Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
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.”
It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
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.
Brecht Vandenbroucke
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.
Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.
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.
Related
Read previous contributions to this series.
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.
(
Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com.)
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.
Link:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?src=recg
