written and awfully edited. I must have some kind of OCD because I definitely MUST correct students’ texts down to the last comma, and that is exhausting. I forgot to say that I gave students a late deadline to help them, which means that I gave myself a very tight timeframe to mark the papers before the final marks had to be published, but this is how it works. Life is a series of deadlines.
At this point, I don’t know if the blog is back or if this is the only Monday of the rest of the Summer when I will be able to post. Writing here also tires me, logically, but I would like to distinguish between being happily and unhappily tired, which is the point I am trying to make about time. These past six weeks I have been unhappily tired most of the time, which means that I could not summon up the energy to write here. You feel unhappily tired when the work you do is not fulfilling, as it should be, or when you have a pile of annoying chores on top of it. You feel happily tired when you have worked hard but this gives you a buzz so good that you can add extras, from going to the gym to writing a blog post, from meeting friends for drinks to having sex… you name it! When you say ‘I don’t have time’ for this or that, this is not really about time but about which kind of tiredness is gripping you. Another matter (for another post) is laziness, but this can be good if you feel that the weekend spent binge-watching series has been as happy as if you had gone hiking in the hills. The bad laziness if the kind that leaves you wondering why you can’t do better (I had a very candid email from a student who acknowledged he is just lazy; as I told him, naming the problem might be a first step to solve it).
So, no, I have not been procrastinating, and I have not been lazy. I have been unhappily tired, and have used my time apart from work and from the annoying chores to get the unhappiness out of my tiredness. Thank you, Antena 3, for helping me with the delicious Tu cara me suena, which has been wonderful therapy, and will continue being so. To Minister Yolanda Díaz, I would like to say that I am not so sure that the four-day working week (= 32 hours a week) is a good solution, for it still leaves you with four long days of potential unhappy tiredness. I would support instead the six-hour working day (=30 hours a week), which seems to me to offer more chances of happy tiredness or of no tiredness at all (depending on the job, of course). The first workers enslaved by the Industrial Revolution used to work up to 16 hours a day with just Sunday off if they were lucky and with no paid holidays, but that was 200 years ago, and, surely, with all our innovations and the help of AI, the goal of working 30 hours a week for, say, 40 weeks a year should be feasible. Go for it, Yolanda!
Let’s aim at being happily tired and having leisure enough to enjoy rather than endure life. Maybe we should all start crying on TikTok…