"I wonder if the time crunch is a more socially acceptable way of saying alienation, depression, and anxiety?"
I think alienation is right (I don't know if I would put depression and anxiety in the same bracket). Wage labourers have always been alienated from their creative lives, but how you experience that alienation depends on the working class's own level of organisation. In times of broader and deeper unionisation, workers imaginitively reappropriated their alienated selves in the illusory forms of 'the dignity of labour' or 'the national wealth'. Deluded as that was, it did tend to reconcile them more to longer hours. Today's less organised workers experience that alienation more directly, and have a weaker social network to deal with it. They lack the stoicism of their parents. For them the fantastic resolution of the problem of alienation is more likely to be individuated than collective. They dream of becoming celebrities or artists in their spare time, while slaving away disinterestedly at work. Everything in society tells them that self-actualisation is something that will happen outside of work, so no wonder they feel every moment there to be onerous.
Bitch wrote:
"it is irrelevant whether or not people are wrong about their subjective experience of work stress and demands on their time. Objective truth about their situation -- you aren't really working more but less! -- isn't going to change a fucking thing."
On the contrary, I don't think it is irrelevant, I think it is very relevant, and tells us a great deal about the current state of the working class. I don't think it says that everything is wonderful, quite the opposite. And sad to say, I do not believe that frustration at work stress or hours being greater in any way translates into a more militant outlook. If anything it corresponds to a more individuated response from working people, which is dissipated in private projects and fantasies.