Busyness as a Form of Belonging

This month I'm going to talk a lot about overwhelm because well, a lot of people are feeling overhwelmed. But also because, I think as a society we need to course correct our relationship to overwhelm.

So this month, I'm going to talk about what overwhelm is, the cadence experiment I used to shift my relationship to it, and how I relate to overwhelm now.

But before we get into the nitty gritty of overwhelm, I want to talk about a foundational societal issue, which is our allegiance to buysness.

Have you ever noticed how dedicated we are to busyness as a society?

It's all too normal when greeting people that you ask how they are and they reply "busy" and you say "oh ya, me too" and that whole conversation has a certain subtle messaging to it. A message that says "I'm in, are you?" and the expectation is that the other person confirms that ya, they are in.

But in on what exactly? And why are we constantly checking to make sure other people are still in?

In my years of disentangling myself from capitalism's chaos, I've come to understand that the thing people are in on is the busyness club.

In capitalist societies, it's not just good for working-class people to be busy. It's critical. Busy people theoretically get more work done, but more importantly, busy people are too distracted and exhausted to look around and ask questions like "what the fuck is going on around here?"

And so praising busyness, affirming busyness, and convincing people to adopt busyness as a key rule in their code of ethics is important to keeping the ruse that is capitalism going. Because more than anything, capitalism needs our time and what better way to get it than to convince us that giving up as much time as we have to offer is how we prove not just our worth, but that we belong.

Let's get into it.

Busyness as a Social Construct

First, let's get on the same page about what a social construct is. A social construct is something somebody made up that we have been socialized to accept as true. To me, the idea that busyness is a good thing is a social construct.

We've learned to associate busyness with:

• Success
• Money
• Worthiness
• Able-bodiedness.

Let me talk about each of these in turn.

Busyness as a Metric for Success

When I was a baby lawyer, one of the frequent exchanges I had with my co-workers was talking about how busy we were.

I'd ask "How are you?" and they'd respond "Busy."

They'd ask "How are you" and I'd respond "Busy."

And they'd say "Busy is good. That's good."

And I'd shrug my shoulders.

Because sometimes I was really swamped with work to the point of almost drowning and I'd say "busy" in a scared tone to try to indicate that I sort of needed help, but was too ashamed to ask for it and hope they picked up on it. They never did.

But other times, I wasn't busy at all, but it made sense to pretend to be because the thought of doing more work seemed awful. So I just got used to responding to this question with a big fake smile on my face and an enthusiastic "BUSYYYYY" so as not to attract attention to myself.

Now when I look back on it, it seems like a scene from the iconic Boots Riley film Sorry to Bother You.

But at the time, when I told people I was busy, they tallied it in their heads as an indicator that I was doing well at work. If I was busy and had work, that meant people wanted to work with me, which meant I was outputting good work product, which meant I had the potential to be successful in a law firm, maybe even as a partner.

My ability to have enough work to drown me was a critical metric for determining whether I had what it took to "make it" in the legal world.

I've come to learn that this type of exchange isn't unique to the legal industry, it's a staple in the corporate world. People who are busy in their jobs are deemed to be succeeding because all the work goes to people who apparently "can handle it." So the busier you are, the more qualified you are, and the more successful you're destined to be.

Busyness as a Metric for Wealth

In addition to being a measure of your capacity to success, busyness is also a metric for how much money you must be making.

We all know this one. Busy people are hustling and hustlers know how to get the bag.

This particular social construct is extremely prevalent in the entrepreneurship world, which is where I first learned about it. The entire world of entrepreneurship has a raging boner for busyness.

Busy founders who don't sleep, eat, or take time to maintain the intimate and familial relationships are praised for doing what's "necessary" to build the next unicorn.

Online business owners who are hustling and on client calls and social media all day must be getting the bag, honey.

Everywhere you look in the world of entrepreneurship, you'll see messaging that busy people are rich people and that financially successful entrepreneurs are busy entrepreneurs.

When I first started my entrepreneurship journey, this messaging was everywhere and it kind of knocked me sideways in the back of my head. I had just left the world of 9 to 5 only to be told that the entrepreneurship world was one of working around the clock without a start or stop time.

To be an entrepreneur, or at least a wealthy one, the messaging seemed to say, was to make your business your number one priority and forsake all others. It was to eat, breathe, and live your business 24/7 so that your business was the sum total of your busyness.

This concept didn't work for me for many reasons, one being that I had no interest in voluntarily losing control over my time by acting as my own overseer when I had just come from a place where someone else was the overseer. Another being that I was actually quite burned out and needed to rest and reconnect with myself and the people that mattered to me.

So while I successfully rejected the notion that busyness was essential to financial success, the constant messaging left me wondering at what cost. That's where the idea of busyness as worthiness comes in.

Busyness as Worthiness

Have you ever noticed how scary it can be to notice that you...aren't busy?

