Written by Micah Gill
Why are we so busy? Most people in contemporary U.S. society, especially college students, feel busy (research it if you don’t believe me). Our schedule quickly fills when we try to split our time between academics, extracurriculars, work, relationships and maintaining our physical, mental and spiritual health, not to mention the time spent planning for the future and trying to serve those around us. It’s no surprise that nowadays when we ask people how they’re doing, “Busy!” is often a go-to response. Yet, as Dr. Monte Cox likes to point out, this common answer is rarely a solemn admittance of an oversaturated schedule, but rather a point of pride.
Why are we proud of our busyness? We have not always prided ourselves on being a society of resume boosters, speed walkers, multitaskers, LinkedIn curators and coffee guzzlers. For the roughly 250 years leading up to the mid-20th century, we were in what French historian Michel Foucault called a “disciplinary society,” which imposed society’s values and expectations on its people by force and coerced obedience. Outside forces compelled and threatened people to fall in line and to make “progress.” Though there are some remnants of disciplinary society still intact today, Byung-Chul Han, a South Korean philosopher, explains how today’s society has shifted: “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society,” he writes in his book “The Burnout Society.” If you don’t believe him, note the change in today’s characteristic institutions from the past: “Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls and genetic laboratories . . . prohibitions, commandments and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives and motivation.” Society no longer forces us to be productive members; we now force ourselves.
Why are we so busy? Perhaps a better question is, “Why do we force ourselves to be so busy?” Primarily, we feel that we must be busy. We compel ourselves to busyness because, in our achievement society, busyness, productivity and “excellence,” are our standards of importance. If we see our lives as unimportant without hard work, we will naturally enslave ourselves to “the grind.” Han puts it similarly: “The reaction to a life that has become bare and radically fleeting occurs as hyperactivity, hysterical work and production.” We members of achievement society have starved our lives of their intrinsic value and have tried and failed to create a new virtue called “efficiency” to make up for it. Really, efficiency is a vice.
When we hyperactively achieve to make ourselves important and valuable, we show that we do not trust the meaning ascribed to our lives by the Gospel. Our distrust of the Gospel detaches us from “being” characterized by peace, simplicity and gratitude, and instead imprisons us into a false “becoming,” characterized by strain, complexity, burnout and discontentment. How far is this from Jesus’ example? Nowadays, we are too busy to break away and pray for hours like Jesus made his common practice. We are too busy to stop and show love to others by listening to them, like Jesus did for the woman at the well. How many hours did Jesus spend pouring into the lives of his disciples? It seems strange to even imagine Jesus thinking about sacrificing his time because his entire purpose on earth was “not to be served but to serve” (Mt. 20:28). What if we thought about our lives the same way? Did Jesus frantically speed-walk around Galilee? Somehow, I don’t think so. As Dr. Ross Cochran often says, “Hurry and love are fundamentally incompatible.”
Those of you who know me may be surprised that I am writing this article. The reality is that I am an imprisoned member of an achievement society, just now waking up to see the chains which bind me to “the grind.” I will admit that we are sometimes (but not as often as we think) called to busyness. This is a dangerous calling, though, because busyness, while not bad, makes it harder to be good.
