This article originally appeared in Fairer Disputations.
By Peter Copeland, April 21, 2026
We can all sense it. Our relationships have thinned. Unpaid forms of care that were once embedded in family life and community networks are in decline. Informal support systems among neighbours, extended family, and friends have weakened. Relationships of mutual obligation are increasingly outsourced, professionalized, rendered virtual, or simply absent. We feel increasingly isolated and disconnected from one another.
This shared feeling is a clue that can help us understand what appears to many as a paradox: declining happiness amidst growing wealth, living standards, opportunity, and even time. By many measures, modern men and women have more leisure time than previous generations. Yet our relationships appear weaker, not stronger. We possess immense productive power, and yet we struggle to maintain relationships. The more we outsource and commodify care, the more we break free of informal networks of obligation, the more these networks thin. In the process, we lose the unplanned, reciprocal practices of hospitality and neighbourliness through which we sustain relationships and communities.
Though we have more of a certain kind of time, it has not translated into care, because our time has been reorganized in ways that supplant or degrade it. When I speak of “care,” I mean something broader than emotional warmth and something narrower than all unpaid activity. “Care” is labour and leisure whose value is inseparable from the relationship in which they occur. Examples might include preparing a meal for someone you love, sitting with an aging parent, helping a neighbour, or sustaining a friendship through presence and attention. The relational context is what distinguishes care from tasks that can be outsourced without meaningful loss. It does not much matter who repairs your furnace; it matters enormously who raises your child or tends to your dying parent. Relationships exist between specific people, with histories and attachments that are unique and irreplaceable. The benefit to both caregiver and cared-for depends on the particularity of the bond.
We face a modest but real quantity deficit in time available for care. More seriously, we face a substitution problem, in which caring activities are increasingly outsourced or commodified, and a quality problem, in which even our remaining free time is absorbed by passive, individualized consumption rather than genuine human connection. To address the care deficit, we need to shift the default settings in our political economy. Rather than seeking to commodify and optimize every corner of life, we should reshape our economy in ways that protect the presence and informal networks of obligation that human relationships require. To do this, we must design policy frameworks that protect the time and forms of life needed for care.
How We Spend Our Time
Hours per worker have declined, leisure time is up, and household labour is down. Industrial workers once worked backbreaking hours. Now, the typical work week in advanced economies is between thirty-five and fifty hours. Thanks to labour-saving devices like the dishwasher and washing machine, time spent on household tasks has plummeted. So why do we feel so busy?
One factor is the distinction between hours per worker and total hours worked across the population. As dual-income households became conventional across much of the developed world, men’s paid hours per person declined, while women’s rose, largely offsetting each other. So, while individual workers may work shorter hours than their grandparents, the aggregate amount of paid labour by household has remained flat or risen modestly, as the hours that technology freed from unpaid domestic tasks were largely absorbed by women entering the paid workforce. Across Canada and the United States, total work hours per adult, paid and unpaid, have been broadly unchanged. More of what was once done within household and informal networks is now routed through paid, market-mediated channels.
As technology and market services have “freed” more of our time from domestic labor, much of that time has not been redirected into family and community life. Rather, it has been absorbed by the paid economy, as dual-income households became normative, and adult life increasingly structured around continuous employment. Here, the economic theory known as Baumol’s cost disease provides part of the explanation. As productivity rises in goods-producing and scalable service sectors, the economic opportunity cost of time spent caring increases. The result is pressure to compress, modify, outsource, and professionalize acts that were once normal parts of life, reciprocal acts of care that used to be embedded in a person’s informal networks of obligation.
This shift has real costs. Domestic life is porous in a way that paid labour is not. It accommodates the unplanned and informal ordinary things of life, like checking in on an elderly neighbour, helping a grieving friend, extending hospitality to new members of the community, volunteering at local events, and the innumerable small acts through which communities sustain themselves. These are things you can’t do so easily while working in the paid economy. With the shift to greater paid labour, this social ecology—the networks within which care occurs without being scheduled, monetized, and formalized—is left to wither.
We see this play out in countless domains. Meals prepared with love for friends and family are replaced by delivery apps. Childcare is outsourced to paid providers. Elderly relatives are institutionalized. Emotional support is increasingly delegated to therapists and counsellors. And there are too few priests and pastors—figures who are meant to care for the whole person. Although the rise in “intensive parenting” might initially look like an increase in care, that conscious cultivation of the child is concentrated within the nuclear family, scheduled and outcome-oriented, shaped by educational attainment pressures, and less embedded in wider networks of family, friends and neighbours. Such hyper-focused parental activity leads to fewer webs of informal obligation, not more.
