One of the primary reasons my partner and I chose to not have any children is because neither of us wanted to be busy in that particular kind of way. Like, none of it was appealing and I knew it would be a trap for me.
I’m thankful for our past selves making that decision! It’s made our present selves able to pare down other areas—we’re both public school teachers who have spent the last few years reframing what “busy” REALLY means in education—it means mostly working for free. Not any more. I work (and am extremely busy!) during my contracted hours but that. Is. It!
Similarly, it’s why I’ve mostly lived alone vs partnered. Obviously not all men offload the domestic labour, but very few wanted to contribute equally to a household. It’s given me all kinds of hours to pursue hobbies.
We also made the choice to be childfree. And I did work in the classroom teaching for 10 years, so I understand how you feel there. I love that you shared this perspective!
I’m Gen X and I’m def busier than I was before the Internet and so are my Gen X friends. The thing I remember the most about my childhood is being bored. even my 20s and early 30s I had boredom. If I was standing in line and I forgot to bring a book I just stood there. I couldn’t call somebody or start scrolling.
I had a smaller but deeper friend group because you couldn’t regularly talk to your friends who were far away because then you have to pay for long distance calling. So those calls were limited.
now I’m trying to keep in touch with a much bigger group of people which definitely has its upsides, but does make me busier.
And then of course we didn’t work on weekends before the Internet so basically until my 30s working on the weekends was pretty much unheard of so that gave you more time. There wasn’t as much to watch on TV and obviously we didn’t have streaming, so there was no binge watching shows . I’m trying to re-create my old life right now though single tasking and limited time on apps/internet/binge watching shows. It’s hard!
I'm emerging from a ban on screens/reading/writing due to a head injury, and yes to all of this, especially waiting in public places without anything to distract you. It felt so uncomfortable at first, and then it felt...really good. I noticed things in ways I've forgotten I once did. I'm determined to hold onto some of these new/old ways of being.
As boring as it was, I feel grateful that my brain was able to develop without all the constant input and distractions that millennials and Gen-Z deal with because it’s so bad for your brain and nervous system.
I'm Gen X and while I agree we spent a lot of time alone, I can't remember ever being bored! I read so much and you could always do stuff like walk around the mall if you got desperate. There was usually someone else around somewhere to hang with if you needed to.
Leslie, I also read A TON and watched a lot of TV too, and my mom always said I was good at keeping myself busy, so I wouldn't say I was bored a lot, but I was alone with my own thoughts a lot and got used to that. I lived out in the country and both my parents worked, so I was by myself often. I really envied my friends who lived in town who could walk somewhere and go do something on their own!
I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV and I did read a bit when I got older but not when I was younger and also we lived in the middle of nowhere so there was no walking to the mall. And it wasn’t that I was always bored or never had fun it’s just that compared to today. Every minute of my life wasn’t scheduled and filled with something and now even when it’s not filled, there’s always the iPhone or a movie or show to binge. I also don’t think my nieces would think walking to the mall was fun. I think that’s kind of my point they need much more ‘entertainment’ than that
Kirsten, this is totally it - we were satisfied with less-fun things because it was all we had, lol. The bar was extremely low. I feel like "hanging out" is somewhat of a lost art for my 12yo and her friends - whenever I suggest they get together, she asks, "What would we do?" The question would have been inconceivable to me when I was her age - I just wanted to BE with my friends. It didn't matter what we did.
When I was home recently and we drove past the McDonald’s I pointed to it and told my nieces that’s where we used to hang out in high school and they were like why and I said because we didn’t want to be home and we had nowhere else to go. They don’t get it because they’re home all the time texting with their friends. Even when they have their friends come over, I’ll walk in and they will be on their phones.
Or, I should say, I was allowed to watch limited TV, but it was very limited, and anyway during the day there was nothing on that I would want to watch during the summer, which is one most of the boredom took place. In the winter we could go sledding.
This part about Gen-X friendship! I’ve had multiple close friends move away over the years, and although we all think of each other fondly, we don’t work especially hard to try to pretend we’re the same level/type of friends as before. I especially let things lapse beyond a friendly “hey!” via social media from time to time. I’ve gotten a bit of shade for this approach from others but the way I see it is sociological—if we aren’t within a day’s drive from each other it’s kinda impossible to be intimate friends any longer. Sharing the mundane long silences and whatnot that we Gen-X folk understand so well. Maybe I’m right? Wrong? Both?
I think it depends. My best friend from high school lives 1,000 miles away from me, and even though we’re not in constant contact and we see each other maybe once a year, when we do talk, we pick up right where we left off the last time we got together. There’s an intimacy in being with people who have known you for a long time. It’s different than what I have with my local friends, but it’s still incredibly valuable.
My best friend lives far from me and has 3 kids (one still quite small) and a not-very-nice husband who doesn't like her to socialize with any of her old friends. (Yes, I know, quite concerning). So, we don't talk frequently but when we do, it's like we're young and fancy-free again and we're back in that same relationship. So, it's different, but we joke about one day being the Golden Girls with another friend.
I am still really close to friends who have moved away, but I also have become aware how that makes me not look for friends locally because I can just pick up the phone and call someone and I agree with you it’s not the same to be doing things in person. I think you are right from a sociological standpoint. We are supposed to be in the physical community. But for me, that doesn’t mean not staying in regular touch with the people who are in other places tho I keep that circle small.
It took me so many years of straining to keep these faraway relationships before coming to the same conclusion. I wish I was quicker to get it. There is so much local context to my life that I’d like to share and discuss and process and experience with another person, and these distant relationships can’t substitute that.
I love your point of how things have changed with the constant input we now have...connections on social media with basically everyone we’ve ever met, all the TV, the ability to always be connected to work even on weekends. Monitoring my input more has been something I’ve really focused on recently. I deleted FB back in 2021 and haven’t looked back. Basically, I now have substack and IG only. But it can still be a struggle for sure. And I also watch plenty of tv and try to balance it out with plenty of reading too (although this balance isn’t always balanced🤣). But yeah, there’s a lot out there now and it can be overwhelming.
Yes, I think we deal with dual problems: one is late stage capitalism where we have to be hustling and working all the time just to support ourselves, but then the second thing is we make things harder on ourselves because we fill our time with a bunch of meaningless stuff and then wonder why we don’t have any time. My husband and I rarely watch a show unless there’s one that we’ve really gotten into and then we will watch it but we don’t just turn on Netflix or Amazon prime and just pick something to mindless watch/numb out to. I’m like you I only do Substack and I G but at this point I don’t even really do IG. I just post my Substack on it. I find that it’s not just a waste of time, but that it’s actually draining.
