Too Busy to Live

If there is one saying that encapsulates life in the twenty-first century I think it would have to be the one that I hear most often from friends, neighbors and family alike; That is: I'm too busy. I know of no one who does not consider himself to be too busy. The other saying that goes with being too busy usually has something to do with stress. Thus we constantly hear people saying things like, “I was just too busy to get that done.” or “I was so stressed out I just had to get away for a few hours.” or “I'd really like to do that some day when I'm not so busy.” My question is: What exactly does 'busy' or 'stressed out' mean and what is it that people are busy and stressed out about? 

 

When you say 'busy' I think of homework. Some people call it 'busywork', some call it schoolwork, but regardless of the name, the result is the same: namely, you work long and hard at something obviously and honestly unimportant and relatively meaningless. I always balked at the hours and hours of time I spent answering redundant and sometimes demeaning questions at the end of every chapter I read in school. I agonized over the whole concept of keeping my mind occupied with useless 'busywork' while real life was passing me by. When people say they are 'too busy' to do something that they really want to do, I have to wonder how important that 'busy-ness' really is. 

So, let's say for instance that you have a job. In that job, you are required to move pile A to pile B all day long. Eventually, no matter how much money you are making, your mind is going to end up screaming at you that the job itself is pointless and redundant. Of course, then you have the other side of that coin where the bills have to be paid and the food has to be procured for the coming week. So you busily go about your meaningless job, making money so you can survive. On top of that, the job of moving pile A to pile B doesn't pay very well, so you have to work many more hours than you would like so that when you finally get home, you are either too tired, too stressed out or have been 'too busy' to do any real living. 

I think it's a crying shame that this is the way most people live. Are these people too busy surviving to live a productive, happy life wherein they do the things they really love to do? I believe that happiness comes from doing what you love to do and having enough to live on as a result. Ideally, everyone would do what he does best and loves to do, living productively until the day he died and helping others to live better by producing something of value to his neighbors. I believe that we don't have to have mega-factories where thousands of people live out their busy and stress-filled lives trying to get ahead in a never-ending battle for survival. I think that people can work together, doing what they do best, in an atmosphere of cooperation and on a small scale. Anciently, small villages worked this way to a certain extent. However, there always seemed to be someone who wanted to take control of large groups of villages, states and even nations. These actions always lead to disaster, tyranny and oppression. Everything in our society can be improved, I believe, by bringing it home to a small town level and allowing people to govern themselves. 

If I could make any changes in this world, it would be changes toward independent living, small scale cooperation among neighbors and an absence of centralized control of everything. There are thousands of people in this world, if not millions, who have spent their entire lives working for a company doing busy work and never knowing the joy of doing what they love for someone who appreciates and needs that work. They are the people who are too busy to live. It sounds to me like 'too busy to live' is really 'too ready to die'. You would think that in the twenty-first century we could come up with something better than that!