Too Busy to Live
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 … They’re busy … because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. — Tim Krieder
I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair. — Alfred Tennyson
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About four-hundred years ago, a curious tribe of homo sapiens sapiens calling themselves Puritans stumbled into North America. New People in an old land, the Puritans differed from the land’s contemporaries — at least, they thought they did. Puritan metaphysics aside, the distinction they took the most pride in was busyness.
Unfortunately, theirs was an obsessive busyness, a desperate and gnawing busyness, a busyness meaning a life lived in the future in anticipation or in the past in regret, but never in the present. Never in peace. While North American tribes older than the newly-arrived Puritan tribe lived with deep social connections and a deep appreciation of nature, too many of the New People found it too difficult to leave their minds in order to truly maximize their social or aesthetic happiness. How could they? Like anti-gravity ping-pong balls, they were always moving, always fretting over the past or planning for the future, yet reality resides in the present. Life is lived in the present.
Pretty soon, “[t]he Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” Since the New People stereotyped the natives as a sort of “backwards” Old People, their Cult of Busyness burned across North America like an Old World plague. And though modern American religiosity seems less Puritan each year, modern Americans of every stripe have inherited some traits from the Puritans, including their secular religion: The Cult of Busyness.
It’s no surprise the New People kept so busy. You see, back in England the New People couldn’t busy themselves no matter how much they itched to — in the 1600s, the arable land in the British Isles was almost entirely owned by hypocritical curmudgeons who “busied” themselves dishonorably: (1) lecturing “inferiors” on laziness and/or (2) jailing them for unpaid debts. What’s more, these upper-class busybodies made it immensely clear whenever they “owned” a piece of land, utilizing both physical fences and the abstract fence of trespass law to keep commoners out. After moving to a new land without fenced-in estates and litigious aristocrats — and having grown up with an Old World sense of how one asserts property ownership — it’s no wonder the New People got so busy. When the New People noticed the supposedly “backwards” Old People picking berries instead of growing them, hunting meat instead of raising meat, they judged them: “Just look at all that ‘unused’ land!” they said. “What a waste! I’ll build a fence around some of it and start farming!”
Now, I won’t feed the “noble savage” stereotype; Native American tribes, like European tribes — the English, the French, etc. — had varied ways of life, some violent and some peaceful, some more communistic and some less so. Nor will I paint the New People with too broad a brush. (If you want to draw an accurate picture, a broad brush is insufficient.) It must be admitted that both the New People and the Old People had valuable secrets to teach, great truths about humankind’s confusing place in this confusing world. The Puritan “New People” I am referencing were among the first settlers in North America; most were goodhearted religious folk who merely wanted to find a cozy New England house in which to practice Puritanism and raise a family in peace, away from the bloody busyness of Europe — the constant revolutions, the political upheaval between states and classes, the countless wars as a tired continent left monarchy for republicanism and parochialism for cosmopolitanism.
Nonetheless, because the New People’s Cult of Busyness remains endemic in American society, it must be noted that unlike the Old People the New People — and by extension, most modern Americans — did not understand a fundamental truth: Life comes in rhythms. The Old People understood this instinctively. “Now you plant, now you relax; now you work the soil, now you leave it alone.” As the New People’s Bible puts it, “To everything there is a season … a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”
While in theory the New People toiled with such restless intensity to reap busyness’s fruits — to pluck that which they’d planted — the New People didn’t ever take time off to rest and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Indeed, when their hard work yielded some reward, they usually invested whatever reward they gained back into their work in order to make their work even more profitable, buying more land, more tools, and so on. The richer among the Southern New People — less scrupulous about morality than the religious Puritan New People of the North — even bought human beings so that they could reap all the rewards of busyness without actually engaging in busyness. Maximum efficiency was viewed as the perennial goal.
Anyway, I digress; let’s return to the New People of New England. Let’s note an important truth about these people: They were not born neurotics. (Nor were they born religious. Hm. Perhaps religious belief, like race and gender, is simply an accident of birth. And yet we kill over it, and we call ourselves sophisticated. But I digress again…)
As children, the New People’s busyness was more well-balanced, for as children one is attuned to one’s natural limits and needs rather than pulled this unhealthy way and that by a society intent on producing ever more profit by using employees as means to ends — cogs, machines — instead of humans. Taught to value maximum efficiency, children soon lost their sense of play and became adult neurotics.
Pretty soon, rest brought the adult New People great anxiety, filling their unoccupied minds with all sorts of mettlesome questions they’d rather leave examined. They developed a phobia of empty hands, one surpassing their fear of empty minds. Who knew when an errant beer jug — or, God forbid, an errant breast or genital — might land in an idle hand? (One suspects the Bible called laziness a sin precisely because of what people begin fondling when bored.)