When I still worked in corporate law, I used to feel this sense of panic when I wasn't busy. If I didn't have a lot of work, then that meant I was falling behind on my billable hours. People would tell me to enjoy it, but I couldn't because not being busy felt fundamentally wrong, especially when others seemed to be drowning in work.

As an entrepreneur, I experienced a similar panic. If I didn't have a bunch of client calls or projects to work on, I'd start panicking. Because if I wasn't busy, then that meant I wasn't doing enough to make money.

Inherent in both of those experiences is the idea that not having anything to do or having an open schedule is both bad and a problem.

Lack of busyness was a sign that something was fundamentally wrong. Because good workers are busy workers and good entrepreneurs are busy entrepreneurs.

Not being busy must mean you aren't good in some way, or perhaps even all the ways. And if you're not good, there's only one other thing you could possible be: bad.

And being bad in a society that is obsessed with goodness is a problem. Because in our society, we've been told that bad people, or people who don't follow the status quo, deserve bad things. They deserve to struggle, they deserve to be homeless, they deserve to live a life without love or care.

Bad people aren't worthy of those things. And people who aren't busy are bad people because this is a society that highly values busyness and equates anything other than busyness to laziness, which is bad.

Well that's not quite true, you can be not busy and not lazy, but that means society labels you as not capable.

Busyness as Able-Bodiedness

Inherent in the idea of busyness is the ability to be busy. If you have the ability to be busy and you aren't, then you are deemed to be a lazy, bad person. But if you don't have the ability to be and sustain busyness, then you get labeled as incapable.

As a neurodivergent person, I live somewhere in society's Venn Diagram of laziness and disabled. Sometimes, I'm deemed as able, but unworthy of good things because I apparently don't push myself hard enough because I'm no longer perpetually busy.

Other times, I'm deemed as not capable or disabled because my neurodivergence makes me unable to sustain busyness. When that happens, I'm no longer lazy; I'm a lost cause and lost causes are "such a shame."

And because now I'm basically never busy as a practice, I'm learning to excavate the pieces of this social conditioning that have been internalized and I'm also learning to shift myself out of social circles where those kinds of judgments still exist.

But the second I stopped being busy, started prioritizing my health and wellbeing, and pursuing pleasure for pleasure's sake and not as a means of delayed gratification, I started to become an outcast.

Because the society we live in requires busyness from each of us to sustain itself. It requires us to commit to busyness because that commitment is how it gets us to willingly give the capitalist class our time generation, after generation, after generation.

It convinces us that busyness is the measure of a good person, a successful person, a worthy person, and an able person. And it tells us that people who can sustain busyness are in and people who can't sustain busyness, for whatever reason, are out.

The Relationship Between Busyness and Overwhelm

I talk about busyness as a key metric for determining who is in and who is out societally because I think it's important to understand when we talk about how we relate to overwhelm.

First, because these social agreements around busyness are constantly operating in the background of our overwhelm. And second because our allegiance to busyness impacts how we perceive and relate to overwhelm.

Because we've come to know overwhelm as this thing that can stop us in our tracks. When we're overwhelmed, we often tend to lose momentum or find it difficult to move forward. But in a society that is heavily focused on constant forward, linear movement, feeling like you're coming to a halt or stopped is a problem. Because if you aren't moving then you aren't busy. And if you're not busy then you're not keeping up with those key metrics that determine whether you're successful, worthy, wealthy, able, and most importantly, whether you belong.

In my experience, this can often lead to panicking about feeling overwhelmed. The source of the panic being that if people see you're not moving or getting anything done, then they'll think you can't sustain busyness, which would make you both bad and unworthy of lots of things, but particularly belonging.

In essence, I think every time overwhelm arrives on the doorstep of folks who still have a heavy allegiance to busyness, it creates a very real and visceral fear that the longer they are overwhelmed, the more their belonging is in jeopardy.

And no, this is not a trivial thing. Humans need belonging to survive. We are inherently social creatures. So to me, experiencing overwhelm is no small thing because overwhelm has the potential to trigger core fears about survival.

So in this series, when I'm talking about Befriending Overwhelm, I want you to remember that overwhelm, because of how we've been socialized, is deeply uncomfortable because it can feel like it's jeopardizing your very survival. That means you'll need to be especially gentle with yourself as you explore this top, especially if this post made you feel some kind of way.

You'll need to check in with yourself and your body especially to see if it's actually okay to continue reading or experimenting. You'll need to eat nourishing food and spend time outside and do things that help settle your nervous system.

Because overwhelm inside of these oppressive systems we live in is deeply triggering. But I also believe it holds vital information that has the capacity to change our approach to a whole of everything.

That's why I advocate for people to learn how to befriend overwhelm. If you're ready to join me on this ride, then I invite you to check out and spend time journaling on the reflection questions below. I'll see you next week when I talk about what overwhelm actually is. See you there.

Questions for Reflection

• Where are you performing busyness in your life?
• What privileges does that performance afford you?
• What kind of belonging does that performance create for you?
• What would you lose if you stopped performing busyness?
• Who would you be without the identity of "busy person"?