Absolutely. Yknow I spent all of the past couple days reading the “big lifestyle change” thread with interest, but thinking I didn’t have anything to contribute. But this is it: social media. I made a huge shift for someone chronically online and in 2023 spent less time on social media than I had for over a decade. I didn’t outright delete my accounts but did delete them from my phone (and/or intentionally make my login info hard to retrieve).
There are some benefits I’ve genuinely lost from being on social; and I didn’t instantly gain back all the time and headspace I hoped. It’s been more like a first step. But what you describe is what I was hoping to change - the endless scroll that fills all the empty minutes, less about whether social media is good or bad, just the reflexive behavior that has changed the way I spend time with myself and the world.
RR: Your comments help me frame something I find critical: I don't care whether I am busy; I care whether I feel "X' (insert unpleasant synonym here). That state I actively avoid — receiving and sending emails but not texts, and then only on my laptop, asking myself to notice whether I feel like answering the door/the phone and responding accordingly, staying in touch with what calls to me: sometimes it's doing tasks and other times it's reading a novel in front of a fire.
Same! I'm not going to say I never waste time online but I don't waste nearly as much on social media. It's lost its appeal for me. I do miss friends I made online but the algorithm only shows me ads now, anyway.
Appreciate you framing your changed social media behavior as a first step rather than a silver bullet (although I wish it were as simple as deleting a few apps).
I've similarly found changing notification settings, logging out of the apps, looking at Insta on my ipad/laptop vs an iPhone, and going weeks without being on any social media has generally kept me in a better headspace. And reading Momfluenced (thx for the re AHP), The Influencer Industry, and Swipe Up for More has stoked my inner rebel; the thought of being a shill for big tech every time I log onto social has been a great deterrent.
My work (as a professor in the humanities) is the primary driver of a busyness I can’t always sustain: it ebbs and flows with papers coming in, extra admin projects, writing deadlines, etc., but there has been a general shift even in the past decade to more work demands on my time, demands that cannot be accomplished in 40 hours a week during the teaching term.
We strive for simplicity as a family: avoiding over scheduling, trying to prioritize relationship over hustle, etc. my kids each do one activity at a time because that’s what we can manageably juggle. We rely on steady rhythms. A lot of this feels fairly countercultural, but my mantra is BUSYNESS IS NOT A FLEX.
However, some of the stress I feel sometimes isn’t fair to blame on work: my desires and my time and capacity don’t always match up because I have an enormous appetite for life. I want to read every good book, go deep with lots of friends, walk and garden and play with my kids, make quilts and have an indigo vat to dye linen and hand-bind books and write books and gaze into my partner’s chocolate eyes and cook delicious food and play piano for fun and volunteer and be present to my neighbors and and and…
And all of this in a body limited by chronic illness.
I am working to release unhelpful SHOULDs but also to embrace that I (1) need margin and rest to be well and (2) am graced with a hearty appetite for relationship and creativity, which will always outpace my time. Instead of a frustration, this can be another mode of abundance: there is SO MUCH MORE than I can do. So much goodness! Is this a tragedy or is it an immense gift?
"I want to read every good book, go deep with lots of friends, walk and garden and play with my kids, make quilts and have an indigo vat to dye linen and hand-bind books and write books and gaze into my partner’s chocolate eyes and cook delicious food and play piano for fun and volunteer and be present to my neighbors and and and"
YES YES SO MUCH THIS! I yearn for the abundant busyness that you (and Anne Helen) describe and feel vexed when my capacity doesn't permit it.
The part Emily quoted resonates with me, too. Chronic pain is my limiter, ADHD is my possibility engine. It sucks sometimes, but the reframe of it as abundance of possibility was very helpful, Cynthia.
Overall the world of academia loads more busy work on its employees than ever before. More reports, more data to collect, more after hours efforts expected. Meetings and publications quotas for the ever-lengthy CV and constantly justifying your existence in your annual review. Also everyone is supposed to post loads of social media posts of their endeavors, nothing less than smiling faces permissible. And everything now has to be an “event”—-why is this? I have no doubt you do wonderful work!! :-) Just complaining on the soul-sucking grind academia has become. Even if you work with great people, it’s hard to escape.
Solidarity! It has shifted a lot even since I started my tt job in 2012. I feel like I could work full time just keeping up on email and attending to specific students' needs, not to mention everything else. SO MANY MEETINGS!
Ooh I love this idea of the appetite itself being a source of abundance. I’ve often felt unsure of myself for having lots of ideas and struggling to always execute them to completion, but in this perspective, it’s a gift to have that abundance of ideas and desires and interests, and it’s ok that I can’t do all the things all the time, because I will never run out of beautiful ways to fill my life.
yes yes yes. also an academic and one of the things I've been struggling with so much this past year is that it is, like ahp said at the end of her piece, a business that makes me feel out of control. but many of the things I would like to step back from are required by my job, and those that give me fulfillment, the ones that remind me I'm alive and connected to others---even the bits that appear connected to my job--are the ones that upper admin would tell me to drop. I'm mid-career and I don't know how to sustain it and it doesn't feel like I can push back. I dunno; I've just been noticing this and sort of looking for a solution lately but I don't know if there is one, other than as you say to release the shoulds and to reframe my thinking a bit. as term starts tomorrow, I'll be honest, I'm struggling with this
I hear this all the way down. So much of what I have to say no to is what I want to say yes to, and what I have to do, related to work, is what I'd rather not. It is a structural problem that no number of hacks will solve. I'm trying to flourish inside it and don't always how if it's possible in every season.
The other night, I sat on my couch and listening to music for 2 hours. Nothing else. Not crocheting, not reading, not cleaning or cooking, and wow it was glorious. Many times during that session I felt my fingers itching for my phone but I did my best to put it farther away from me and that helped with the sense of needing to be busy. All the "busy" things (work, life admin) are on my phone. Spending time doing truly nothing was such a nice reset.
This is the main memory that inspired me to mostly quit social! Before I got a smartphone (I was a late adopter) I remember sitting in my apartment in my early 20s just listening to music and being carried away. That is how I spent my time. Or writing. Phones, work email, etc make it easy to stop having room for that kind of experience.
