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40 OVERWHELMED ‘What if you wanted—or needed—to find time to do good work and splash in puddles with your child? Could you ever allow yourself a moment of peace? I began to wonder how ordinary people like me could make their lives work right here, right now, right where they are. I decided to look for stories of imperfect people who had at least begun to see their own time confetti and were struggling to find their way toward time serenity. Perhaps they were clearing a path for other flawed souls like me. If, as Erik Erikson wrote, the keys to the good life are having enough time for three great arerfas: work, love, and play, I would scour all three asking two questions; Why are things the way they are? How can they be better? I would look for bright spots in the frantic gloom.” TOO BUSY TO LIVE It will not seem futile for young people to dream of a brave and new and shining world . . . Science and technology, labor- saving methods, management, labor organization, education, medicine—and not least, politics and government, All these have brought within our grasp a world in which backbreaking toil and longer hours will not be necessary . . . The material things that make life interesting and pleasant will be available to everyone. Leisure, together with educational and recreational facilities, will be abundant, so that all can develop the life of the spirit, of reflection, of religion, of the arts, of the full real- ization of the good things of the world. —President Dwight D. Eisenhower's acceptance speech at the 1956 Republican convention Jane Vangsness Frisch is busy. She's getting her Ph.D. She just got married. She works all the time for a state agency that prizes face time in the office. With the main office five hours from her home, she’s on the road 80 percent of the time. Her “alone time” is when she’s studying, Or in the car, It’s a harried lifestyle she feels compelled to lead in order to be successful. What’s lost in the busyness? “Family,” the twenty- eight-year-old says. “My husband and I have chosen not to have kids, because there’s no time.” Vangsness Frisch is the first speaker at a focus group on the busy- ness of modern life.’ She says her only time for leisure is when she goes for’a run with a friend, which she considers efficient multitasking: socializing and exercise. “But I hate running,” 42 OVERWHELMED ‘Across the table, Josh Malnourie, a thirty-two-year-old IT worker for an insurance company where people routinely put in seventy-hour workweeks, says he and his wife have just had a baby and he volunteers on a number of charity boards. “I never get everything done that I need to do,” he says, adding that he was double-booked at the moment and really should be at another meeting. “{ guess I could sleep less.” Travis Kitch works two jobs for two different and demanding bosses. His wife works full-time, and they are struggling to raise two special needs kids. “We are in a state of constant busyness,” he says. And leisure sometimes just feels wrong, “The Protestant work ethic is very strong here. The whole ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop’ thing is very big. I'd love to canoe more, but i ‘At the head of the table, Betsy Birmingham, fifty, says she juggles raising five kids with being an associate dean and professor at the local university. “The last time I felt like I had a moment to myself, to breathe?” She pauses. “Last week. When I went to my doctor's office for my annual mammogram.” Just then, a tall, trim woman with short gray hair cut into a stylish bob bursts in, apologizing for being late. She introduces herself as Deb Dawson and launches into a rushed explanation about her dog, the dog's “intestinal issues,” a trip to the vet, and squeezing in another meeting at the library. She takes a breath. “Then I got stuck in traffic!” I look out the window. From our perch in the bar of the eighteen- story Radisson Hotel, the tallest building in town, I see a handful of cars lined up at one of the few stoplights. Acres of cornfields stretch as far as the eye can see beyond that. We are not in New York, Washing- ton, Boston, Chicago, or L.A. ‘We are in Fargo, North Dakota. Fargo. Population 107,000. On the road, flat Great Plains border- ing Canada. Here, old-time farmers still have dinner at midday and supper in the evening, a heavy-duty tractor manufacturer is one of the biggest employers in town, and the local fair on the street below is serving deep-fried battered cheese curds and pork chops on a stick. “Life is stressful in Fargo,” the focus group organizer, Ann Burnett, had told me. And she didn’t mean the occasional life-threatening trau- matic stress of the Red River that winds through town overflowing its banks and swamping entire neighborhoods like it has in recent years. She meant ordinary, everyday life. “People are going nuts.” TOO BUSY TO LIVE 43 As I began my search for bright spots in the overwhelm, | had first turned to rural America. With visions of bucolic country vistas, church suppers, and porch