What Being Sick Taught Me About the Cult of Busy

Hello from beneath a mountain of blankets, surrounded by a small fortress of crumpled tissues and half-empty cups of water.

Currently, I feel like death is knocking at my door. Disclaimer: I am not actually dying. I’m just being incredibly dramatic because I feel like absolute crap. But being forced to pause and stare at the ceiling for hours on end does something funny to a person. When you physically cannot do anything, you’re forced to look at the way you live. And honestly? My fever dreams have been less terrifying than the realizations I’ve had about my daily life.

As I’ve been lying here, unable to do much without needing a 20-minute recovery nap, I started thinking about how we fill our time. I don’t know when “busy” became the norm, but I blame the 90s. In the late 1990s, society collectively decided that being busy was the ultimate badge of honor. The moment people started wearing Bluetooth headsets to the grocery store was the beginning of the end.

Not busy? Clearly, you are lazy, unmotivated, and probably still trying to figure out how to program your VCR.

Chronically busy? Wow, look at you! You’re a resounding success! You’re important!

Believe it or not, but creative people are notorious for doing this. We wear our burnout like a shiny medal. We compete in the Overwork Olympics: “Oh, you only slept five hours? Well, I slept three and survived entirely on espresso beans and panic!”

To help me cope with my forced stillness, I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving” by Celeste Headlee.

Let’s be real for a second. Even though I know I am sick, as I lay here, I have one part of my brain that is absolutely freaking out.

It’s screaming at me because I haven’t gotten into the studio. It’s yelling because the yard work is piling up. It’s panicking because I’m not responding to emails. According to that specific, loud-mouthed section of my mind, I am just laying here like a complete waste of space. Let’s call a spade a spade: that side of my brain is an asshole.

But it’s an asshole that has been running the show for a long time. According to the book, before the 24/7 hustle culture of the internet age, the roots of the “cult of busy” were planted way back during the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the Protestant work ethic (Idle hands are the devils work). Suddenly, human beings stopped living by the natural rhythms of the sun and seasons, and started living by the rigid tick of the factory clock.

We stopped measuring a good day by how connected, creative, or content we felt, and started measuring it by “output.” If you weren’t producing a tangible unit of work every hour, you were seen as a moral failure. Fast forward a few centuries, and that historical conditioning has mutated into a full-blown societal obsession.

It is a massive wake-up call. Headlee basically takes our modern work culture, flips it upside down, and shakes it. She explains how our obsession with efficiency and constant labor is actually a relatively new human invention (thanks, Industrial Revolution) and how it’s literally killing our creativity and well-being. It’s an educational slap in the face that reminds us that human beings are not machine parts. We are meant to live, not just produce.

Listening to that book has made me take a hard, uncomfortable look in the mirror. I am a self-diagnosed workaholic.

For a long time, I used that “busy-ness” as a badge of personal importance. If I’m working hard, I matter, right? But since I’ve had nothing but time to think, I dug up some of the underlying motivations for this. And brace yourselves, this might be a little TMI (Too Much Information), but we’re friends now, so here it is:

My drive to overwork stems from insecurity and a deep desire for people to like me.

Oof. It hurts to write that down. There are a lot of layers to it, but the ultimate symptom of this idea is that I turn things that are supposed to be fun into chores. I make things so much harder than they need to be. It’s like my brain says, “God forbid something is easy! If it’s easy, how will anyone respect the work you do? You have to suffer at least a little bit for it to count!”

Do I do this all the time? No. But I do it enough.

Because of this, I’m officially doing a deep dive into the motivations behind everything I do.

I’ve noticed that the initial spark, that beautiful, creative drive that makes me want to start a project in the first place can easily gets snuffed out the moment I label it as “work.” I have this toxic tendency sometimes to make things incredibly serious the second I think I need to take them seriously.

When we strip the joy out of our passions just to prove our worth to some imaginary audience, we lose the whole point of doing them.

Lying here, feeling like a deflated balloon, has given me a weirdly beautiful sense of clarity.

I don’t know how much time I have left on this mortal coil… hopefully a lot, assuming this cough doesn’t actually finish me off, but I do know this: I do not want to spend a single second of it taking myself, or anything else, so seriously that it sucks the joy out of life.

So, there you have it. These are my fevered thoughts that I wanted to share in a spurt of consciousness.

If you, too, are a recovering workaholic wearing a badge of busy-ness that is starting to feel incredibly heavy, consider this your permission slip to put it down. Let things be easy. Let things be fun.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a bottle of cough syrup and a completely unproductive nap.

What about you? Have you ever realized you were turning something you love into a chore? How do you protect your “spark” from the cult of busy?