Busy has been sold to us as a status symbol. Busy means important, high status, it means I am worth. I was chatting to a friend the other day and asked him how is work? Busy, he replied with a little smile. He looked knackered, unhealthy white complexion of someone who never sees the sun. A very respectable legal counselor for an insurance company.
The culture of busy is rewarded by society. Celebrities and billionaires looking busy, rich people appearing to toil all the time. Work hard and play hard means 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week, 11 months a year in the office and commuting to and from work. Shopping, entertainment and stimulants after work. Holidays regularly checking work emails of course. Earn, spend. Must be fun? It can be, if you are thriving in what you do and enjoy what you buy.
It seems the utopian idea of a technology driven, rich world leaving space for more meaningful free time has evaporated. I read on the Internet the average workweek is not 35 or 40 hours but an honest 46.7 hours these days. Good!
I went to a birthday party and met Claudia, trader at a top investment bank in her late 30s. She had a panic attack on a plane back to London a while ago. It was so embarrassing, she said with that little smile again, they had to open the doors and take me back to the terminal! Everyone seems to be so proud to work hard. Even getting acute anxiety for it, she’s on Xanax and obviously high status. How is the market, I asked. Terrible, terrible, the sovereign fund so and so and pension fund X led the sell-off, oil money first then the others followed. Uh, OK. So, how’s work these days? Busy. Of course it is! And how’s your thyroid, I wanted to ask. But off she went to have a quick cigarette.
Even my friend Jasmine, a part-time naturopath with a 5 years old at school is busy. When we chat that’s what she starts the conversation with, or ends it with. Busy housewives, busy teenagers on the bus messaging, whatsapping, tweeting, watching, doing.
But what if, for whatever reason, you are mad enough to love slow food, slow bath and slow cuddle? The model to follow is the functionally anxious, hence the proud little smile of the busy. And everyone needs purpose.
Let’s think about why we are running all the time though, what is the reason for it. Is your lifestyle really meeting your needs? Some people are loving it and feeling great, so good for them. Many are caught up in the frenzy just because… well, because it’s the done thing. Or because it kind of happened to them, and the mind got addicted to the busy-ness, the body is running on cortisol and can’t relax, shut down the fight or flight response.
I suppose the trade off here, if you want to escape the rat race, is to learn how to deal with the guilt of not doing, running, working all the time. Even being labelled as lazy, the ultimate insult in the busy society.
How to get out of the daily grind then? I am not sure and everyone’s different. You’ve got bills to pay and can’t quit your job tomorrow. Maybe as a first step, you could stop watching mind-numbing TV and Hollywood movies, disconnect from the Internet for a week or check Facebook etc. once a day only.
Move away from compulsive spending, gradually freeing yourself from worthless shopping habits and high bills and slowly shifting to higher meaning, lower cost activities (erhm.. it helps if you’ve got a partner here :-). And do Yoga of course!