Curse of Busyness!
A life of leisure was once the aspiration of the upper class. But now, bragging about busyness is how people indicate their status.
Busyness is a powerful social signal, though a somewhat counterintuitive one. At the turn of the 20th century, economists predicted that the ultimate symbol of wealth and success would be leisure — showing others that you were so successful that you could abstain from work. Instead, the opposite occurred. It’s not free time, but busyness, that gestures to a person’s relevance.
In 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture, later published as Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in which he foresaw that people in the year 2028 would work only 15 hours a week thanks to a productive economy and technological innovation
Well-off people in the western world are nowhere close to working just three hours a day.
Just as being leisurely around 1900 was a status claim, being unmanageably busy at the turn of this century was a status claim based on the fact that the busiest people also tended to be the richest.
What can we do to be more efficient rather than busy?
Three elements that create an experience of deceleration: embodied deceleration, technological deceleration, and episodic deceleration.
Embodied deceleration is the physical slowing down of your body: walking or riding a bike versus moving your body around in cars, planes, or buses.
Technological deceleration is not giving up technology, but feeling like you have a sense of control over it.
Episodic deceleration is having fewer episodes of action per day — Not feeling like you’re running from meeting to meeting at work, and then you have to run to pick up your kids and drive them to three different activities at the same time as you’re trying to cook dinner.
Emphasizing the pleasure and social benefits of deceleration can help shift attention away from busyness.
Changes in attitudes lead to changes in behavior. And both attitudes and behavioral changes lead to changes in social structures.