Anyway, enough meandering. The point is that the New People worked without pause. Often they worked the soil so hard that it grew barren, too overworked to produce plants. The plants it did eek out were withered, tired, saggy. Once the Old People even had to suggest that the New People rest the soil a bit in order to thwart starvation. The New People thanked the Old People; later other, newer New People betrayed that thanks by busying their way westward. The New People had many righteous rationalizations for this westward push, but one suspects the real reason was their phobia of rest, which was itself tied to their fear of the Great Nothing. With all that “empty” western land, the New People could busy themselves and postpone their encounter with the Great Nothing for decades.
And so the season of the land changed, and the way of life of the Old People passed largely into legend. The modern inhabitants of the land are quite different from the New People (who I guess are now actually Old People, but bear with me), perhaps even more different from the New People than the New People were from the Old People. Unlike the New People, modern Americans are not quite so religious, not quite so sex-phobic, and they certainly live much easier lives for myriad reasons which they long ago took for granted. But we moderners have inherited at least one trait from the New People: The Cult of Busyness.
Indeed, ceaseless busyness has transformed North America. Instead of trees and grass and biodegradable housing, the land groans under concrete, asphalt, steel. The grass chokes; the trees decay. The large majority of the land’s people could not care less. They are too busy to notice — much less to care. They approach even leisure as a sort of “work” — some of them, no doubt, bought the inspiration for this article, The Tao of Pooh, and read it “to improve” themselves. Maybe now that they’ve read Benjamin Hoff’s excellent book they approach play with a sense of, well, play instead of work. But its doubtful. Old habits die hard. New habits die harder, especially when those habits are viewed not as sickness but as strength. Many readers probably still worship the Busyness God of the New People. In this vein, some may have even crossed The Tao of Pooh off a list of “books to read in 2017,” then proudly made some sort of Fakebook post or other about their conquest of The Tao of Pooh. How dreary. How utterly sad.
Perhaps you are not such a person. Perhaps you have maintained that talent that, these days, it seems only children have — the talent not if doing but of being, which the ancient Chinese called wei wu wei — “doing not doing,” “effortless action.” Or perhaps you are surrounded by Modern New People (“MNP”) but really you are more like the First People. In that case, you may want to escape the MNPs by traveling somewhere. Maybe, for example, you live in MNP Mecca — Manhattan — and want to escape to another country where things are saner. Or at least another burrough.
Unfortunately, you likely won’t be able to escape for long. Without any help from anti-vaxxers, nearly the entire world is plagued by the Cult of Busyness. Even before the New People arrived in North America, most non-hunter-gatherer peoples of the world had already, like the New People, made a religion of busyness. Those who hadn’t — wise men like Epicurus and Lao Tzu — were derided as lazy or labeled childlike. (Lao Tzu’s Taoist followers noted that the wisest sages — those most able to flow with the way of the world instead of busily attempting to resist it — seem most childlike.)
Fortunately, even if you live in a rest-phobic place like Manhattan, you can avoid MNPs. Just go to a park. MNPs despise parks. Like trolls avoiding sunlight or Trump loyalists avoiding The New York Times, they tend to avoid nature. Nature makes them anxious, for to them it seems to be doing nothing and therefore it reminds them that they are doing “nothing.” Even if you do happen to notice a stray MNP who has stumbled away from his or her natural habitat in a park, never fear. The MNPs will be busy in some way or another — gazing at their iPhones answering work emails, gazing at their iPhones answering personal emails, gazing at their iPhones swiping through Tinder (*true MNPs will be on the League), and so on. You’ll be perfectly safe.
Why are MNPs so busy? Do they have to be? I don’t understand it myself, but I suspect that it’s because of more than habit that the MNPs are so desperately busy. You see, like the original New People, MNPs have been promised that if only they work, they will become successful and (as a consequence) happy. This sort of mentality means that an MNP is never aware of the present. While an Epicurean, a Taoist, or a child might view the most seemingly banal moment as utterly amazing, an MNP is too busy for raw, unvarnished life. Naked life is too … underdeveloped to prove useful. Ever since childhood, they’ve been “educated” away from their natural impulse to periodically relax, and indoctrinated into the New People’s religion of busyness.
Such is the life of a MNP:
When at a park, they do not feel the breeze on their skin, the grass gently parting beneath their feet.
