While trying to clear up my computer, I found these notes
that I had saved.
"In
a popular opinion piece for
The New York Times, Tim Kreider looks at the cult of busyness. “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” He argues that busyness is a combination of choices and social pressures to avoid laziness, but that unrelenting activity has its costs: ”The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
“I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter,” says Kreider. Perhaps there is a point at which we force ourselves into a completely packed schedule that is filled with more sweat and tears than its worth. Do we owe it to ourselves to try and find a balance, or should we just accept busyness as a fact of modern life?"
