From the NY Times Opinion page. Felt it was worth sharing here. Excellent read.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
Tim Kreider
June 30, 2012
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to
listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the
default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So
busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a
complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s
a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the
I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you
how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired.
Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose
lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve
taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged”
their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own
ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and
dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they
aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They
schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make
sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their
college applications. 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.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with
classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of
the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey
generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely
unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from
surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to
getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods
directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with
important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those
free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my
life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of
life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.
Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by
high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the
south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the
first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t
consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she
has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every
night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating
in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do
better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality —
driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative
effect of her environment. 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. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where
she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently
needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose
raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so
it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other
than a form of institutional self-delusion. 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. I can’t help but wonder
whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the
fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most
writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any
day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is
enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best
ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike
ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see
friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and
pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t
maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or
ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails
all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of
professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was
able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do
this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy
this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and
put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my
in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do
or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more
and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed
Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check
e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without
seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and
the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for
the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life
without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about
impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it,
without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as
indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived
of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The
space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for
standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected
connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of
inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work
done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote
Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the
bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is
full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams.
It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts
aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and
masterpieces than the hardworking.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s
why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may
sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it
was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and
pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications
satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column
proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a
guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion
that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like
abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans
turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it
as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I
do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere
between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless
frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid
standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your
desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of
there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been
a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a
long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood
that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it
with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed
regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say,
but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer
with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh
with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
---
Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of
essays and cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has
been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
Tim Kreider
June 30, 2012
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to
listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the
default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So
busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a
complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s
a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the
I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you
how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired.
Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose
lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve
taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged”
their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own
ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and
dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they
aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They
schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make
sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their
college applications. 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.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with
classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of
the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey
generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely
unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from
surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to
getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods
directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with
important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those
free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my
life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of
life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.
Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by
high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the
south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the
first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t
consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she
has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every
night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating
in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do
better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality —
driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative
effect of her environment. 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. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where
she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently
needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose
raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so
it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other
than a form of institutional self-delusion. 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. I can’t help but wonder
whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the
fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most
writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any
day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is
enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best
ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike
ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see
friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and
pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t
maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or
ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails
all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of
professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was
able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do
this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy
this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and
put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my
in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do
or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more
and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed
Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check
e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without
seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and
the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for
the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life
without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about
impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it,
without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as
indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived
of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The
space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for
standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected
connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of
inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work
done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote
Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the
bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is
full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams.
It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts
aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and
masterpieces than the hardworking.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s
why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may
sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it
was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and
pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications
satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column
proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a
guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion
that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like
abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans
turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it
as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I
do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere
between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless
frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid
standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your
desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of
there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been
a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a
long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood
that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it
with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed
regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say,
but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer
with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh
with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
---
Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of
essays and cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has
been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
Disclaimer:- Obviously, I do not claim any credit for this work in whole or in part.
