The Lighter Side By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam 

There is a peculiar affliction sweeping through humanity with a virulence that would have alarmed even the most seasoned epidemiologist and I speak not of any virus that a laboratory has yet catalogued. I speak of Chronic Busyness Syndrome, a condition in which the sufferer is perpetually occupied, permanently rushed and constitutionally unavailable, yet somehow manages to post seventeen photographs on social media by ten in the morning.  

I first noticed this syndrome gaining critical mass sometime in the mid-nineties, when busyness graduated from a state of being into a badge of honour. Before that, people were occasionally busy. After that, everyone became busy as a matter of philosophical commitment.  

To admit to having a free afternoon was to confess to some deficiency of ambition, some failure of the modern spirit. The truly successful person, we were given to understand, had no afternoons at all. They had only back-to-back meetings stretching into an infinite horizon, broken occasionally by a working lunch at which more meetings were planned. 

I ran a small experiment recently, purely in the service of science. I contacted eleven people over the course of a week asking if they had time for a conversation. Not a conference. Not a summit. Not a strategic dialogue. A conversation, of the kind our grandparents had on verandahs without requiring a calendar invite. Every single one of the eleven reported being tremendously busy.  

Three said they were slammed. Two said they were swamped. One said she was absolutely buried. The geography of busyness, I noticed, has grown quite dramatic. People are no longer merely occupied. They are submerged under geological formations of obligation. 

What is philosophically interesting about this epidemic is its highly selective nature. The busy person, unable to meet you for coffee, will appear at a party the very same evening looking rested and well-fed. The colleague who has not had a free moment in three weeks somehow manages a four-day trip to Goa. The friend who is simply too overwhelmed to return your call appears with extraordinary regularity in comment sections across the internet, having found the time to weigh in on everything from the national budget to the mating habits of migratory birds. 

I have a theory, which I offer humbly and without peer review. Busyness has become less a description of one’s schedule and more a statement about one’s self-image. To be busy is to be important. To be always in demand is to matter. The person who says he is not particularly busy these days is either a saint or someone whom nobody wants. Since saints are in short supply, the safer social strategy is to remain perpetually overwhelmed. 

The vocabulary of busyness has also undergone considerable inflation. My father was a gentle, man who ran the affairs of our household, tended to the needs of an extended family, served his community in whatever way was asked of him and still found time to go to the vegetable market in the evenings and have a relaxed conversation with me along the way. He would describe a demanding day simply as a full one.  

Today, a person who attended three meetings and sent forty-seven emails will inform you that he is completely done, utterly exhausted, running on empty. We have become extraordinarily fragile in proportion to how busy we claim to be. 

There is, of course, the mobile phone, which deserves its own chapter in any serious study of manufactured busyness. The phone has given us the extraordinary ability to be visibly occupied at any moment, regardless of what is actually being accomplished. A person staring at his screen with a furrowed brow could be reviewing a quarterly report or watching a cat fall off a refrigerator. From the outside, both look equally serious. The phone has democratised the performance of busyness in ways that the industrial revolution could never have imagined. 

What worries me most, however, is what we are so busy avoiding. Swami Vivekananda once said that the greatest sin is to call yourself weak, but I suspect he might have added, had he lived to see us, that the greatest modern delusion is to call yourself busy when what you actually mean is that you are afraid to sit still with yourself for ten minutes. Busyness, at its core, is often just noise we make to drown out the silence that might ask us questions we are not ready to answer. 

The most genuinely productive people I have known in four decades of work, the ones who built hospitals in forests, educated children in places the State had forgotten and shifted the direction of governments, none of them ever told me they were busy. They told me what they were doing. There is a difference and it is not a small one. 

Perhaps the most radical act available to us in these frantic times is the simplest one. To slow down. To answer a call not because the calendar permits it but because a human being made it. To say, without elaborate apology, that we have time. For each other, for a conversation, for a cup of tea, for the unremarkable and irreplaceable business of being present. That, I suspect, is what we are all secretly rushing toward and missing entirely, in our magnificent haste. 

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]