Welcome to Elsewhere

The second of these changes is the rise of women in the workplace. As they've moved from the kitchen to the conference room, domestic chores have had to be outsourced—at a financial cost that keeps us working when combined with other, ever-growing consumerist needs. The number of mothers who worked outside the home rose from less than one in five in the 1950s to one in three in 1975. Today two thirds of mothers with children under the age of 18 work. Partly as a result, kids spend double the time in programmed activities after school than they did 20 years ago. So the next Elsewhere generation learns, in turn, how to manage stressful schedules, deadlines and meetings just like their parents. Home-cooked dinners too are increasingly a thing of the past (although that's good news for the food-preparation and -service sectors, the fastest-growing low-wage jobs). Dads have picked up some of the slack—taking on more household and parenting responsibilities than any previous generation of fathers even as they log more work hours; but still, the home is far from gender-equal, and the bulk of the duties falls upon women.

This vicious cycle is completed by the technological changes that we see all around us. There wasn't much that William H. Whyte's Organization Man of the 1950s could do once he got home, but today's professional couples can work any time and any place—even on a so-called vacation. That's thanks to the fact that much of our economy is weightless and thus can be handled in the palms of our hands on laptops, iPhones and BlackBerrys.

The result is nothing less than the loss of barriers that insulate us from modern capitalism. Today, not only is home more like the office—since 1980 the number of Americans whose principal place of work is home has doubled—the office is more like home. Take Google, which is to the Elsewhere Class of today what General Motors was to the man in the gray flannel suit. The Internet firm offers its workers laundry service, massages, volleyball courts, entertainment, free food and beverages and gyms for burning off all those gratis cookies. Sounds great, but the somewhat insidious goal is to make the office more attractive than home, where your hardworking spouse is probably too tired to give you a massage and you have to pay for the takeout. And it works: Google's coders work practically nonstop.

As a result of these fundamental changes in how we live, Americans in the middle and upper classes were experiencing intense anxiety and alienation even before the financial crisis. Although not everyone is part of this Elsewhere Society, we can all recognize it around us and are subject to its gravitational pull at various points in time. It's not even that our activities have necessarily changed, but their meaning has. Once, playing ball with our kids on a Saturday afternoon was unremarkable. And driving an old car and living a simple life was a default option. Now each of these has become a self-conscious lifestyle choice to go against an invisible societal flow. Perhaps the recession will slow down these currents, but somehow I imagine our dogged pursuit by our anxieties will only speed up in bad times as well as good.

Conley, author of “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” is the chair of New York University’s sociology department.

© 2009