Words I Live By: "The Busy Trap"

If you only read one thing today, don’t even make it this blog post. Make it the article that this blog post is about: "The Busy Trap"

If you read two things, then I guess the second thing could be this post. I wouldn’t complain.

If you just said to yourself, “well, I already clicked on this blog post, and clicking on another link to read that article is just too much work,” then I’ll just give you a quick summary and some of my favorite pieces from the article here, and you can pretend you read it:

Summary: 

In short, the author describes how Americans make themselves so busy that they lose out on leisure time, mistaking it as an unimportant or unnecessary part of life, when the leisure time is actually what makes life what it is. And when we really delve into the heart of why we do this, the author believes it comes down to some sort of self-assurance that we need to feel, because others have decided they should feel it, and everyone has to keep up with the next person. 

Excerpts:

“I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.”

“It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.”

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”

“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary.”

The thing about articles like this is that, while they are great and inspiring and I’d love to model my whole life off of it, sometimes you just have to pick and choose what to take out of it. Because, let’s be real, I’m not going to just take to the forest, learn how to whittle and sit in a rocking chair (that I whittled myself) whittling more things and drinking tea (from a mug, that I most likely whittled myself).

So while it’s impractical and impossible to not ever say that I’m busy, what I really took away from this was trying to not use “busy” as some sort of masochistic badge of honor, or as a “one-upper.” Or, as the author puts it, “being a part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school.” So I try my best to duck out of “the busy trap” anytime I see myself falling into it. I see it as being a part of the solution. Nobody’s perfect, but it’s always good to try to improve, right?

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans"

-John Lennon