There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, about Carl Jung refusing to see a patient because he had “another appointment”. The patient later learned that Jung’s appointment was a long walk by the lake. “But you weren’t meeting anyone”, they protested. “Oh, but I was”, he said. “Myself.”

That story annoys me. It sounds too clean, too quotable. But still,... See more

Here’s the part anyone would hesitate to admit: when you aren’t busy, you feel afraid. Afraid that you’ll vanish, that your worth will evaporate, that you’ll become irrelevant, forgotten. I suspect that’s what drives most of us, not ambition, not greed, but fear of invisibility. Busyness is the camouflage we wear to convince ourselves we matter.

It’... See more

The male burnout gets empathy; the female burnout gets accused of poor boundaries.

But then, perhaps it’s not time we lack but permission? We’ve built a culture where value equals velocity. We confuse momentum with meaning. Even our language betrays us: we “spend” time, we “save” time, we “waste” time... as if time were money and not the fabric of existence itself.

Our obsession with being busy is, at its core, an existential problem disguised as a practical one. We fear emptiness, and so we overfill. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He said that in the 17th century. Imagine what he’d say about Slack notifications.

There’s a peculiar arrogance in busyness, a moral superiority wrapped in martyrdom. It’s the mute pride of the perpetually in-demand, the smug glow of the over-scheduled. “I wish I had time to read”, says the busy person, as if reading were a decadent pastime for trust-fund poets rather than a basic act of mental hygiene. “I just don’t have time... See more

We are, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han observed, no longer the exploited but the self-exploiting, both the obedient worker and the relentless boss in the same exhausted body. The whip has been digitised. There’s no factory bell, no overseer, no visible authority to rebel against; just the noiseless tyranny of our own ambition humming at the back of... See more

We call it “self-care” but it’s mostly consumerism dressed in a cashmere anxiety disorder. We soothe our exhaustion by shopping for its cure: $80 candles that smell like Scandinavian minimalism, twelve-step skincare routines that promise transcendence through exfoliation, “digital detox” retreats that cost as much as rent, and still require Wi-Fi... See more

Psychologists call it “self-objectification”. You turn yourself into a tool, an instrument for efficiency. The self that once wondered, wandered, desired, that messy, imaginative creature, gets fired for lack of measurable output.