In 2017 three marketing scholars, Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan, published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Its title is “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol.” They argued that in North America “a busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol.”
Keinan explained: “the new conspicuous consumption is about saying, I am the scarce resource, and therefore I am valuable.”
The phrase conspicuous consumption comes from Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). For Veblen, leisure was the mark of status.