Ten years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Busy Trap,” about the curse of “busyness” that seemed endemic at the time. The treadmill had been imperceptibly increasing its speed for a while, and people were nervously starting to notice. As happens with a lot of unavoidable evils, they tried to rebrand their frantic busyness as a virtue. “Busy — so busy, crazy busy,” was the answer you got whenever you asked how they were. I came out, in my essay, as anti-busy; I advocated idling, daydreaming, hanging out and goofing off. My conclusion: “Life is too short to be busy.”
I guess a lot of other people had been thinking the same thing. For a few days, that essay was the thing everyone linked to, reposted and emailed. Other writers got paid to write responses to it. Someone even “debunked” it, as though it were a fake Bigfoot film. Entrepreneurial self-help gurus cited it and invited me to conferences. “The Colbert Report” even called, but I was unreachable in the Idaho panhandle […]
Unable to read the whole article🤔.
Same here.
“Takeover”. I doubt that. We have freely given away our power. Like you say, every little decision that we make, how we spend our money determines how much power we give away to the “mega corporations”. When we decide NOT to buy from the small farmer and the craftsmen and buy highly processed and refined products we give away our freedom and our health and the health of our environment.
Great opinion piece. Now whenever I go into an establishment and I’m told “We’re short staffed” what I really hear is “We don’t pay enough”.