sitting, I assumed life would perhaps be less chaotic, the breathing a little easier. Then I came upon Burnett's re- search on busyness and what she calls the “great speed-up” of modern life, Burnett, fifty-four, is a professor of communication and director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at North Dakota State Uni- versity in Fargo. And all of her subjects live in small towns in the Midwest. T’d called her up, incredulous. “People are busy in Fargo?” “Oh, honey,” she'd said, guifawing. “You want to meet some over- whelmed North Dakotans? I can arrange that.” ° As the fried cheese poppers and Diet Cokes arrive, Burnett asks the group she’s convened what drives their busyness. Being busy makes them feel productive and important, they say. Admitting you take time for yourself is tantamount to a show of weakness, The thought of leisure time makes them feel .. . guilty. “It’s like everything has to have a purpose,” muses Dawson, fifty- nine, marveling at how the leisure of so many retired people she knows sounds so exhausting, all the golf they make a point of telling her they play, the travelirig they do. “Maybe it justifies how you spend your time. When you're busy, you're saying, “This is who I am. I'm doing some- thing important. I'm not just taking up space on Earth.” Dawson has five children, has written a memoir, made a film, runs a charity for orphans in the Sudan, and travels to Africa. She used to go to the massive stone Presbyterian church downtown, as did her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, It’s only a block from _ condo. She wonders if she might feel a little calmer if she went, ‘being in a place of God where you can regain perspective about your = the world,” she says. “Yet I don’t seek it out. Because I'm too sy. Ann Burnett, a petite woman with straight dark blond hair that hangs to her shoulders, speaks slowly and deliberately. She began studying busyness one December several years ago. As a scholar of how the lan- guage we use creates our reality, she'd been noticing people increasingly 46 OVERWHELMED Back surgeries, Graduations. Anniversaries, Births. Deaths. Check. Check. Check. The handwriting often snakes up the sides of the letters into the margins of the decorative garland of stockings and tinsel stars. ‘We put the letters aside for a moment and Burnett calls two col- leagues on Skype to catch up on their ongoing research on busyness. They've studied how living fast and busy frays relationships. Couples they've interviewed lament that they have no time for each other. “I can't honestly tell you when actually we had the last real conversation,” one told her. They likened their lives to living on a “speeding train,” “roller coaster,” and a “carousel and there’s no way to get off” In just trying to hold on, the couples put work and kids first. Their relation- ships, they said, feli ta the “bottom of the family food chain.”6 Burnett and her colleagues’ current project examines women and busyness. They're deep in the process of analyzing the language women have used in interviews to describe their lives. “One woman we inter- viewed said, ‘It’s not the kind of cars you drive anymore, it’s how busy you are, how many activities you're in, the bumper stickers on your car—that shows status, ” Burnett's colleague, Becky DeGreeff, says over Skype. Another woman admitted judging people for taking time off. “We assume that if people aren’t always busy, then they must be lazy,” she told them. “I don’t know how people would not be busy,” sniffed another. “I’m so tired. { need a sabbatical," one woman said, before quickly vowing she'd never take oue,.as if that would be admitting a lack of stamina to keep up.” DeGreeff says she overheard two mothers who'd dropped their daughters off at a dance class and were busy gro- cery shopping before the class let out. “One mother sighed that she had all these report cards to sign and give back to the teacher, Like, ‘I'm busier, I win.’ Then the other mother snorted and said, ‘Yeah, but I have two more kids than you,’ Like, ‘No, f win?” Busyness-is now the.social norm that people-feet they must con- form to; Burnett says, or risk being outcasts. “No one is writing ‘Time stands still’ or ‘I have nothing to do’ There's no way people are going to show they're not meeting the bar of being busy,” she says. But people either aren’t aware of, or aren't admitting the toll busyness is taking. “People don't say, ‘My house is a pigsty, the laundry’s really piling up, or “We're all completely overweight because I don’t have time to cook a decent family meal. There is a real downside to busyness, But these let- ters don’t show it, TOO BUSY TO LIVE Burnett is finding an odd paradox. Some people assert that the + busy lifestyle is a personal choice they'd made in order to get ahead or give their kids an edge for the future, Others are resigned, saying they feel obligated to live superbusy and fast, as if swept away on a fast- moving tide. “As if you don’t get to choose, busyness is just there,” Burnett says. “I call it the nonchoice choice. Because