We should busy ourselves with productive work that actually makes a difference.
Enough with the busywork already. We've been "productive" enough — produced way too much, in fact. |
 | | Sebastian Koenig |
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Ten years ago, I wrote an essay for Times Opinion because I was irritated with a friend who kept telling me "yeah, we totally gotta get together just as soon as this bout of work has blown over, I'm just crazy busy right now, let's talk soon" before hanging up on me. In that piece, I complained about the curse — or cult — of "busyness" that then seemed endemic and advocated a saner pace of life, one focused more on human priorities. |
When an editor recently proposed that I write a 10th-anniversary follow-up to that piece, I realized that the culture had, in the intervening decade, changed completely. It had been obvious for some time, but I didn't notice it until I was asked to take another look — the same way that if you only see your nephew once a year, you can see the dramatic growth that's been imperceptible to his parents, or when you rewatch a 20-year-old movie, you realize how much the zeitgeist has shifted since its release. |
One thing that's changed in the last decade is that financial incentives for work have mostly evaporated. Private college costs as much as a Mercedes-Benz, and homeownership for most people is about as feasible as space tourism; meanwhile, the federal minimum wage was last raised the same year Michael Jackson died. The country is run by octogenarians who probably think you can still work your way through school on a part-time job or buy a house with a single income, while kids assume that Homer Simpson supporting a family on a working-class salary is a cartoon fantasy akin to animals who can talk. |
Another contributing factor to the New Slovenliness is the dispiriting sense that many of our jobs are either abetting the destruction of the world or distracting from it. Our government was last accountable to its electorate, as opposed to its donors, sometime before Gen Y came of age; that generation has watched its politicians do nothing in response to one school massacre after another and to the cascading disasters of climate change. Change for the better seems like a thing that used to happen in history books, like the New Deal or the civil rights movement. The prevailing ethos now might be expressed as: Why bother? |
In my essay this week, I argue that people are desperate to do something that matters, that might actually help. I have a friend who, after Donald Trump was elected president, immediately volunteered as a translator for immigrants; when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she investigated the possibility of moving to one of the states where abortion will be criminalized in order to help women who need it. A lot of people are as well intentioned as she is but not many have her initiative or drive (or her freedom and flexibility); they need leadership and organization (and, in a lot of cases, money). To see all the latent will and passion out there freed from cubicles, Uber and Zoom to do something meaningful and real, to finally confront the converging crises we face would be an awesome phenomenon, like witnessing Vesuvius or a supernova. Now more than ever, it's time to get busy. |
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