- If we are as busy as we pretend to be, then we are too busy to allow ourselves to be affected by the pain and suffering of our world. We are too busy to be addressed personally by the social, political, or ecological disasters occurring in our times. We are too busy to make the connections between our artificially-driven consumerism and what we as a society are doing to the rest of the world. We are too busy to feel our own suffering or that of another deeply enough to respond. We are too busy to listen to our own feelings or those of others. Our busyness insulates us from care and from compassion. Our busyness deadens our feelings and numbs our responses.
I have a deep suspicion that this climate of busyness and efficiency is one of the ways we support the ever-escalating levels of violence in the culture. When we are too busy, we become not only uncaring, but we also become volatile and violent. When anyone or any circumstance interferes with our self-importance or the level of productivity that our busyness and overly tight time-control foster in us, we erupt in some form of aggression. Emotionally, we become irritable and angry. Behaviourally we may express it in outbursts of temper, blasting car horns, fighting over parking spaces, cutting into lines, verbally or physically attacking family members, or co-workers, etc.
If we don't erupt noticeably in our social world, most likely we deny or swallow the accumulating frustration. This latter response leads to increasing levels of depression or lack of enjoyment in what we are doing. Yet in all of this, we feel somehow that we are not responsible. We are only barely getting by. The expectation that we must be busy all the time feels as if it is an external expectation with the result that we do not recognize that it is also self-generated in collusion with the culture.
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