In our modern world, being busy is a status symbol, an indication of drive, determination and success. It’s something to strive for. We tend to see it as a necessary part of life: an inherent good. Something anyone who wants to be successful should aspire to have more of in their lives.
But what if this entire outlook on being busy is actually misguided? What if being busy isn’t necessarily something we should strive for but an indication that something has gone terribly wrong with our priorities?
When we have time for everything yet still feel unfulfilled, it becomes apparent that something is wrong. In an attempt to discover just why our lives appear so empty and unhappy despite being so busy all the time, we must ask ourselves what busyness is doing to us.
When you’re busy, your mind is filled with thoughts of schedule and to-dos. It feels good to be so organised and accomplished. You may even feel proud and superior when comparing your super-busy life to those of others who appear less productive. And why wouldn’t you?
Being busy means you have a full life, and everyone wants that. But let’s not kid ourselves: being busy isn’t always a good thing, at least not in the way we view it today. We don’t need more stress, pressure, or responsibilities in our lives; what we need is more time for ourselves, loved ones, and, most importantly, meaningful experiences that bring out the best in us.
If you’ve ever felt profoundly unhappy, perhaps you’ve wondered why. After all, you have a great job and loving family, friends and partners. You live in an affluent society. You could not ask for more opportunities or resources to lead a happy life. So why are you still not content? The answer is that these things are not what makes us unhappy.
What makes us unhappy is precisely our response to these things: fearing that we might lose them; envying others who appear to have more of them; measuring ourselves against an artificial standard of success, or feeling trapped by social expectations about what kind of person we ought to be.
These things don’t make us unhappy because they are objectively difficult to get or keep, but because they trigger negative emotions like fear, envy, insecurity and cowardice in us as a consequence of our own self-obsession. These emotions cause us unhappiness precisely because they cloud our thinking and prevent us from seeing things clearly in the first place.
Busyness is our greatest source of misery
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
An old Danish proverb goes, “a happy person has no time to be busy”. According to the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the most significant source of unhappiness is our constant need to occupy ourselves with “distractions.” He observed the busiest people are usually the unhappiest.
Kierkegaard thinks we make things even worse for ourselves by ignoring the negative aspects of life (known as “the absurd”) and constantly trying to fill our lives with an abundance of distractions.
Søren Kierkegaard is famously regarded to be the first existentialist philosopher. His dense, complex, and often paradoxical writings are not exactly easy reads.
Despite this, his ideas have had a lasting impact on many different fields of study, including philosophy, theology and even psychology.
On living a meaningful life, Kierkegaard cautions us against taking up too many external activities to avoid confronting our misery.
“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be someone who is brisk about their food and work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily,” he explains in his book, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.
When we are unhappy with ourselves, we tend to over-schedule our lives to keep ourselves distracted. The more fuss you make in your life, the more clearly it shows you have not ventured out and explored the silent spaces of being alone with yourself.
The constantly busy person may appear to others as if they are accomplishing many things, but in fact they are merely replacing one task with another — in the hope of getting more done. The key question isn’t how much you can check off your list; it’s whether the activity brings value to your life and work.
“The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness,” observes Søren Kierkegaard.
The cult of busyness is everywhere. If you’re not on deadline, you’re overbooked. If you’re not taking a nap, you’re catching up on sleep. If you’re not eating, you’re eating clean. If you’re not working out, it’s because you’re broken or so exhausted from your last workout.
The bitter truth is that the more time we spend being busy, the less happy we are. Instead of striving for an overly-active life filled with obligations and responsibilities — which only leaves us feeling depleted and exhausted — we should strive for more control over our time to live stress-free and conscious lives.
It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do — we are always doing something to escape the feeling of being suffocated by our own busyness and its pursuit of success as an end in itself. The cycle of busyness is a trap. You can only escape it if you start rethinking how you spend your time and how your daily tasks and responsibilities impact your long-term goal.
Question how you spend your time. Is how you get things done making you happy or merely keeping you from confronting your unhappiness by filling your time with distractions?
This article originally appeared in Medium.