This sounds so nice! I have the fondest memory of an afternoon I spent with my partner listening to one of those podcasts where they do a super deep dive into a song or album. We just listened, soaked it in, and occasionally spoke a few words. It felt so enriching.
So many artists and playlists I had saved that people had suggested and I just never got around to! Mainly the Breezy Three podcast by Kendra Adachi aka the Lazy Genius and the Cozy Jazz playlist on Spotify.
I want to quibble—strongly—with the idea that we’re doing about the same amount of work as we were in the 1960s. Maybe we are in hours, but productivity has skyrocketed over the last five or so decades, while wages have stagnated.
We’re doing more work in our working hours. A lot more. And for less pay and with more precarity. So, in a very real way, we are doing a LOT more work these days (to say nothing of the many people doing side hustles and second/third jobs).
I also think we need to interrogate the cult of busyness with a class lens.
I don’t think anyone working three jobs, parenting, and barely keeping their head above water is doing it out of compulsion for status. They’re doing it simply to survive. And they aren’t vaunted for it (whether explicitly or tacitly). If anything, they’re excoriated for not “making better choices,” for not being able to parent like a middle class helicopter, for not being able to be almond moms.
Look at the Twitter discourse around parents dropping their kids at the library all day. Are some of them going off to the spa or shopping? Maybe, I guess. But I’d wager the majority of them have no other option because we don’t prioritize affordable childcare and they probably have to work so they don’t get evicted.
One is that I used to have a TONNE of hobbies—sewed my own clothes and gifts, knitting, amorphous crafts, cooking from scratch, etc etc.
And then one day I realized that all of my hobbies felt like WORK and that’s because…they were. They were all things that used to be considered actual labour, and primarily women’s labour. But as more and more women joined the workforce, these forms of labour became “leisure” and I stopped doing them all. I’m only now, 7 or 8 years later coming back to things like embroidery.
The other thought I have is that I used to be VERY busy. Work, volunteering, choir, 1-2 friend hangouts a week, family, going to concerts, etc. I was chronically ill but not disabled. I could do all those things and the activities of daily life (cooking, cleaning, etc).
Now I’m disabled and I struggle to both work and do the activities of daily life and, at this point, have to choose between the two. And work wins, because disability in this country is not enough to live on. But working means I’m probably not cooking and I’m barely cleaning. Because work takes all my spoons and then some and the rest of the time is involuntary rest and/or suffering. And when I’m up to it, I’m putting in a second shift in trying to find ways to find relief, because the health system is woefully inadequate.
So I’m busy. Very busy. But not very productive. And having very little fun. And putting almost all the burden of daily life on my partner.
All that to say, I think we forget how busyness as a positive—or even as a compulsion you have mixed feelings about—is a gendered, classed, and abled phenomenon.
Thank you for bringing up class! I struggle with how to frame my own busyness because so much of what occupies my and my partner's time and energy is focused on earning or saving money. That can become its own compulsion, I suppose, and I'm sure we could learn to be satisfied with less than what we have now. But the financial anxiety is very real, too.
"I don't want to hold up my busyness as a shield." I learned to be Busy in college, an emotionally overwhelming time having grown up in an emotionally unavailable home. If I was Busy, I wouldn't have to be vulnerable or learn how to have hard conversations. If I was Busy, I was valuable because I was Doing Things. I threw myself into a teaching career that exhausted my extroverted introvert self. I said yes to insane poorly paid nonprofit jobs. I worked on political campaigns. I worked at a Very Impressive Foundation. I was an independent consultant and constantly in the air and on the road. Until my burnout caught up with me and then the pandemic hit. Even in the pandemic I found a way to be Extremely Busy, organizing food relief & helping people navigate unemployment insurance. But that moment ended. I moved out of NYC (where "Busy" is a virtue) and chose to move to a place where the air is fresh, beaches are close, and nothing much happens. (Including my career, which has fully stalled out.) I am functionally retired in my late 40s (not by choice or desire). I have no kids, no partner. The man I love is on the other side of the country. My aging parents live four hours away. The kiddos I would help with are in Brooklyn. I'm estranged from my aging aunts who live nearby. I think there is a level of intentional busyness that puts wind in your sails. Without it, my life has entered a period of doldrums. I need to find a steady breeze. I'm starting to think that will require relocation.
I feel for you and thank you for sharing. It is important to understand that being retired is not paradise for everyone.
Some retired people may lead a leisurely life of choices and comfort and financial security.
But others are poor, physically impaired, lacking of transportation or emotional support, or on the flip side, taking care of young children because their own children are unable to or cannot afford daycare or taking care of an ailing spouse.
I would like us all to keep our eyes wide open to what life might look like behind other doors.
I'm 48 and currently making $25.51 as an admin. The pandemic hit just as I was making the leap to the VP / senior leadership level after years as a director-ish person. I have a solid 20+ years of working life ahead of me.
Ouch, that sounds so hard. I survive on a regular, part-time gig as a freelancer. That is only possible because I live in Sweden and not in California as I used to. Sending you support as you figure out if it is possible to get all the things you need. I want that for you so much!
These are wonderful spot-on insights. I applaud you for making time for yourself—for less essential things that cultivate happiness and health—especially running, because it’s during those unplugged times when we can do our best thinking and engage the imagination. Chair lift rides while skiing are great for this too; I used to feel impatient on the chair lift, having to sit still, my mittened hand unable to work my phone, until I gave into the forced stillness and either became highly observant of the present surroundings if riding the lift solo, or engaged in conversation with a stranger if sharing the chair. My point is, this is quality time with ourselves during the day—moments that seem to expand the day and make it “a good day.” I am reveling in this phase of life (my mid 50s) when I’m less of a caregiver because my kids are grown and parents have passed, so suddenly I can fill my days with more projects and jobs I want to do. Instead of “busy,” I’d call it “active” or “engaged.” For everyone reading this who feels stretched thin and stressed, I hope you have faith that life has many chapters, and a time will come when days feel less overwhelming and rushed. And it’s OK to say “no thank you” to opportunities and requests to volunteer; take that time for yourself instead.
I love the chair lift example. I’ve tried to reframed my impatience as appreciation for whatever’s happening and forcing that perspective shift is really liberating and a lot less stressful!
