A review by bluejayreads
Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

Did not finish book. Stopped at 48%.

I really wanted to like this book. I deeply, desperately wanted to hear what a journalist had to say about business in modern society and how we might be able to get some of that leisure time back. But nowhere on the cover, in the title, in the back cover, or even in the reviews is there any mention of the real focus of this book – it is, in reality, about work, love, and play when no parent has the time.

That’s not to say the time stresses on modern parents, especially mothers, isn’t an important topic. On the contrary, I very much agree with the assertion that working parents, especially women married to men, are being asked to (or are required to or are choosing to) do too much, which harms their work, their parenting, their relationships, their personal leisure, and pretty much everything else. And this seems like a well-written, well-researched exploration of the topic. I’m not criticizing the book on that.

In fact, I don’t think I want to criticize the book at all. It’s a good book and it covers its topics thoroughly and engagingly. However, I picked it up looking for an entirely different topic altogether. I am not a parent, and I very much hope to never be a parent. Though the challenges of time and parenting are important to millions of people, they are not personally relevant for me. And I picked this book up looking for something personally relevant. I wanted an exploration of how the many pressures of modern life, the cultural elevation of busyness to virtue, etc. is affecting our ability to work effectively, form and maintain relationships, and engage in fun/play/leisure, perhaps along with some suggestions for fixing it. But this book is single-mindedly focused on parents and how the time investment children require makes working effectively and being recognized for that work, connecting with your spouse, and engaging in hobbies and personal things you enjoy much more challenging.

And, sure, the book does mention at times that “of course people who aren’t parents could also benefit from having more free time” and “single people want to have leisure too!” But these are occasional lines in a book that overwhelmingly focuses on the time-related struggles of parenthood. Would I, as a child-free person, benefit from, for example, more options around “flex-time” and hybrid or work-from-home arrangements in the workplace? Absolutely. But the benefits I get have nothing to do with being home when my kid gets off the bus or the ability to leave work when the school nurse calls. The relentless focus on parents as the subject made it feel irrelevant to me. Not that it actually is – it’s one of those issues that doesn’t benefit me personally, but would be great for society as a whole if it were fixed/improved. But I had a really hard time engaging with it because I couldn’t see myself or my struggles in the pages.

Ultimately, this comes down to the fact that I wanted to read this book out of personal interest in the topic’s relevance to my life, and the book actually focused on how the topic affects a population that doesn’t include me. That doesn’t make the book bad, or irrelevant, or even not worth reading. But going in with incorrect expectations left me disappointed. I found myself skimming sections, ready for the part where Brigid stopped talking about parents specifically and started getting into stuff that mattered to me. If I had gone into it looking for a journalistic deep dive into a particular topic affecting society as a whole, I probably would be singing its praises right now. (I can’t stress this part enough – leaving aside my own expectations, this book is well-researched, engagingly written, and overall a worthwhile read.) This is one that I may come back to in the future with revised expectations and a readiness to read about a society-level issue that isn’t personally relevant to my life. The problem here was that I came in wanting something personal and, being not a parent, didn’t get it.