Why do we valorise busyness?
Years ago, when I was walking back to my college dorm room one Vermont evening after dinner, I noticed my residential assistant (RA) standing underneath a tree, staring into its branches. When I stopped to ask him what he was doing, he jumped. “Um, well, I’m supposed to be at a meeting, but I started watching these squirrels instead.” I thought about Jon and the squirrels for hours afterward. Who misses a meeting to watch a squirrel? It would be easy to say that Jon was distractible or unreliable. A person who can be pulled away from commitments, who will put a moment of wonder above a work responsibility, might be considered unserious. He might be considered bad at his job. Yet Jon was actually really good at his job. His tendency to stop and admire seemingly small things (like squirrels in trees), and his refusal to cave to the culture of busyness and constant rushing about, actually made him more focused and effective as an RA, not less. He told me later that he always wanted to do what was honest and natural. Sometimes, that meant missing a meeting, I suppose. But it also meant turning away from the squirrel to talk with me and to provoke me to think deeply about what was truly important. Years later, this interaction still has me wondering: why does our culture valourise busyness? Why is it deemed honourable to be constantly distracted by a pinging cell phone, but a waste of time to watch the squirrels? Busyness is a utilitarian value In my work as a homemaker, historian, and writer, I am constantly at the mercy of our culture’s obsession with being busy. Since being a homemaker does not contribute directly (though it certainly does contribute indirectly) to the Gross Domestic Product, much public and private pressure suggests that homemaking and full-time childrearing are only acceptable paths if you can frame them as a job and prove that you are doing something productive with them. High standards of housekeeping and running kids around to various activities come to mind, as do arguments that emphasise the economic value of homemaking as a “job”. In other words, a good homemaker is a productive homemaker, one with visible, measurable output. “It’s the most important job in the world,” we are sometimes told (with varying levels of sincerity), “so get busy.” The same can be said for writing, teaching, and many other professions. Our society is a highly utilitarian one; it measures an individual’s value by what he does, not by who he is. And if a person does not appear to be busy, he may appear not to be doing anything at all, or certainly not anything worthwhile. The highest praise our culture can ever give an individual might be summed up by the compliment that Thomas the Tank Engine so often receives in the famous children’s television show: “Thomas, you are a very useful engine.” There’s a history to this, tied up largely in the Industrial Revolution and its rearrangement of family structure and labour along wage-earning and non-wage-earning lines. Instead of men, women, and children working together toward subsistence and wealth-building on a (frequently multi-generational) family farm, industrialisation drove a division of work into wage-earning and non-wage-earning categories tied to production value rather than shared stewardship or communal well-being. It was in this context that nineteenth-century feminists found themselves highlighting the economic aspects of homemaking in an effort to gain respect for women’s work. As Ivana Greco demonstrates, this also drove women to reclaim the terminology that summed up their work in the home over time. Interested in economic production above all else, we have come to equate busyness with importance, value, and well-being, even as we sense somewhere deep down that this is not quite how life works. Should our production of economic goods really be the core of our social or personal worth? Is our productivity our reason for being, our best defence against accusations that we are merely taking up space? Human beings are not, in fact, engines, so what on earth are we keeping ourselves so busy for? We all know the justifications we’ve used. In high school, we keep busy so that we can have a college application packed with activities. In college, we keep busy so that we can be attractive to graduate, medical, or law schools, or to the best employers. In graduate school, we work sixty-hour weeks so that we can get good professional placements later on. In our first post-graduate jobs, we burn the candle at both ends so that we can get tenure or make partner. Finally, we get that big promotion, only to discover that far from being finished, we are now at the peak of our careers. Now we are really busy! Just a few more years until we can retire! Worse still, we tell ourselves that we do this for our children, so that through a sky-high standard of living (earned through our professional busyness) and the best schools and lessons money can buy, they can be properly prepared for high school, and then college, and then, well, see above. Our families keep us busy, and we keep busy for our families. Busyness is family-friendly! Some busy companies even prove their family-friendliness by including coverage for egg-freezing in the employment package they offer female employees. “Having a baby now would be too risky,” they say; “you might have to stop producing other things for a little while.” But somehow, it is considered family-friendly to help women delay babies until the latest possible moment (with no guarantee that the eventual conception will even work). Babies, the narrative goes, are only acceptable once you are no longer such a useful engine. Meanwhile, universities claim family-friendliness by offering policies designed to help graduate students who have children. Some of these do help: affordable on-campus family housing comes to mind. Yet many of these policies look good on paper but do little to actually support mothers, because they cannot destigmatise motherhood in the campus culture. The same is true for many professor mothers who have the option to take maternity leave or stop the tenure clock when having a baby: it is often possible to do so, but it is also likely to cause the mother to fall behind in reputation and other professional intangibles. So it can be professionally quite unwise, even openly frowned upon, to stop professional work even briefly. So corporations and universities keep their family-friendly reputations, but production doesn’t have to suffer. Against all odds, their female employees will keep busy. To do otherwise is simply too risky. Busyness is driven by fear Beyond financial considerations, it is this sort of reputational, value-oriented risk that is the unspoken secret behind the valourisation of busyness in our culture. When you stop being busy, even just for a moment, it can feel frightening, even destabilising. We fear that if we cease our activity even for a moment, we will be forced to confront some of the deeper questions that our busyness helps us avoid; to address some of the problems our constant motion allows us to skirt past. When our exterior lives become quiet, our interior lives become louder, and we can no longer avoid wondering: Who am I if I am not producing something, or at least appearing as if I am? If I slow down, will the people I value now cease to value me? Do I have worth beyond my usefulness?