The allure of being too busy
You're probably not as busy as you think you are.
In my last job, I worked in an office with a small team of people. I used to get the bus home from work. With the bus timetable I could get home 45 minutes earlier if I left the office at 4:56pm instead of 5pm. 4 minutes. I remember asking my boss if I could do this and she told me it wouldn’t be fair for me to leave earlier. She also went on to tell me how she always stays back late because of how busy she is.
She loved telling people how busy she was. The part she would usually leave out is that she mostly just fucked around all day. Every time I would look at her screen I would see her doom scrolling the world’s most clickbaity news sites. It was something I couldn’t quite understand. She did arrive early and leave late most days, but she definitely didn’t need to. The image of being busy has somehow been connected to having a strong work ethic. It could just as easily be attributed to inefficiency.
Performative busyness is a disease that has taken over the world. I remember watching Suits when I was in high school and fantasising about being Harvey Specter with the corner office and wearing a suit to work. Captain capitalism had won, and I had lost. My young and malleable brain somehow believed the dream was to wear a suit to work each day and work long hours in a soulless corporate company, defending the rich from bills they probably should have been paying.
I was moulded by American TV to be the perfect cog that the wheel required me to be. Many years later, I would wear a suit to work in the Australian summer and wonder if I could comfortably rest inside the Earth’s core. I wanted a busy life filled with long work hours because that is what I thought success looked like. A few hundred years ago I would have grown up wanting to be obese.
Being overweight was also once attributed to success because it meant abundance (until the US figured out how to 3D print slop and put it in Walmart for $3). It was a poor measure of wellness because it was inherently bad for wellbeing. I imagine the Jords of the 1800s wanting to be a fat man wearing a suit in an un-airconditioned world.
When I was a kid if I complained about being bored my parents would reply ‘it’s good to be bored’. They were right of course. I fear these days most kids don’t ever get bored, they just increase their screen time. They will go from busy with screens to busy with life and not ever have a good understanding of what being busy really means. This makes me sad.
Since I quit my job in 2021 a lot of people have asked me don’t you get bored? The answer is pretty much never, and if I ever feel a touch of boredom it turns to gratitude and nostalgia. Boredom is a luxury and a privilege; and much like naps, it is something that is wasted on the youth. I thought the entire point of being busy was that you could one day stop being busy. It is good to be bored.
A good friend once told me ‘anyone without kids who says they’re too busy doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about’ and I think about this a lot. Especially those who currently don’t have kids but want them in the near future. How do you plan on being too busy to go out for lunch a week from now, but soon you’ll become a near-full-time parent and make no career adjustments?
Having access to too much information has overwhelmed our senses. The world’s highest paid engineers spend all of their time trying to figure out how to take ours away. With so much attention dedicated to our phones and our dopamine sensors completely fried by the infinite scroll, we have lost an understanding of how many hours we really have in a day.
The average American spends more than 7 hours on screens per day. That is horrendous and appears to be trending worse for every generation. On mobile devices alone we usually spend more than 4 hours per day. This is also growing year after year and generation after generation. So I mentally run the numbers; okay, so you’re really busy right now? That’s nice. Oh, you don’t have kids? Ah, okay. You don’t have kids, you clock 5 hours of screen time per day, and you’re always really busy? Hmm, doubt it.
Oftentimes it is not being too busy, it is lacking the ability to prioritise certain things over others. Everyone is guilty of this, yours truly included. Much like everything subjective, busyness is a relative concept.
There is just not enough time to do everything. I don’t even have a job and I can barely keep up with all the things I want to do. When I was moving houses I remember someone telling me ‘if you get a storage container, you’ll fill it. If you don’t, you won’t need one.’ It’s the same with a schedule, it’s easy to feel busy while actually accomplishing nothing.
If you work 6 days every week, then your busy week should be defined as one that is significantly more demanding than your normal workload. If I have 2 calls in one day, that’s a busy day for me. Yes, I’m a bit precious, but that is my busy and it may legitimately feel busier to me than your day with 10 calls if that’s the norm.
I always remind myself that a billionaire without a place to park his yacht may be as sad as someone whose car just broke down on the side of the road. Suffering is relative. Everything is relative.
We have a major inability to understand relativity. We also have the chance to just label ourselves as subjectively busy and have a permanent excuse to not do the things we know we should be doing. Being too busy is often paired with something vague and unquestionable like ‘work’ or ‘family’. The point is to get out of something without the need to properly justify it.
We as a society have made a crucial error in equating busyness with achievement. Someone can mismanage their calendar or be running head first into burnout and be praised for their success. We say we are really busy right now and feel like it’s something to be proud of.
My girlfriend lives in a city where it seems like exchanging how busy you are is part of any normal conversation. How are you? Yeah I’m busy, wbu? Yeah, just really busy. I haven’t spent too much time in cities, but it is my understanding that this is a common thing in city-people congregation. I still haven’t really normalised it.
It appears to me that many operate under the impression that busyness is the end-goal. Hollywood has cursed an entire generation into thinking the corner-office is the dream. All our idols are people who are workaholics and have absolutely no idea what the definition of enough is.
Pascal once wrote that all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Being busy all the time never allows us to sit with our thoughts. All of my best ideas pop into my head while I’m doing trivial tasks, where my brain is at rest. When I’m doing the dishes, walking, showering or just about to go to sleep. These are the times when great ideas go ding in my brain (and why I’m writing right now at 2am). Rest is where the magic happens.
I also value being able to use my flexible schedule to help my friends. Was there any point in being alive without helping one another? How much depth in conversation do we miss with loved ones while we try to speed-run everything? How many lightbulbs never went ding in my brain because I was scrolling Twitter while telling people I was too busy?
Busyness is not a value of mine and I do not equate it to success. Periods of busyness in order to justify periods of rest make sense to me. Times when we have an excess of shit to get done also happen. But what are we achieving when we tell people we are really busy? We are saying that right now I do not really have time for you. We are telling our friends that actually they should be thankful we’re even here because we are COOKED.
It can feel special that someone has made time for you in their busy schedule, but it can also feel like they maybe have something else they wish to be doing. Busyness is a part of life, some people handle it and others don’t. We should never define ourselves by our work, but we do. The least we can do is not let the general feeling of busyness define our ability to do things with the people we love.
We need to understand that being busy is a relative concept and a powerful term. You should only wield this power if you are actually far busier than your normal schedule. If you have a normal week but you feel like you’re too busy, then hedonic adaptation isn’t working and it’s probably fixable.
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. Show me your screen time and I’ll tell you how busy you really are. Have you got young kids? Okay, fair enough. You don’t have kids but you want them? You’re probably not busy, you’re just bad at prioritisation.
