忙碌陷阱The Busy Trap
埃斯库罗斯If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default respon when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguid as a complaint. And the stock respon is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
一对一英语教学Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what tho people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people who lamented busyness is purely lf-impod: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, class and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy becau of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, becau they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its abnce.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either workin
g or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community rvice becau it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noi through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
whBrecht Vandenbroucke
can的过去式Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with class and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervid time every afternoon, time I ud to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Tho free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The prent hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chon, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herlf as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it
feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness rves 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. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine who raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to e this preten of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional lf-delusion. More and mor蛞蝓怎么读
人力资源好考吗
e people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. 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.
英语学习方法I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not derve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I e friends, read or watch a movie. This, it ems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time? quarterback
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, becau of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight fac
e, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could e why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or prenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclod Location from which I’m writing this. 96 org
