There is a wonderful sketch in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl where four Yorkshiremen are trying to best each other regarding who survived the most indigent and treacherous childhood. Douglas Coupland referred to a similar phenomenon that occurs at AA meetings as "onedownsmenship."
There is a new game in town in relation to busyness. If you observe conversations closely, does it not seem as if there is some sort of tacit contest regarding who is busier? For instance, you tell a friend that your day was jam-packed with back-to-back meetings, and she tells you that she had to fly the organ-donor helicopter to Santa Inez and back -- twice -- to save two Nobel Prize-winning rocket-scientist twin sisters who both needed kidney transplants?
And you think you had a busy day??
I have noticed that a large percentage of belated email responses I receive include the words "crazy busy" or some derivative thereof in the first two lines. If I were writing in German, crazybusy would already be one word. Of late, I've been on the receiving end of that phrase so many times that I'm certain it will be included as a single word in the next edition of the OED.
Of course the ultimate manifestation of crazybusy -- the emperor's new clothes -- is to not receive any response at all. Those non-responses are from people who are so many clicks beyond crazybusy that they're "overwhelmed," "totally swamped," "crushed," "inundated." And then when your paths casually cross at yoga or Whole Foods or Starbucks, their faces light up as they rush past you exclaiming, "I know I owe you a call. I've been crazybusy. Let's get together next week!"
Granted, through many years of studying and traveling, I've met some pretty high-powered human beings. Yet dear few of the people floating around my orbit have full-time 60 hour per week desk jobs; most of them are self-employed freelancers -- yoga teachers, artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, therapists and other types of rampant do-gooders.
If I met someone who worked 17 hours per day, seven days per week in the Foxconn factory and he said, "crazybusy," I would understand. If I met someone who was weeks away from finding the cure for leukemia after 20 years in a laboratory and she said, "crazybusy," I would concur. But if you're self-employed, I think the term "crazybusy" is relative.
The problem is that busyness has become part of personal identity, how we get our sense of self. Eleven years ago, David Brooks wrote of the new bohemian bourgeois class nonchalantly trying to gain social status by besting each other with exotic vacation destinations: "Oh you were in Saint Barthes for Christmas? Antigua is so much less scene-y!" I think that busyness is a new status symbol that people use to measure themselves against other people.
When was the last time you heard someone say, "I sat in bed for the last week eating licorice and watching TV," and didn't think he or she must be unwell?
Ever hear the phrase, "I want to be a human being, not a human doing"?
And this is how Yes has become the new No. Because many of us have become human doings. Since the invention of multi-tasking, Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum could now be translated as, "I'm crazybusy, therefore I am."
And we're all soooooooo crazybusy that we double-book, flake on meetings, cancel at the last minute via email, text important messages that shouldn't be texted (Pregnant! Driving on freeway now! Gotta stop smoking! Sucks! Will call later!), and wield caller ID like Luke Skywalker wielding a lightsaber.
Swoosh! Swoosh! "Oh, Joan's calling... probably just to whinge about her cat's hairball. It can wait. I'll call her back later. Right now I'm crazybusy."
But when crazybusy becomes your way of being in the world, later too often becomes never.
So Yes is the new No because people say "Yes, let's get together next week!" to your face but after sundry emails and texts trying to schedule a place and time to actually meet, they give up and actual human connection flitters away into the ether.
Should I mention personal integrity? Should I mention creating your reality by being your word and showing up when you say you will? I dare not... I dare not...
I recall hearing the phrase many years ago, "On your deathbed your inbox will be full," meaning that there are perpetually things to "do," things we think need to get checked off our ever-growing checklists. We delude ourselves into believing that texting and emailing allow us more time to get things done. And we delude ourselves into believing that we're really connecting with people through these new media -- sans facial expressions, sans smells, sans body language, sans touch, sans eye contact.
Are people living happier and more fulfilling lives since technology has enabled us to "do" more -- or more precisely, to do more things at the same time, and be crazybusy? Or are people increasingly stressed out due to overstimulation, due to being over-connected?
Let's not allow Yes to be the new No, let's make an effort to engage in authentic and compassionate communications. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that interacting on Facebook or Twitter will help us get our emotional needs met. Let's take out our earbuds when we're in a restaurant or cafe. Let's show up for the human beings in our lives with face-to-face interactions.
Let us stop hiding behind our thumbs and fingers.
The eyes are the windows to the soul. Not the thumbs.