people really do have a choice.” Some even seem to create the perception of a breath- lessly busy lifestyle—like a traffic jam in Fargo—even when it may not necessarily be so. Why, she wonders, is there such a compulsion for busyness when, her research clearly shows, no one is happy about it? It’s a question that Edson Rodriguez, a sociologist who studies fre- netic families in L.A., has been puzzling over. To Rodriguez, the drive for busyness has become a powerful cultural expectation, The human “urge is to conform to it. “Culture is more powerful than the individual people who partake in it,” he told me. “The urge for humans to conform to the sociat norm of the group can be irresistible, In lab experiments first conducted in the 1950s, psy- chologists surrounded a test subject with others who purposefully gave the wrong answer to a question—in one case, the length ofa set of lines, Even though it was obviously wrong, three out of four subjects couldn't resist choosing it, as well. Gregory Berns, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University, more recently has gone a step further in exploring the human urge to conform. Putting his subjects into brain scanners, he studies what the pressure to conform looks like, He showed his subjects two different three-dimensional shapes on a computer screen and asked them to decide whether the shapes were alike or different. He followed that with photos of other people and the answers they supposedly offered. ‘The results were intriguing: When a subject was shown that everyone else in a group disagreed with his or her answer, the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, went wild. Not only that, when the group all gave the wrong answer, the perceptual circuits in the subject’s brain lit up—not the forebrain that deals with conscious decision making and monitoring conflicts. So strang was the urge to conform, Berns concluded, that the brain actually changed what the subject saw! . “As a culture, we have translated speed into being a virtue. If you are busy, if you get things done quickly, if you move quickly through- out the day, it expresses success. You're achieving,” Rodriguez said. 48 OVERWHELMED “We're validated by those around us living the same way and sanc- tioned if we aren’t following this cultural expectation, ‘The feeling is, if T'm not busy today, something’s wrong.”. Everywhere, even in rural America it seems, people strive to be busy? They tell pollsters they're too busy to register to vote." To look busy and important—or because they can't help themselves—people obses- sively check their smartphones every ten minutes."! In surveys, people say they're too busy to make friends outside the office,” too busy to date,’ too busy to sleep, and too busy to have sex." Eight in ten Britons report being tao busy to eat dessert, even though four in ten say dessert is better than sex.'° We're in such a rush that the typical sound bite for @ presidential candidate has been compressed from forty seconds in 1968 to 7.3 seconds in 2000.'* Remember those unused vacation dayst-People say they're too busy to take a vacation” and too busy for a lunch break."* That’s prompted retailers like McDonald’s to launch “It’s Your Lunch. Take It” ad cam- paigns. The travel site Orbitz has been trying to get people to make a pledge to take all their vacation days. And the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has mounted a “Take Back Your Summer” ad blitz, showing a harried office worker climbing on top of her desk and, Norma Rae~style, holding up a placard reading vacation Now. One physician has said the modern drive toward fast-paced busy- ness is a pathology. He dubbed it “time sickness,” Others said it was more a psychological mania. ‘They called it “chronophilia?2! Psychologists write of treating burned-out clients who can’t shake the notion that the busier you are, the more you are thought of as com- petent, smart, successful, admired, and even envied.” It’s the new epi- demic, psychiatrist Ed Hallowell has said.?? In his book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!, Hallowell maintains that in addition to showing status, busyness is a new kind of high. I was hearing it in interviews. “There is a certain rush,” one young man told me, “when you're going a thousand directions at once and getting it all done” Being superbusy has become so normal that it’s now a joke. The actor Casey Wilson explained in an interview that her character, Penny, on the T'V Show Happy Endings, abbreviates her words, like “hilar” for 4 TOO BUSY TO LIVE 49 hilarious and “appresh” for appreciate, because she’s just too busy to say the whole word.+ And on Saturday Night Live, Seth Meyers joked in a Weekend Update segment that retailers like Target, Costco, and Kmart were selling freshly cut Christmas trees online that could be delivered to people’s homes. “And for just a few dollars more,” Meyers cracked, “they'll put it up, they'll decorate it, unwrap all your presents, play with your new toys, and feel the joy that you and your family apparently no longer have time for.”