This is a repost from 2012, but it’s so totally relevant to my life right now. I needed the reminder and figured it might be useful for you guys too 🙂
Anyway, have been doing lots of internet reading outside my usual hangouts, lately, and this article on busyness seemed ridiculously appropriate, given my excuse for not posting was going to be, “I’ve been busy” O:) Definitely go read it for yourself, but the best quotes are extracted below.
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.”
[We] feel anxious and guilty when [we] aren’t either working or doing something to promote [our] work.
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.
[But] 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. (That’s a challenging one)
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.
Conclusion? Life is too short to be busy.