When with friends, they do not discuss how that friend is feeling, or whether that friend’s smile is really only a “smile” like their own, a “smile” cloaking great, unbearable pain that they deal with hidden away in their apartments with drugs and sex and alcohol and Netflix. “But you said these people are always busy!” someone responds. Well, you see, these short-term leisure activities are not true leisure activities for MNPs, but work activities disguised as leisure activities. These overworked people participate in these ersatz forms of life because they work so hard that they are the only way they can bear living at all. They engage in leisure to make work bearable — to retain the capacity to stay busy without the busyness illness killing them completely.
Note how utterly alone these activities, even sex, can feel. Too many MNPs are lonely, despite living in large cities with fellow homo sapiens sapiens all around. One suspects a part of their loneliness comes from the networkification of social interaction. When hanging out with friends becomes a way to bolster one’s social portfolio, when pretentious dating apps like the League exist to filter out people who are not quite so “successful,” well, an ersatz fakeness suffocates everything, like shrink wrap. When MNPs are sitting across from old friends or loved ones, they are often too busy to talk because they’ve taken those old friends or loved ones for granted. (What can their mom do for their resume?!) So they pull out their phones, obsessively scrolling through Fakebook or sending emails filled with obsequious fakeness. (Every now and then, they’ll take pictures of their food to upload to Fakebook, or pictures with smiling family members or old friends that moments before had also been sitting awkwardly, with a slight frown, endlessly scrolling through their Fakebook newsfeeds.)
Even when they’re not working, they have invented new toys that resemble work more than play. Exhibit Number One? Fakebook. The lives portrayed on this CIA database posing as a social networking website are largely complete and utter lies. The MNP users of this website especially are busy partly because they are afraid of how others whom they barely know perceive them , and so they create versions of themselves that portray themselves as they wish they were rather than as they actually are. Fakebook brims with photos of put-together lives; it misses the other half, the half that instead of smiles brims with frowns, that instead of meals with supportive friends brims with meals alone in an office late at night with the newest of New People calling and emailing to ensure that everything gets done “right away!” and that the hamster wheel keeps turning, all so that the present continues to be ignored and underutilized in favor of the future. All so that they can pretend that it’s possible (at least for a moment) to escape the inescapable, The Big Nothing.
Fakebook is also full of thoughts its denizens type up and send out into the world — “statuses,” they are called. Many of these statuses speak of how busy the user is, because the user wants everyone to know how important he is.
When I moved away from my rural hometown in North Carolina — which had plenty of New People, but also some people with the souls of Old People — it seemed that I’d become surrounded by only New People. They zigged and zagged around my college, then my law school, then Manhattan, like ping-pong balls immune to gravity. Or is loss of perspective just what it means to become the narrow, dull, culled-by-society creatures we call adults? Whatever it is, I miss childhood. I miss resembling an Old Person more than a New Person. Because if you embrace the New People’s religion, you will never be happy. No New Person is content with how she or he actually is. There’s always more. Happiness to a New Person is like the sun: always on the horizon.
Even the New People who attain their wildest dreams — getting into a prestigious school, landing a high-paying job, finally persuading that girl Cindy or that boy Mark to shutter the friend zone — do not cease being new people. Perhaps they resemble the old people for a while, feeling more content to relax, to do what the new people call “nothing” for a few more hours during the day, but like the aforementioned anti-gravity ping-pong ball the desire for more always returns.
Constant busyness has become a habit, you see, and without busyness the MNP feels lost and adrift and, really, utterly frightened. Devoid of the New People’s Puritinism, the MNP knows of no other ways to create meaning than study or work or status or some other form of ersatz conquest. They are aware of few of the many sources of meaning. When they do find such a source, they quickly undervalue it. Yeah, you might get Cindy or Mark, but once you get them — after you’ve “conquered” them — the opportunity to be busy in that particular quest ends, just like the conquest of the Americas had to end. Soon, these new conquests become a default feature of life. There must be more, you the MNP say, and perhaps you become dissatisfied and, like many Americans, break up or betray your loved one’s heart by seeing others behind their back like a coward too afraid of confrontation. It’s understandable; cowardice is a hallmark of the MNP. Once I was such a creature almost to a T, and even now — lazing around so much more than the busy bodies surrounding me — I am habitually a coward. Cowardice is why we are all so busy. The New People used both religion and busyness to keep the Great Nothing at bay. We MNPs, less religious, have only the secular religion of busyness. (And drugs like Netflix.) Is it any wonder we’re so sad? So lonely?
It doesn’t have to be this way. Reclaim your childhood; reclaim your free time; reclaim your ability to sit still and be present. Take a deep breath.
Reclaim your life.