* So much do we value busyness, researchers say they have found a human “aversion” to idleness and need for “justifiable busyness.” Chris- topher Hsee, a psychologist and professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, gave ninety-eight students a survey to fill out. ‘Then he gave them a choice. ‘They could either sit idly and wait for fif- teen minutes before taking a second survey. Or they could walk fifteen minutes round-trip to drop the first survey off—the equivalent of unnecessary busywork. Hsee’ found that the group that had busied itself with walking felt happier. “If idle people remain idle,” Hsee wrote, “they are miserable.” ‘These days even the superrich and powerful are superbusy. No longer content to show status by lazing about in conspicuous idleness as in the past, elites today act more like the U2 mega-rock star, Bono, who jets off to Africa and global capitals to meet with world leaders and push for a cure for AIDS and debt forgiveness for impoverished countries—squeezing humanitarian work in between songwriting and concert dates. The Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, a man who was once so busy he slept under his desk at work rather than lose a minute away from the office, is now so busy seeking cures for malaria and pro- moting innovation and education reform that he’s hung up his golf clubs’ Celebrities, such as the star chef Marcus Samuelsson, stuff as much “wild and frenetic life” into their fifteen-minute window of fame to.last a lifetime. Samuelsson cooks, runs six restaurants, has a cook- ware collection, a line of tea, deals with airlines and credit card compa- nies, TV appearances, two websites, four cookbooks, and a memoir.” “In the contemporary money culture,” wrote the columnist Daniel Gross, “to be at leisure, to be idle, is to be irrelevant.” I met with a group of researchers at Leisure Trends, a consumer research and marketing company for the outdoor sports and recreation industry in Boulder, Colorado. They first noticed busyness creeping 52 OVERWHELMED a measure of time that, if not dedicated to high-minded pursuits, was at least free from work. The economist Juliet Schor writes that in fourth-century Rome, there were 175 public festival days a year. In the Middle Ages, though peasants and serfs worked in the fields from sunup to sundown, they broke for breakfast, lunch, afternoon nap, dinner, and midmorning and midafternoon breathers. Church holi- days, Sabbath days, saints’ days, official rest days, public feasts and fes- tivals, and weeklong “ales” to celebrate major milestones like births, marriages, and deaths took up about one-third of the year in England. In Spain and France, Schor estimates that even the hardest workers had nearly half the year off.* What changed, she argues, was the introduction of the clock in the thirteenth century and the rise of manufacturing. Time became money and employers had the power to control both. Work hours climbed steadily until, at the turn of the twentieth century, workdays as long as fifteen hours, six or seven days a week, became the industry standard. ‘The U.S. steel industry enforced a twelve-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule until 1923.” During a 1912 millworkers strike for shorter work hours in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the mostly women workers sang, “Yes, it is bread we fight for. But we fight for roses, too.” “They were call- ing for time for family. Time for joy,” said Ellen Bravo, who heads Family Values @ Work and lobbies for policies to support working families. “Rather than seeing leisure as a frivolous, privileged notion, they saw it as avery human and laudable concept. That we all deserve time for roses.” In the 1950s, work hours did finally begin to fall. Leisure time was on the rise. “So my question,” Ben Hunnicutt told me, “is what the hell happened?” . Some argue that today’s knowledge economy professions—art, technology, engineering, communications, politics, think tanks, aca- demics, and the like—are more like leisure pursuits of the mind that the Greeks envisioned, and that to be fully engaged in life through work is 2 good thing.* But economists like Schor argue that a voracious advertising indus- try creates shiny new wants and that insatiable consumer spending now powers 70 percent of the U.S. economy. The astonishing rise in the cost of médical care, the cost of living, and ever-steeper housing prices for ever-larger homes have outstripped stagnant earnings. As a result, 7. TOO BUSY TO LIVE 53 household debt has reached historic highs,®? and people are drowning in stuff—caught up in what she calls a vicious cycle of “work and spend.” Hunnicutt sees something deeper happening, too. “Work has become central in our lives, answering the religious questions of ‘Who are you?’ and ‘How do you find meaning and purpose in your life?’ ” he told me. “Leisure has been trivialized. Something only silly girls want, to have time to shop and gossip.” Even in academia, scholars confess they're sometimes embarrassed to say they study leisure, as, to be honest, I often was when I told people what I was researching for this book. Karla Henderson, who studies women’s ldisure at North Carolina State University, has been contemplating writ- ing a paper with the title, “Don’t Laugh When I Say Leisure.” “I think my mother thinks what I study is kind of goofy,” she told me. Henderson's own Leisure Studies department has been renamed the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management. “We live in a society that thinks work is far better than leisure. But when you really understand what leisure is, what it means to the quality of your life and the relation- ships you have, leisure is really, really important,” she said. “Leisure is so misunderstood. That’s what makes people feel guilty about it.” Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, Hunnicutt says, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness. “Then we starve the capacity we have to love,” he said. “It creates this ‘unquiet heart, as Saint Augus- tine said, that is ever desperate for fulfillment.” Ann Burnett hunches over a table across from me in a café on the North Dakota State University campus. Spread out before us are stacks and stacks of holiday letters we've brought from her office, arranged in manila folders neatly by year. A handful are marked with a big A across the top. “A as in a grade? For a good Christmas letter?” I ask, waving one at her. “A for authentic,” she says. “Do these letters show people living authentic lives?” “Meaning?” “Do they recognize that life is finite,” she says, “that they're going te die.” “That's pretty heavy for a Christmas letter, isn’t it?” 54 OVERWHELMED “When you realize you're going to die, you value your time more,” Burnett says. “That's depressing,” “That,” Burnett says, “is living honestly and courageously in the moment, You're abie to step back, stop, and smell the roses. Or realize the roses are even there. You recognize the past is gone. The future’s not set. You may still be busy, but you're savoring every second of it.” ‘The German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote that authentic living requires keeping both life and death in mind at all times, Bur- nett explains. He called it “dasein,” literally, human be-ing. Few of us are able to do it. It is, perhaps, only human nature to avoid at all costs thinking of life’s ultimate, unavoidable conclusion. Maybe that’s the attraction of busyness, she says. If we never have a moment to stop and think, we never have to face that terrifying truth. Burnett and her colleagues scrutinized a random sample of close to six hundred Christmas letters to look for signs of people living authen- tic lives. They found only thirty-two. Burnett shows me an example: “Dear Friends, Hither and Yon, In this, my 80th season, 'm learning that life is increasingly a process of LETTING GO of loved ones, family and friends who have been closer than family. Of special places I have loved to be and things it has been a joy to do.” Another describes how a near-fatal accident made the family more aware of “the transience of this lovely life together.” ‘The vast majority of the other letter writers, Burnett says, were living in what Heidegger called “forfeiture,” a lack of self-awareness from being so distracted with the hectic busyness in everyday life. “Life is short,” Burnett and her coauthors wrote in their analysis of the letters. “If we are unable to get off the gerbil’s endless wheel, and appreciate what life is about, we may never be able to recognize fully life's meaning and ultimate happiness.”* I think with regret how, caught up in my own busy forfeiture, over the years my holiday greetings have diminished from thoughtful, handwritten notes to hastily signed photo cards to a Facebook post to, one recent year, nothing at all. Burnett says it’s time to go. Time for me to go to the airport and for her to go for her radiation treatment, Burnett has cancer. We carefully pack up the piles of Christmas letters. As she drives me back to the Radisson, she muses on how busy she herself has always been. ‘There TOO BUSY TO LIVE 55 were years of going “one hundred miles an hour,” teaching, research- ing, serving on statewide boards, getting her daughter to Piano lessons, speech tournaments, band concerts, and throwing her “spectacular’ birthday parties, At dinner the night before, Burnett's daughter, now twenty-one, explained that she, too, has always ‘felt compelled to be busy. “I don’t know what to do with myself with free time,” she admit- ted, And neither, really, did Burnett. Before she got sick, Burnett says she felt exhausted, that she had no time for herself, that everyone wanted a piece of her until she was spent. She wonders, sometimes, if being that busy is part of what made her sick. If she had known more the toll it would take, would she have tried to change? Now, she says, her cancer treatments leave her so wiped out she has no choice but to slow down, “It’s frustrating. And I feel a little guilty,” she says. “There’s so much more I want to do.” a ee Dees