I am late to the party, but I recently read Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks after too many months of being the wrong kind of busy. It helped me better recognize some of the sources of my busyness -- a sense that I could accomplish everything if only I was more productive, an attempt not to acknowledge the painful reality that I won't be able to do all the things I'd like to do with my one wild and precious life.
It's helped me reflect on the seemingly important things I should consciously reject in favor of actually important things -- in my case, the classic "forgoing certain career goals in favor of spending more time with family and friends". It's a bit cliché, but how many of us actually live our lives in accordance with these priorities even after coming to recognize them?
I'm angling more towards the right kind of busy -- navigating an abundance of beautiful possibilities! But doing my best to consciously choose the few things that feel most meaningful among them, and acknowledge I won't be getting to the others (for now, and possibly forever).
Also, it is much easier to make such choices if you have the means to. I've cut my work schedule down to 4 days/week. I couldn't have afforded this any earlier, and even now the change is felt, but well worth it regardless.
Yes! I have framed my work as "a trade-off between time and money" for the past fifty years. I get it right, I get it wrong, I make corrections. For me finding the sweet-spot produces job satisfaction and satisfaction is worth as much tinkering it takes.
I love this book so much. Right now I’m struggling to implement the lessons from it - my brain now knows I can’t do all the things that are important to me, but my patterns and emotional self won’t let go of the fantasy, and grieve loss of spending energy on some priorities to focus on and actually enjoy others. There is so much good stuff in life to engage with! Lovely to read about how you’ve shifted to focus on family and friends, and have a 4 day workweek - Thank you!
This post touches on something I think about a lot, which is how big or small one's world is. COVID really made my family's world extremely tiny, and small disruptions to our routine or any additional demands on our time felt UNBEARABLE. It made me really sad and I realized that I wanted to expand our world and give us a slightly bigger cup that could hold a few more things. I know this isn't the same thing as busy/not busy, but I think sometimes my experience of "busy" is also just about how disrupted I feel by the activity itself, versus feeling at ease with it.
I think the same thing has happened to me (maybe less so to my household/family members) and I didn’t really recognize it in this way till reading your comment. Thank you for articulating it.
I hear you! I’ve been thinking about this discussion and how it also relates to AHP’s other discussion earlier this week about big life shifts. To me, big life shifts often seem to really amp up busy-ness for at best a lateral positional life change. Which is maybe why I avoid them so often?
I’m a school principal and have been so busy with work for years and years. I found it fulfilling and like it was enough until about a year ago....something clicked, and I realized I wanted other kinds of busy. I rested a lot on the weekends but didn’t feel fulfilled. I still find my work meaningful and I still find it very difficult to not work endless hours.
As an experiment/because I couldn’t think of another way, I joined an exercise class gym and started booking classes within 2 hours of school ending (or less!!) to give myself a reason to leave campus at a decent time and make myself empowered to say no, internally or out loud, to demands of my time and energy. I love it. It’s working. Hoping to develop mindsets through this first move towards life outside of work and towards further abundance.
Thank you SO much for sharing. I am no an educator but am a VP in the financial services world and am feeling the same. Just not fulfilled anymore. The business of my job used to energize me but now it just depletes me. It is also so easy for it to blend into evenings and weekends. I will try to give this a try!
I chose a gym that has a cancellation fee if you cancel within 8 hours! That has helped too! It’s a weird mind game but has been so helpful. Hope it helps fight the blending for you too!
Came here to say this! When I’m feeling a particular jittery busy, I ask myself, “what am I trying to avoid feeling right now?” Or I end up wondering why I’m crying laying in savasana at the end of a yoga class.
Avoidance!!! I've never been busier than when my marriage was falling apart. I was working 12-14 hours a day and most weekends and had so many social engagements and so many family obligations and had to do so many home improvement projects and I was just a frantic-frenzied-busy mess. And then I left the marriage and moved to a tiny cabin on a creek and somehow suddenly had 2 hrs a day to sit quietly on the dock and sip tea and watch birds.
For me it’s the fear of laziness that drives a lot of busyness I think. Lazy is not a thing! Lazy is a puritanical concept invented to make you feel guilty for resting! Understanding laziness isn’t real has really helped me.
I am feeling so burnt out with two very young children who are sick all the time, a demanding full-time job, and a partner who is not as supportive as I’d like. I would welcome advice on how to care for myself when it feels like I am drowning and it feels like nothing I’m doing is optional. Like, I can’t just not take care of my sick kids. I can’t quit my job and I also don’t want to. Please share your wisdom!
Not sure it counts as wisdom: This year I started to take all the things I do in my head and my time to keep our lives running and document them. My goal was to make them visible, legible and invite everyone else into being part of them. I haven't been doing it long enough to know if it works but it's very fun to walk up to my six year old and say "what night are you cooking dinner" and then sign him up on the calendar. The approach of "here's what you're doing" combined with visible progress as we work together to make our house easier to use has been good. All of this came out of a long bout of stress, panic, and then acceptance that I wasn't going to work or think my way out of anything. Instead of dreaming of a beautiful home or a cool space when I thought about where I wanted to live I would always flash back to really good preschool classrooms I'd been in. So that's what we're doing now. We are making our house into a preschool so that we can all learn how to be capable humans at the pace that works for us.
I love this because it's like a solution for the thing I see happening to parents a bit older than me who are entering the empty nest phase but somehow still spending an incredible amount of time on "child"care. Like, the child is in college but the parents are still spending a lot of time helping to manage classroom assignments, proofreading essays, doing their laundry on weekends, sending them back to school with a week's worth of groceries. The now-adult children haven't taken over any self-management.
I remember so clearly being where you are.... For me, I dropped things that were not absolutely "mandatory".... I dropped a lot of taking care of my in law side.... planning dinners, buying for birthdays/holidays, keeping them up to date with what was going on with the kids etc. It liberated a lot of time and head space for me. Look at all that you do, plan, buy etc. and drop what is not absolutely essential at this time.
I don’t have any.new ideas, it’s a hard time. Without family or friend help, it can be just more than you can do. I’m wondering why unsupportive partner is able to walk away from responsibilities. I lived that way for years and I wish I been less accepting. Partners who opt out of the hard parts aren’t partners.
