Not too long ago, the most common answer to “How have you been?” was “Fine, how about you?” Today you are just as likely to hear something like “Insanely busy.” Tim Kreider wrote a famous article in the New York Times several years ago called “The Busy Trap.” He said that when you say you are busy, you are obviously trying to disguise your boast as a complaint. Our culture tells us that your life cannot be trivial or meaningless if you are completely booked every hour of the day. If we are busy, we believe we are worthy of higher status than those who are not. This cultural belief is exemplified by the obligatory response to “I’m too busy,” which is: “That’s a good problem to have.” Another acceptable response is “Better than the alternative.”
A century ago, in his essay “On Laziness,” Christopher Morley wrote: “It is our observation that every time we get into trouble it is due to not having been lazy enough.” Lazy may not be the best description. But it is my observation that when we have problems, it is often because we are too busy. We try to do too many things too quickly. Problems occur because we do not have enough time between stimulus and response. Everything is urgent, and there are too many things.
Technology has made this exponentially worse. People call, text, and email me seven days per week at all times of the day. That is partially my fault and partially a consequence of being a lawyer in Eastern North Carolina in 2019. In the late 1990s, I was a procurement forester. I worked in the woods most days with no cell phone. If I needed to talk to someone they could leave a message on my answering machine or write me a letter. I went on vacation with no phone and no computer and didn’t worry about people not being able to communicate with me. It could wait a week. Last week, my cell phone battery died while I was duck hunting in the middle of Currituck Sound. It took a few minutes to become comfortable with being disconnected from the world for a few hours. I was able to spend some time observing the world around me. I used to do that every day.
I’m not a huge fan of Oscar Wilde – or any 18th century poet or playwright for that matter. But he was an interesting person to say the least. I once wrote a paper about his life in retaliation for my English teacher saying Bob Dylan didn’t qualify as a poet. It turns out that the Swedish Academy agreed with me and awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. So instead of writing about a future Nobel Prize winner, I wrote about Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency. Wilde once said that “[t]o do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.” It is harder to do nothing now than it was a century ago. If you don’t take some time to do nothing, your best ideas may never come into focus.
In contrast to indecent 18th century poets, I am a fan of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. When the Christmas lights wouldn’t come on, Clark’s father-in-law was not impressed. When Audrey explained that he had worked “really hard,” Grandpa’s response was “So do washing machines.” His point was that work is not valuable for the sake of work. Henry David Thoreau made the same point more eloquently when he said “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
Maybe you are busy about something that will change the world. But probably not. Tim Kreider said you are more likely to be busy because being busy reassures you that what you do is important. Many of us are addicted to busyness and feel guilty or anxious when we aren’t working. Or perhaps you dread what you may have to face in the absence of busyness.
Neel Burton says busyness can become a manic defense – the tendency to deal with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings by distracting your mind with either a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts or feelings. When life is slipping out of control, one way to prevent the feelings of helplessness is by filling your mind with something else. But at some point, the manic defense stops working. According to Burton, “a person adopts the depressive position if the gap between his current life situation and his ideal life situation becomes so large that it can no longer be carpeted over.” In other words, sometimes you crash because it’s just too much.
If you read my posts regularly, you may be coming to the familiar point of asking yourself “What in the world does this have to do with estate planning?” Maybe nothing. If the void in your life is an addiction or sheer vanity, I can’t help you. But many of us crave safety. We just want to know that everything is going to be alright. The problem is safety does not exist. Your world could crumble around you tomorrow.
If my world crumbles, I don’t want it to be my fault. I am also keenly aware that life is short. And there are lot of things I want to accomplish. So I work harder, promise too much, overcommit, overschedule, and push physical boundaries. And when I have a spare moment, I feel like I should be learning, listening, questioning, and improving. I have to force myself to take a break.
If busyness is my manic defense, planning is my anti-depressant. If busyness carpets over my current life situation as Burton says, having a plan in place refinishes the floors. I feel comfort in knowing that if something happens to me, my family will be protected. Not everyone feels that way. One of my google reviews says “You can’t put a price on peace of mind.” That is how I feel as well. Perhaps that is what has drawn me to my work.
Being crazy-busy is not a good problem to have. It’s not a virtue. At best, it’s a method of coping with an unsustainable culture. At worst, it’s a terrible problem to have. Having an estate plan in place may be one way to help lower your risk of crashing. We would all be better off if we could just say “I’m doing fine, and I hope you are too.”