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.

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 irony, of course, is that busyness has almost nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with anxiety management. It’s not a virtue but a tranquilliser, a culturally endorsed way to avoid collapse by rehearsing control. We call it “drive”, but it’s often fear in a tailored suit. The busier we are, the less time we have to notice the... See more

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

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

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

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.

But what no one tells you, or what you refuse to hear until your body finally stages its revolt, is that constant motion creates the illusion of purpose while hollowing you from within. The days blend into each other like identical tiles on a corridor you can no longer see the end of. You mistake fatigue for meaning because exhaustion at least... See more