I feel similarly, even with a partner who is pretty supportive. Despite having what I think is a more egalitarian marriage than most, I'd say the household and childcare responsibilities still fall 60-70% on me. a 60-40 split might sound close to equitable, but in actuality that's me doing 50% more work than my (male) partner. As a result, I've shifted into private practice (I'm a clinical psychologist) to give me more flexibility and, in theory, time. That's not really shaking out so far, as starting a business is a ton of work & parenting 2 kids under 5 is a ton of work, even if you don't also work outside the home. I don't really have wisdom except that it feels hard because it is hard. I don't know how to feel less busy. Our kids are not at the age of doing a lot of activities. We have occasional birthday parties and play dates, but that's about it. Our weeks just feel insane. The mornings are crazy, getting 2 small children ready and out the door for day care. The days are busy with work and household responsibilities. The evenings and weekends are busy taking care of small children with tiny needs. We don't have much of a village, and that's really the problem. I wish I had more wisdom, but all I have to offer is solidarity and the assurance that nothing is wrong with you.
Oh and let me add, we are comfortably middle class but not at the point I could stop working. Mortgage + 2 day care tuitions + student loans is a lot of financial burden. We have one old car that is paid off. We don't live in a very expensive area. I know it won't always be this way and that we'll at least regain the day care tuition in a few years when our kids age into public school. But it's not like we are over here grinding so we can buy fancy things or go on fancy vacations. We are just trying to pay our bills, save for emergencies and caregiving burdens (including my elderly mom, who is dependent on her adult children), and save for our children's future so they aren't saddled with student loan debt (hopefully).
I'm in a similar boat as you. It's hard because my partner *thinks* we split household work and childcare 50-50. And I know he does SO MUCH more than was modeled for him by his dad. He usually does what I ask him to do but I still feel so resentful that I have to ask him to do things, and that I am the default parent.
No advice but I do find hope in the work of Katherine Goldstein at the double shift - https://www.thedoubleshift.com/ check out the podcast archive and the newsletter! And also, the sicknesses are OUT OF CONTROL. It did not use to be like this!
I recommend following the amazing writer Zane Villines on FB and right here on Substack: https://zawn.substack.com/
Her newsletter, Liberating Motherhood, has wonderful tips and ways of thinking about how to navigate/balance being a mom + being with a partner who can do more but won’t.
I don't have great wisdom. I just want to affirm (from my own experiences at an earlier stage of my life) that where you are is hard and there's no simple fix. The only way I got through those drowning times is treading water. I'd second what Laura said. I ended up leaving my marriage and changing my job, and it was still hard--but a better hard. I changed/shifted ambitions, also hard (but also better hard). If it's at all helpful, I'm glad now that I prioritized my kids and the work that helped me take care of them and myself. I'm in an easier place now.
If your partner isn’t helping, you may need to be direct about what you need. But, I can also understand not wanting to have a confrontation, since you are already under enough stress. Can you dial in other people to help out - parents, siblings, good friends?
Giving you a virtual hug because been there. As my therapist recently told me before my kids' 20-day winter break, lower your expectations. It's impossible for everything to be firing on all cylinders when the kids are sick and you're working; yet society has conditioned us to believe that it has to. Also, give yourself permission to be "selfish" and do something for yourself. Every day. Lastky, Eve Rodsky's book Fair Play also changed my life and marriage. As a trained mediator, she offers terrific ways to initiate conversations about equitable distribution of household work. Things aren't perfect, but our household is getting closer to the equilibrium we had pre-kids.
Thank you all for your kind and supportive words! It is so helpful to hear from others who remember this phase and who can also affirm that it does get easier as the kids get older - and also that it’s just a HARD time (because of course sometimes I feel like I must be doing something wrong or missing something because it shouldn’t feel so hard). Thanks for helping me feel more hopeful.
Karla, I so feel this. I remember this phase of life so well. Remembering "this too shall pass" really helped me see the bigger perspective. Not in that awful "you must treasure these moments with your young children no matter what" way. Just a "this is really really hard and also it will change again, because all things change" sort of way.
I'm sorry you're in this tough stage, and I'm also reassuring you from the other side that it WILL get better, day by day. Kids get older, immunity builds, and you start to be less exhausted. One day, you'll have the strength to drive the change on your own, at least a little. And slowly but surely, you'll get to a new and better place.
I saw something recently about burnout being borrowing tomorrow’s energy today and it stuck with me. I got Covid for the first time right at the holidays and the energy recovery has been A LOT! I cannot push past or through it like I normally have during periods of burnout. It is forcing me to have to stop and have to rest. Having that forced time has been so eye opening in how much I think I’m recovered vs. actually not being there at all. For my future physical and mental health, I’m forcing in breaks and slow downs regardless of the guilt I feel because for the first time in years I’m allow myself to see the benefits of rest.
Thank you for this post! I really started rethinking my ideas about being busy and all of the seemingly “urgent” things that aren’t really urgent after losing a parent a few years ago. There is nothing like a major wake-up call to knock you out of the normal *grind*. Ever since, my relationship with time has massively changed (although, it has been a slow process to unlearn). Life is too short to spend our time on things just because society expects it or external influences encourage it. Our values & priorities are all different and being in touch with ours and creating time for them is a wonderful kind of busy.
Nowadays, I am busy reading, writing, completing jigsaw puzzles, making time for friends & family, attending broadway shows, walking, lifting, listening to music, hanging with my pets, etc. This kind of busy is full of joy and I love it.
I can really relate to this. Coming out the other side of ahead injury, which made me realize all the progress I hadn't made in recovering from...well, all kinds of things, but especially about how I spend my time. I'm encouraged to see that you've held onto changes you've made, as I've seen myself already slip back into old patterns.