Practicing Presence
Putting aside the quantity of time available for care, there remains a more serious problem with the quality of what we do with the leisure time we have. Discretionary time has become increasingly screen-based and solitary. Platforms are engineered to capture and hold attention, so hours that would otherwise be given over to hospitality, friendship, community life, or unstructured presence are turned inward to individualized consumption. New technologies have increased the volume and speed of communication, but because they are embedded in a cultural logic of individualized consumption, the efficiencies they create do not always translate into richer forms of shared life. Screens not only replace in-person socialization; they also intrude into the time we do spend with others by fragmenting our attention.
Care requires patience, abiding presence, and a willingness to be interrupted by another’s need. The habits cultivated by the attention economy are geared to instant gratification, which leads us to form an attentional character poorly suited to caring at all.
In the years to come, the pressures bearing down on care will only intensify. Fertility decline, population aging, and the further normalization of full-time dual-income households will shrink the pool of family-based caregivers, place strain on those who remain, and increase incentives to outsource care to markets and institutions. AI will upend industries and job functions and tempt us to “solve” care through technologically driven efficiency and substitution.
But the instrumentalizing mindset betrays an impoverished view of what it means to care. Here, the good lies in the activity itself: the disinterested gift of time, freely given, without the constant pressure to optimize or get it over with. An efficiency-seeking attitude destroys the very thing it seeks. Care is, in an important sense, an end in itself.
When we automate or outsource care, we lose not only what others receive from it, but who we become through it. To care for others is one of the chief ways we become more loving people—and happier ones. This is one of the lessons of the Global Flourishing Study, which finds that religiosity, cultivated friendships, family, and community networks are the keys to flourishing. The key to greater care, and therefore greater well-being, lies in disinterested and informal relationships. Today, we need creative ways of decommercializing care, strengthening informal networks of obligation, and using our leisure time properly.
Making Space for Care
The way forward is not to engineer “care” as a bureaucratic service. Rather, we should remove it from the realm of market exchange, where possible, by realigning incentives so families can provide more of it themselves.
Childcare is the clearest test case. Direct, portable cash support or credits to parents—in lieu of default institutional provision—would make home-based, kin-based, and flexible arrangements more viable. We should also make it easier for seniors to participate in intergenerational care and to remain embedded in community life. Potential policy levers include a kin-care tax credit for households using non-parental family care, senior caregiver credits for providing childcare or elder respite to family, or even property-tax relief or deferrals for multigenerational households. Measures like these would shift the default from the entertainment-based, consumeristic leisure of the golf course, bingo table, and retirement home to a vibrant community life. They would ease pressure on straining pension systems and social transfer systems, while strengthening social networks and providing economic relief.
Many of these policies exist in isolation, are small in scope, or tied to conditions that are too narrow. They lack the comprehensiveness that’s needed. To truly value care, a society must uphold that priority across the board in the design of its policy and institutions. This will require significant changes. Tax and transfer systems built around the individual earner undervalue unpaid caregiving and penalize households that organize market work and family life unevenly across stages of life. Labour markets, likewise, assume a continuous, full-time attachment that sits uneasily with pregnancy, infancy, early childrearing, elder care, and other periods of intensive dependency. And as welfare states have grown ever larger, they end up substituting institutional provision for family and intergenerational care in ways that have actively undermined, rather than supported, those bonds.
A care-based order would recognize care in the tax system through household-based taxation, including household averaging for uneven earnings across spouses and life stages; explicit recognition of household size that reduces tax burden as the number of children rises, reflecting their long-term contribution to society; and more generous caregiver credits, crediting a parent’s caregiving years in pension and social-insurance systems, rather than treating them simply as periods of non-participation, reflecting the real social and economic value of care. Labour markets should make room for flexible, part-time work without undue penalty, providing prorated benefits for part-time workers. And public support should strengthen rather than bypass the family, with policies designed to be neutral—or perhaps even preferential—toward parental, kin-based, and home-based forms of care, rather than exclusively subsidizing institutional care.
If we continue to treat care as something to be outsourced, optimized, or fit into the margins left over by work and consumption, then we should not be surprised when we find ourselves disconnected and unhappy. In an age of unprecedented productive power, the crisis may not be that we lack time, but that we have forgotten what time is for.
Peter Copeland is deputy director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa.
