“How have you been?”
Busy.
“What have you been up to?”
Girl, everything. I haven’t stopped.
“How’s business?”
Crazy busy.
And somehow, busy sounds like good news.
We hear busy and translate it into something else.
Needed.
Productive.
Successful.
In demand.
Ambitious.
Important.
The fuller the calendar, the more important the person must be.
But when did we decide that?
At some point, we started measuring the importance of a life by how little room remained inside it.
Busy Became a Status Symbol
There was a time when leisure itself communicated status.
Having enough money or resources to spend your time traveling, reading, creating art, entertaining, enjoying hobbies, or simply doing things because you enjoyed them could signal privilege.
Now we have successful people proudly describing lives with absolutely no available time.
“My calendar is insane.”
“I’ve got back-to-back meetings all day.”
“I’ve been working twelve-hour days.”
“I haven’t taken a vacation in two years.”
“I barely sleep.”
And we’re supposed to hear that and think:
Wow. They must be doing really well.
But sometimes I wonder:
Are we describing success or poor resource allocation?
Because those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Being in demand can absolutely be a sign that something is going well.
But if the reward for becoming successful is having less and less ownership over your own time, I think it’s fair to ask what exactly we’re succeeding at.
Apparently, We Really Do Think Busy Means Important
And apparently, I’m not imagining this.
Researchers have actually studied the way we interpret busyness as a status signal.
In a series of studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers found that people could perceive busy, overworked individuals as having characteristics associated with higher status, including competence and ambition. Busyness could also suggest that a person was scarce and in demand.
Which makes sense when you think about the language we use.
“Everybody needs me.”
“My calendar is completely booked.”
“I don’t have a free weekend until November.”
Those statements don’t just communicate:
I have things to do.
They can also communicate:
I am in demand.
And being in demand sounds a whole lot like being important.
What makes that especially interesting is that busyness hasn’t always been the obvious status symbol.
Historically, having enough wealth that you didn’t have to spend all of your time working could itself communicate status. Leisure was evidence that you had resources.
Now, particularly in American culture, we can read the opposite message into a packed schedule.
So maybe we didn’t accidentally start treating busyness like importance.
Maybe we actually learned to read it that way.
Technology Was Supposed to Save Us Time
This part is especially interesting to me.
Think about how much technology has been created specifically to make things faster.
Email is faster than mail.
Online banking is faster than going to the bank.
GPS saves us from driving around lost.
Online shopping saves trips to stores.
Computers complete tasks faster than older technology ever could.
Automation can eliminate hours of repetitive work.
AI can now complete some tasks in minutes that once took hours.
We have spent generations creating tools designed to save time.
So where did all the time go?
Because somehow the reward for becoming more efficient is often just being expected to do more.
Finish something faster?
Great. Here’s something else.
Automate part of your job?
Great. Increase the workload.
Technology allows you to answer emails from home?
Great. Now work can follow you home.
We didn’t necessarily use efficiency to create more life.
A lot of the time, we used it to create more capacity for work.
Maybe the question was never simply whether technology could save us time.
Maybe we should have also been asking:
What were we saving the time for?
We Have a Strange Relationship With Doing Nothing
Ask somebody what they did all weekend.
“Nothing.”
Then listen to how quickly we start explaining ourselves.
“Well, I cleaned.”
“I did some laundry.”
“I ran errands.”
“I meal-prepped.”
“I caught up on a few things.”
Apparently, “I rested” needs supporting documentation.
Doing nothing can make us strangely uncomfortable.
Not necessarily because we don’t enjoy rest.
Sometimes because we’ve been taught that time needs to produce something in order to count.
Even our hobbies aren’t safe.
You like painting?
You should sell your paintings.
You bake really well?
You should start a business.
You like writing?
You should monetize it.
You exercise?
Track the numbers.
You read?
Set a yearly reading goal.
You make something beautiful?
Turn it into content.
We have become remarkably good at taking things that make life enjoyable and turning them into additional performance metrics.
And there’s nothing wrong with making money from something you love. In fact, I recommend it.
There’s nothing wrong with setting goals.
There’s nothing wrong with tracking progress.
I do all these things.
But I wonder what happens when we lose the ability to do something simply because we enjoy doing it.
No audience.
No metric.
No money.
No achievement.
Just because.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether our lives were full and started asking whether our schedules were.
Those are not the same thing.
Busy Isn’t the Problem
I don’t think being busy is inherently bad.
There are seasons when building something meaningful requires a lot of work.
Starting a business can be busy.
Raising children can be busy.
Going to school can be busy.
Building a career can be busy.
Sometimes life simply requires more from us.
And sometimes being busy is exciting.
The problem isn’t:
Busy = bad.
The problem is when:
Busy = worthy.
Busy = successful.
Busy = important.
Because once productivity becomes connected to worth, slowing down starts to mean something completely different.
You’re no longer simply doing less.
You can start feeling like you are less.
And that’s where I think this conversation gets more interesting.
What Happens When Nobody Needs You?
If your identity has been built around being the person everybody needs, what happens when nobody needs anything?
If your self-worth comes from productivity, what happens on a day when you produce nothing?
If your importance comes from your calendar, what happens when the calendar is empty?
Maybe some people aren’t afraid of being bored.
Maybe they’re afraid of what quiet might say about their importance.
Because busyness can give us something beyond productivity.
It can give us evidence.
Evidence that we matter.
Evidence that people need us.
Evidence that something is happening.
Evidence that we’re moving forward.
Evidence that we’re not wasting our lives.
An empty calendar can’t provide that reassurance.
So we fill it.
And then sometimes we fill it again.
A Full Calendar Is Not Necessarily a Full Life
There will be busy seasons.
There should probably also be seasons with margin.
The question isn’t whether you’re busy.
The question is whether the busyness is building the life you actually want or replacing it.
Because it is entirely possible to spend years being extraordinarily productive only to discover that you’ve become incredibly efficient at maintaining a life you don’t particularly enjoy.
Maybe success isn’t about eliminating busyness.
Maybe it’s about having enough ownership over your life to decide what deserves your time in the first place.
Work can deserve some of it.
Ambition can deserve some of it.
Family can deserve some of it.
Rest can deserve some of it.
And some of it should probably remain completely unproductive.
Because your life doesn’t have to produce something every minute in order for those minutes to matter.
So here’s something to think about:
If being busy makes you feel important, what does having nothing to do make you feel?
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