I’m glad to hear you’re on the other side of your injury. I’m sure that wasn’t easy. I do sometimes have old patterns creep in and at one point I was very much an all or nothing thinker like, well if I can’t stick to this then it’s just not for me. Now I take more of a “both-and” approach. Like I can both slip into old patterns sometimes and still celebrate the changes I’ve made overall. It’s so hard to unravel old habits & behaviors. Be patient with yourself☺️
Reading this has made me realize that I am the wrong kind of busy. I bought a small business last year (an independent bookstore). I love it. And I hate it. It consumes all of my energy right now. I’m working on that in several different ways, although perhaps with less hope and vigor than is required to make real change. The worst of that though is that I’ve made very little time for friends and other activities in the past year. The time is often there but the mental and emotional energy is not. Add to this that I am a recent empty nester who actually misses my life being organized around feeding my family, tennis matches, quiz bowl, all the things. I’m completely lost in terms of how to spend my time right now. As others have mentioned, these are phases. I definitely can look back and see the phases...first job with no other responsibilities, early marriage with a job but no other responsibilities, early parenting while working, parenting without working, parenting while caretaking and working part time, etc. I did not enjoy the hands on and very physical parts of having small children nearly as much as the phases when they bathed themselves and could engage in interesting conversations. But those weren’t “bad” years. I found ways to make those years work for me and I need to do the same for these. I’ve realized that I often use the excuse of being busy to avoid things that would be good for me. I am an extreme introvert, meaning I need a lot of alone time to feel like myself. Owning a business has meant giving up the flexibility to be alone on any given day and now I protect anytime that I’m not at the store like it’s my life. I use the “busyness” of the store and my role there as an excuse from engaging outside of it. But that has isolated me from relationships that are important to me. I’m not good at self reflection and it’s one of the reasons I love this community. The questions discussed here are often ones that I would never ask myself. I find so much wisdom, encouragement, and often the challenge I need to make a change in my life for the better.
Have you thought about checking your network to see if there are any other new freelancers or self employed folks who’d like to handle a day a week or some other combo of shifts covering your bookstore? I’m a new self employed person and miss the stability of a paycheck but also can’t really justify leaving my new business to take an Actual Part Time Job That Demands Too Much. If I had someone like you who paid me to cover a few shifts a month at their bookstore, this is like, literally something I’ve dreamed about.
Close an extra day a week and use that as your personal day. If you can’t afford to give up the revenue, turn the store over to a trusted employee and check out for the day. Tell your staff you have meetings. The meetings can be for coffee or lunch or a movie, you don’t have to be specific.
One of the primary reasons my partner and I chose to not have any children is because neither of us wanted to be busy in that particular kind of way. Like, none of it was appealing and I knew it would be a trap for me.
I’m thankful for our past selves making that decision! It’s made our present selves able to pare down other areas—we’re both public school teachers who have spent the last few years reframing what “busy” REALLY means in education—it means mostly working for free. Not any more. I work (and am extremely busy!) during my contracted hours but that. Is. It!
Similarly, it’s why I’ve mostly lived alone vs partnered. Obviously not all men offload the domestic labour, but very few wanted to contribute equally to a household. It’s given me all kinds of hours to pursue hobbies.
We also made the choice to be childfree. And I did work in the classroom teaching for 10 years, so I understand how you feel there. I love that you shared this perspective!
I’m Gen X and I’m def busier than I was before the Internet and so are my Gen X friends. The thing I remember the most about my childhood is being bored. even my 20s and early 30s I had boredom. If I was standing in line and I forgot to bring a book I just stood there. I couldn’t call somebody or start scrolling.
I had a smaller but deeper friend group because you couldn’t regularly talk to your friends who were far away because then you have to pay for long distance calling. So those calls were limited.
now I’m trying to keep in touch with a much bigger group of people which definitely has its upsides, but does make me busier.
And then of course we didn’t work on weekends before the Internet so basically until my 30s working on the weekends was pretty much unheard of so that gave you more time. There wasn’t as much to watch on TV and obviously we didn’t have streaming, so there was no binge watching shows . I’m trying to re-create my old life right now though single tasking and limited time on apps/internet/binge watching shows. It’s hard!
I'm emerging from a ban on screens/reading/writing due to a head injury, and yes to all of this, especially waiting in public places without anything to distract you. It felt so uncomfortable at first, and then it felt...really good. I noticed things in ways I've forgotten I once did. I'm determined to hold onto some of these new/old ways of being.
Gen X was absolutely the bored generation! So much time ALONE, just existing. It definitely set my baseline in a lot of ways
As boring as it was, I feel grateful that my brain was able to develop without all the constant input and distractions that millennials and Gen-Z deal with because it’s so bad for your brain and nervous system.
I'm Gen X and while I agree we spent a lot of time alone, I can't remember ever being bored! I read so much and you could always do stuff like walk around the mall if you got desperate. There was usually someone else around somewhere to hang with if you needed to.
Leslie, I also read A TON and watched a lot of TV too, and my mom always said I was good at keeping myself busy, so I wouldn't say I was bored a lot, but I was alone with my own thoughts a lot and got used to that. I lived out in the country and both my parents worked, so I was by myself often. I really envied my friends who lived in town who could walk somewhere and go do something on their own!
I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV and I did read a bit when I got older but not when I was younger and also we lived in the middle of nowhere so there was no walking to the mall. And it wasn’t that I was always bored or never had fun it’s just that compared to today. Every minute of my life wasn’t scheduled and filled with something and now even when it’s not filled, there’s always the iPhone or a movie or show to binge. I also don’t think my nieces would think walking to the mall was fun. I think that’s kind of my point they need much more ‘entertainment’ than that
Kirsten, this is totally it - we were satisfied with less-fun things because it was all we had, lol. The bar was extremely low. I feel like "hanging out" is somewhat of a lost art for my 12yo and her friends - whenever I suggest they get together, she asks, "What would we do?" The question would have been inconceivable to me when I was her age - I just wanted to BE with my friends. It didn't matter what we did.
When I was home recently and we drove past the McDonald’s I pointed to it and told my nieces that’s where we used to hang out in high school and they were like why and I said because we didn’t want to be home and we had nowhere else to go. They don’t get it because they’re home all the time texting with their friends. Even when they have their friends come over, I’ll walk in and they will be on their phones.
That makes total sense. I could walk or ride my bike to friends' houses or the mall.
Or, I should say, I was allowed to watch limited TV, but it was very limited, and anyway during the day there was nothing on that I would want to watch during the summer, which is one most of the boredom took place. In the winter we could go sledding.
This part about Gen-X friendship! I’ve had multiple close friends move away over the years, and although we all think of each other fondly, we don’t work especially hard to try to pretend we’re the same level/type of friends as before. I especially let things lapse beyond a friendly “hey!” via social media from time to time. I’ve gotten a bit of shade for this approach from others but the way I see it is sociological—if we aren’t within a day’s drive from each other it’s kinda impossible to be intimate friends any longer. Sharing the mundane long silences and whatnot that we Gen-X folk understand so well. Maybe I’m right? Wrong? Both?
