"...busyness of a certain kind...became a mark of social status, that somewhere in the drudgery of checklists and the crumpled heaps one could detect a hint of glamour. “My God, people are competing about being busy,” Burnett realized. “It’s about showing status. That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life. … As if you don’t get to choose, busyness is just there. I call it the nonchoice choice. Because people really do have a choice.”
Do people really have a choice? At some point in her journey through time, Schulte attaches herself to John Robinson, a sociologist known as Father Time because he was one of the first people to start collecting time use diaries, which became the basis for the American Time Use Surveys that tell us so much about how we live. Although she doesn’t say it outright, Schulte seems suspicious of Robinson, and probably for good reason. He is divorced and lives alone and thus is free to spend his time however he wants. (He often just gets on the metro with an entertainment guide in his hand and no particular aim.) But Robinson seemed to me to have come up with the most convincing antidote to the “overwhelm.”
Robinson doesn’t ask us to meditate, or take more vacations, or breathe, or walk in nature, or do anything that will invariably feel like just another item on the to-do list. The answer to feeling oppressively busy, he says, is to stop telling yourself that you’re oppressively busy, because the truth is that we are all much less busy than we think we are. And our consistent insistence that we are busy has created a host of personal and social ills which Schulte reports on in great detail in her book—unnecessary stress, exhaustion, bad decision-making, and, on a bigger level, a conviction that the ideal worker is one who is available at all times because he or she is grateful to be “busy,” and that we should all aspire to the insane schedules of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur."
Do people really have a choice? At some point in her journey through time, Schulte attaches herself to John Robinson, a sociologist known as Father Time because he was one of the first people to start collecting time use diaries, which became the basis for the American Time Use Surveys that tell us so much about how we live. Although she doesn’t say it outright, Schulte seems suspicious of Robinson, and probably for good reason. He is divorced and lives alone and thus is free to spend his time however he wants. (He often just gets on the metro with an entertainment guide in his hand and no particular aim.) But Robinson seemed to me to have come up with the most convincing antidote to the “overwhelm.”
Robinson doesn’t ask us to meditate, or take more vacations, or breathe, or walk in nature, or do anything that will invariably feel like just another item on the to-do list. The answer to feeling oppressively busy, he says, is to stop telling yourself that you’re oppressively busy, because the truth is that we are all much less busy than we think we are. And our consistent insistence that we are busy has created a host of personal and social ills which Schulte reports on in great detail in her book—unnecessary stress, exhaustion, bad decision-making, and, on a bigger level, a conviction that the ideal worker is one who is available at all times because he or she is grateful to be “busy,” and that we should all aspire to the insane schedules of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur."
