✦ Busyness is a costume: 035

Photo by Natalie Blauth on Unsplash

Somewhere in the last few decades, exhaustion became a flex. You stopped asking people how they were and started asking how busy they were - as if the answer confirmed their worth. The person with no margin became the person most in demand. The one who hadn’t slept became the one who cared the most.

Busyness stopped being a condition and became a currency.

Researchers at Columbia and Harvard Business School found what most of us already sensed: in America, conspicuous busyness signals status. To be overcommitted is to be important. To have no time is to be wanted. We traded the old status symbol - the leisure of the aristocrat who didn’t need to work - for a new one. The person who cannot stop.

But look closely at what is actually being performed. Busyness is not evidence of a meaningful life. It is often the disguise of a life too afraid to slow down long enough to ask whether any of it matters. The calendar full of obligations. The inbox that never empties. The weekends already spoken for. These are not signs of a life well lived. They are signs of a life being avoided at high velocity.

The most radical thing you can do in a culture that worships speed is to be visibly, unapologetically still - and have nothing to justify it.