I think it depends. My best friend from high school lives 1,000 miles away from me, and even though we’re not in constant contact and we see each other maybe once a year, when we do talk, we pick up right where we left off the last time we got together. There’s an intimacy in being with people who have known you for a long time. It’s different than what I have with my local friends, but it’s still incredibly valuable.
My best friend lives far from me and has 3 kids (one still quite small) and a not-very-nice husband who doesn't like her to socialize with any of her old friends. (Yes, I know, quite concerning). So, we don't talk frequently but when we do, it's like we're young and fancy-free again and we're back in that same relationship. So, it's different, but we joke about one day being the Golden Girls with another friend.
I am still really close to friends who have moved away, but I also have become aware how that makes me not look for friends locally because I can just pick up the phone and call someone and I agree with you it’s not the same to be doing things in person. I think you are right from a sociological standpoint. We are supposed to be in the physical community. But for me, that doesn’t mean not staying in regular touch with the people who are in other places tho I keep that circle small.
It took me so many years of straining to keep these faraway relationships before coming to the same conclusion. I wish I was quicker to get it. There is so much local context to my life that I’d like to share and discuss and process and experience with another person, and these distant relationships can’t substitute that.
I love your point of how things have changed with the constant input we now have...connections on social media with basically everyone we’ve ever met, all the TV, the ability to always be connected to work even on weekends. Monitoring my input more has been something I’ve really focused on recently. I deleted FB back in 2021 and haven’t looked back. Basically, I now have substack and IG only. But it can still be a struggle for sure. And I also watch plenty of tv and try to balance it out with plenty of reading too (although this balance isn’t always balanced🤣). But yeah, there’s a lot out there now and it can be overwhelming.
Yes, I think we deal with dual problems: one is late stage capitalism where we have to be hustling and working all the time just to support ourselves, but then the second thing is we make things harder on ourselves because we fill our time with a bunch of meaningless stuff and then wonder why we don’t have any time. My husband and I rarely watch a show unless there’s one that we’ve really gotten into and then we will watch it but we don’t just turn on Netflix or Amazon prime and just pick something to mindless watch/numb out to. I’m like you I only do Substack and I G but at this point I don’t even really do IG. I just post my Substack on it. I find that it’s not just a waste of time, but that it’s actually draining.
Absolutely. Yknow I spent all of the past couple days reading the “big lifestyle change” thread with interest, but thinking I didn’t have anything to contribute. But this is it: social media. I made a huge shift for someone chronically online and in 2023 spent less time on social media than I had for over a decade. I didn’t outright delete my accounts but did delete them from my phone (and/or intentionally make my login info hard to retrieve).
There are some benefits I’ve genuinely lost from being on social; and I didn’t instantly gain back all the time and headspace I hoped. It’s been more like a first step. But what you describe is what I was hoping to change - the endless scroll that fills all the empty minutes, less about whether social media is good or bad, just the reflexive behavior that has changed the way I spend time with myself and the world.
RR: Your comments help me frame something I find critical: I don't care whether I am busy; I care whether I feel "X' (insert unpleasant synonym here). That state I actively avoid — receiving and sending emails but not texts, and then only on my laptop, asking myself to notice whether I feel like answering the door/the phone and responding accordingly, staying in touch with what calls to me: sometimes it's doing tasks and other times it's reading a novel in front of a fire.
Same! I'm not going to say I never waste time online but I don't waste nearly as much on social media. It's lost its appeal for me. I do miss friends I made online but the algorithm only shows me ads now, anyway.
Appreciate you framing your changed social media behavior as a first step rather than a silver bullet (although I wish it were as simple as deleting a few apps).
I've similarly found changing notification settings, logging out of the apps, looking at Insta on my ipad/laptop vs an iPhone, and going weeks without being on any social media has generally kept me in a better headspace. And reading Momfluenced (thx for the re AHP), The Influencer Industry, and Swipe Up for More has stoked my inner rebel; the thought of being a shill for big tech every time I log onto social has been a great deterrent.
I'm doing this too - and totally relate to childhood and boredom - but I think that's where I learned to think
My work (as a professor in the humanities) is the primary driver of a busyness I can’t always sustain: it ebbs and flows with papers coming in, extra admin projects, writing deadlines, etc., but there has been a general shift even in the past decade to more work demands on my time, demands that cannot be accomplished in 40 hours a week during the teaching term.
We strive for simplicity as a family: avoiding over scheduling, trying to prioritize relationship over hustle, etc. my kids each do one activity at a time because that’s what we can manageably juggle. We rely on steady rhythms. A lot of this feels fairly countercultural, but my mantra is BUSYNESS IS NOT A FLEX.
However, some of the stress I feel sometimes isn’t fair to blame on work: my desires and my time and capacity don’t always match up because I have an enormous appetite for life. I want to read every good book, go deep with lots of friends, walk and garden and play with my kids, make quilts and have an indigo vat to dye linen and hand-bind books and write books and gaze into my partner’s chocolate eyes and cook delicious food and play piano for fun and volunteer and be present to my neighbors and and and…
And all of this in a body limited by chronic illness.
I am working to release unhelpful SHOULDs but also to embrace that I (1) need margin and rest to be well and (2) am graced with a hearty appetite for relationship and creativity, which will always outpace my time. Instead of a frustration, this can be another mode of abundance: there is SO MUCH MORE than I can do. So much goodness! Is this a tragedy or is it an immense gift?
"I want to read every good book, go deep with lots of friends, walk and garden and play with my kids, make quilts and have an indigo vat to dye linen and hand-bind books and write books and gaze into my partner’s chocolate eyes and cook delicious food and play piano for fun and volunteer and be present to my neighbors and and and"
YES YES SO MUCH THIS! I yearn for the abundant busyness that you (and Anne Helen) describe and feel vexed when my capacity doesn't permit it.
The part Emily quoted resonates with me, too. Chronic pain is my limiter, ADHD is my possibility engine. It sucks sometimes, but the reframe of it as abundance of possibility was very helpful, Cynthia.
I love that verb: "yearn." And I also feel so, so vexed by the mismatch. Here's to finding the goodness in the longing, right?
Overall the world of academia loads more busy work on its employees than ever before. More reports, more data to collect, more after hours efforts expected. Meetings and publications quotas for the ever-lengthy CV and constantly justifying your existence in your annual review. Also everyone is supposed to post loads of social media posts of their endeavors, nothing less than smiling faces permissible. And everything now has to be an “event”—-why is this? I have no doubt you do wonderful work!! :-) Just complaining on the soul-sucking grind academia has become. Even if you work with great people, it’s hard to escape.