So put down your iPhone, put down your Blackberry, get up from your computer, and make a real connection with a fellow human being today.
Because you don't want your tombstone to read, "Was Crazybusy."
You want it to read, "Beloved."
For more by Ira Israel, click here.
For more on unplugging and recharging, click here.
For more on conscious relationships, click here.
Flickr photo by .reid.
Ellie Knaus: This Is Only the Beginning: Surprising Advice From a Centenarian
Have to wonder how many of the crazybusy folks are actually productive, and how many are filling time out of fear of not knowing how to relax.
we can fill in the blank with lots of notions-- respectability, acceptability, sympathy, contentment, success--you name it, we'll immediately assume a shortage of it, and commence a mighty struggle to get some more.
tibetans are right, america is the land of hungry ghosts.
So thanks for the article; like the poster below, I am relieved to have a late lie-in of a weekend morning, and if no one else hears the bees, so bee it! :)
I agree with rionnieatlanta9- it's not that most people are beyond busy, it's that they are disorganized.
With a 7 month old, my "pregnancy brain" is lingering. When I do remember to call my beloved friends, it's always while laying in bed trying to fall asleep, or giving my son a bath.
It’s just that we live in a global society which says we do. So, we run around and work hard and play hard. We try to fulfill ourselves by keeping up with the Joneses, and find that it is a constant treadmill that we must constantly keep walking on lest we fall off.
So inevitably we keep chasing, running ever forward. But at the cost of it we see what this article describes, the breaking down of communication, of communities, of interpersonal connections.
The greatest source of pleasure is not hidden somewhere in “things." It is not in working some job to add zeros to our bank accounts. It is in human interactions. Many scientists and sociologists today are stressing something very pivotal that previously we haven’t known much about. And it is this: We today, as a global society, are interconnected and interdependent.
This is where we should be putting our time and energy: In the perfection of our connections with one another, in developing further and further empathy, in creating a workable and manageable fair global society, in learning that we all, through our interconnection, make up one giant global system.
Because if we don't begin to fundamentally, as a society, change how we consume we will inevitably be forced into a very harsh future reality. And besides that we see that our excessive consumption is not making us happy in a lasting way.
But without further education we see that we aren't inclined to revise our consumption habits, to start to re-prioritize to focus again on our connections, even though our shortsighted habits prove ultimately detrimental to our long-term well being.
That's why it's going to take new education for all of society, and collective efforts, in order to change things.
Personally, I might walk into a store and choose for myself a can of gourmet coffee -- I certainly deserve some pizazz in my life. Its the other items in my basket -- the "bargains," "just gotta try," and the ever famous -- "ooh, I don't have that particular color combination among my 20," etc., and most of this by unconscious grabbing as I walk through the aisles or an implanted commercial or aisle ad. Then you get to the checkout counter and as it rings up -- only then do you realize.
In California (at least) we have the 99 Cents stores. Without fail, people go in there (e.g., me) with the intention to pick up a few specific items, and walk out with a 50% tab. I'm embarrassed (continuously by my wife -- but it doesn't help) at how much just goes on the shelf, never to be noticed again until Spring cleaning.
We all want to live a better life, to live more comfortably, and that's fine. Technology is simply showing us how not to do it. It quickly reveals our inner emptiness, as Ira so aptly details in this article. By wasting time on the "garbage" of the Internet, we're discovering how hollow we've become, to the point that we can barely tolerate more direct forms of communication.
Do I really need to know that my cousin lacks "energy" in order to play Mafia Wars? Yet, when I call my brother more than once every six months, there's awkward silence? What do we need this for? Just so we—and our children after us—can be born, grow up, work (play Mafia Wars?), and then die?
Why all this? Deep down, there is an unsatisfied desire awakening in us, a desire for connection on a higher level of existence—a better, kinder, and happier level. We just have to reveal the ugliness of our current level in order to desire the other.
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But you did anyway.
So much for integrity.
And as a self-employed writer, I love this contrary advice from Haruki Murakami:
"I'm struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn't this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority? My opinion hasn't changed over the years. I can't see my readers' faces, so in a sense it's a conceptual type of human relationship, but I've consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life.
"In other words, you can't please everybody."
Haruki Murakami, What I Think About When I Think About Running
A day a week tending vegetables would be fine. Or in a factory, if there were any.
The social class system upon wealth is destroying human society and the natural world. We need to confront it head on with new thinking. Please express your thinking to others.