You Don’t Need to Feel Guilty For Not Being Busy
A culture of being busy may be wounding our souls
“I am so busy.”
I am not exactly sure when I found myself in a position where this statement felt like a 2-in-1 boast and complaint.
Perhaps I first started feeling this in high school, when having a social life, good grades, and sleep all seemed to be working in a trade-off system, and people competed to have the least hours of sleep. Or maybe it was before then, watching movies and television shows as a child, and montage scenes of a hardworking, tired employee pore of their work well into midnight. Nevertheless, I’ve come to understand that I was shaped by a society that valued being busy.
But is busyness as a value all that great?
In Japanese, the characters for “busy” are made up of the characters for ‘soul’ and ‘loss’. Being busy is quite literally described as a loss of our soul.
心：soul
亡：loss
忙：busy
Growing into an adult, I was able to more closely witness the repercussions of a lack of time on people’s…
