The cult of busyness refers to a cultural mindset where being busy is treated as a virtue or status symbol. People often equate a packed schedule with importance, productivity and personal worth. In this Substack, Tamara rants about this contagion:
“Once upon a time, “busy” was merely descriptive. You could be busy milking cows, busy repairing a fence, busy raising children or dodging wars. Now it’s an identity. Ask someone how they are and the answer is as predictable as an algorithmic ad: “Busy, but good!” The “but good” is crucial. It signals that you are not complaining, heaven forbid! You are simply stating your membership in the modern aristocracy of exhaustion.
To say you are busy is to announce your relevance. It means you are wanted, useful, chosen. You exist. Those who are not busy, beware, are lazy, unambitious, or, worst of all, at peace.
The irony, of course, is that busyness has almost nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with anxiety management. It’s not a virtue but a tranquilliser, a culturally endorsed way to avoid collapse by rehearsing control. We call it “drive”, but it’s often fear in a tailored suit. The busier we are, the less time we have to notice the cracks forming: the conversations avoided, the intimacy postponed, the silent terror that maybe we’re sprinting toward nothing. Busyness offers the illusion of progress, the narcotic of motion. Doing something, anything, becomes the psychological equivalent of keeping the lights on in an empty house, just to prove to yourself that someone still lives there. Because to stop… to actually stop is to risk hearing the one question our entire civilisation is built to drown out: Who are you when you’re not performing usefulness?
…But what no one tells you, or what you refuse to hear until your body finally stages its revolt, is that constant motion creates the illusion of purpose while hollowing you from within.”
Whilst we recognise the importance to recharge our mind and body, even those have become performative:
“We’ve internalised capitalism so thoroughly that even our rest must now file an expense report. We don’t simply rest, we optimise recovery. We “recharge” as if we are iPhones running the latest firmware of burnout, our batteries calibrated for productivity. Forget pleasure! “Rest” has become another performance metric, another thing to get right.
…We call it “self-care” but it’s mostly consumerism dressed in a cashmere anxiety disorder. We soothe our exhaustion by shopping for its cure: $80 candles that smell like Scandinavian minimalism, twelve-step skincare routines that promise transcendence through exfoliation, “digital detox” retreats that cost as much as rent, and still require Wi-Fi for check-in. We meditate to increase focus at work, nap to improve cognitive function, journal to enhance resilience as if every tender act of self-preservation must ultimately serve the empire of efficiency.”
Indeed, historically, leisure not busyness was a status symbol:
“Historically speaking, leisure used to be a marker of class. The Greeks had a word for it: scholé, the root of “school”. Leisure was not laziness; it was the condition for thought. Aristotle argued that contemplation, not labour, was the highest human activity. Which means that if Aristotle lived today, he’d be unemployed and ghosting recruiters on LinkedIn.
Medieval monks prayed seven times a day, but they also slept nine hours. They had long silences between tasks, long walks through cloisters. Meanwhile, our modern monks, the knowledge workers, kneel before the altar of Google Calendar and call it devotion.
We are, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han observed, no longer the exploited but the self-exploiting, both the obedient worker and the relentless boss in the same exhausted body. The whip has been digitised.”
We have reached a stage where even those of us who are aware of this, struggle:
“When was the last time you walked without purpose? Not to count steps, not to brainstorm, not to clear your head for productivity, but just walked?
When I tried it last summer, I lasted eleven minutes before reaching for my phone to check the time, and to answer more comments on my essays. Then I realised I didn’t need to be anywhere. It felt like walking without skin, like being visible to the world again, and not just my schedule.
Our obsession with being busy is, at its core, an existential problem disguised as a practical one. We fear emptiness, and so we overfill. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He said that in the 17th century. Imagine what he’d say about Slack notifications.”
But aware we must be and Tamara ends with this:
“Maybe the point isn’t to “cure” busyness but to recognise its absurdity, hold it up to the light like a ridiculous relic of our collective insecurity and laugh. Humour, after all, is the only form of revolt that doesn’t require a PowerPoint.
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