Solidarity! It has shifted a lot even since I started my tt job in 2012. I feel like I could work full time just keeping up on email and attending to specific students' needs, not to mention everything else. SO MANY MEETINGS!
Ooh I love this idea of the appetite itself being a source of abundance. I’ve often felt unsure of myself for having lots of ideas and struggling to always execute them to completion, but in this perspective, it’s a gift to have that abundance of ideas and desires and interests, and it’s ok that I can’t do all the things all the time, because I will never run out of beautiful ways to fill my life.
I love that "I will never run out of beautiful ways to fill my life." Yes.
I love the phrase "enormous appetite for life" !
yes yes yes. also an academic and one of the things I've been struggling with so much this past year is that it is, like ahp said at the end of her piece, a business that makes me feel out of control. but many of the things I would like to step back from are required by my job, and those that give me fulfillment, the ones that remind me I'm alive and connected to others---even the bits that appear connected to my job--are the ones that upper admin would tell me to drop. I'm mid-career and I don't know how to sustain it and it doesn't feel like I can push back. I dunno; I've just been noticing this and sort of looking for a solution lately but I don't know if there is one, other than as you say to release the shoulds and to reframe my thinking a bit. as term starts tomorrow, I'll be honest, I'm struggling with this
I hear this all the way down. So much of what I have to say no to is what I want to say yes to, and what I have to do, related to work, is what I'd rather not. It is a structural problem that no number of hacks will solve. I'm trying to flourish inside it and don't always how if it's possible in every season.
The other night, I sat on my couch and listening to music for 2 hours. Nothing else. Not crocheting, not reading, not cleaning or cooking, and wow it was glorious. Many times during that session I felt my fingers itching for my phone but I did my best to put it farther away from me and that helped with the sense of needing to be busy. All the "busy" things (work, life admin) are on my phone. Spending time doing truly nothing was such a nice reset.
This is the main memory that inspired me to mostly quit social! Before I got a smartphone (I was a late adopter) I remember sitting in my apartment in my early 20s just listening to music and being carried away. That is how I spent my time. Or writing. Phones, work email, etc make it easy to stop having room for that kind of experience.
This sounds so nice! I have the fondest memory of an afternoon I spent with my partner listening to one of those podcasts where they do a super deep dive into a song or album. We just listened, soaked it in, and occasionally spoke a few words. It felt so enriching.
What music did you listen to?
So many artists and playlists I had saved that people had suggested and I just never got around to! Mainly the Breezy Three podcast by Kendra Adachi aka the Lazy Genius and the Cozy Jazz playlist on Spotify.
Co-signing Kendra Adachi's Lazy Genius podcast. It feels like a hug.
I want to quibble—strongly—with the idea that we’re doing about the same amount of work as we were in the 1960s. Maybe we are in hours, but productivity has skyrocketed over the last five or so decades, while wages have stagnated.
We’re doing more work in our working hours. A lot more. And for less pay and with more precarity. So, in a very real way, we are doing a LOT more work these days (to say nothing of the many people doing side hustles and second/third jobs).
I also think we need to interrogate the cult of busyness with a class lens.
I don’t think anyone working three jobs, parenting, and barely keeping their head above water is doing it out of compulsion for status. They’re doing it simply to survive. And they aren’t vaunted for it (whether explicitly or tacitly). If anything, they’re excoriated for not “making better choices,” for not being able to parent like a middle class helicopter, for not being able to be almond moms.
Look at the Twitter discourse around parents dropping their kids at the library all day. Are some of them going off to the spa or shopping? Maybe, I guess. But I’d wager the majority of them have no other option because we don’t prioritize affordable childcare and they probably have to work so they don’t get evicted.
I have two other major thoughts around busyness.
One is that I used to have a TONNE of hobbies—sewed my own clothes and gifts, knitting, amorphous crafts, cooking from scratch, etc etc.
And then one day I realized that all of my hobbies felt like WORK and that’s because…they were. They were all things that used to be considered actual labour, and primarily women’s labour. But as more and more women joined the workforce, these forms of labour became “leisure” and I stopped doing them all. I’m only now, 7 or 8 years later coming back to things like embroidery.
The other thought I have is that I used to be VERY busy. Work, volunteering, choir, 1-2 friend hangouts a week, family, going to concerts, etc. I was chronically ill but not disabled. I could do all those things and the activities of daily life (cooking, cleaning, etc).
Now I’m disabled and I struggle to both work and do the activities of daily life and, at this point, have to choose between the two. And work wins, because disability in this country is not enough to live on. But working means I’m probably not cooking and I’m barely cleaning. Because work takes all my spoons and then some and the rest of the time is involuntary rest and/or suffering. And when I’m up to it, I’m putting in a second shift in trying to find ways to find relief, because the health system is woefully inadequate.
So I’m busy. Very busy. But not very productive. And having very little fun. And putting almost all the burden of daily life on my partner.
All that to say, I think we forget how busyness as a positive—or even as a compulsion you have mixed feelings about—is a gendered, classed, and abled phenomenon.
Thank you for bringing up class! I struggle with how to frame my own busyness because so much of what occupies my and my partner's time and energy is focused on earning or saving money. That can become its own compulsion, I suppose, and I'm sure we could learn to be satisfied with less than what we have now. But the financial anxiety is very real, too.
"I don't want to hold up my busyness as a shield." I learned to be Busy in college, an emotionally overwhelming time having grown up in an emotionally unavailable home. If I was Busy, I wouldn't have to be vulnerable or learn how to have hard conversations. If I was Busy, I was valuable because I was Doing Things. I threw myself into a teaching career that exhausted my extroverted introvert self. I said yes to insane poorly paid nonprofit jobs. I worked on political campaigns. I worked at a Very Impressive Foundation. I was an independent consultant and constantly in the air and on the road. Until my burnout caught up with me and then the pandemic hit. Even in the pandemic I found a way to be Extremely Busy, organizing food relief & helping people navigate unemployment insurance. But that moment ended. I moved out of NYC (where "Busy" is a virtue) and chose to move to a place where the air is fresh, beaches are close, and nothing much happens. (Including my career, which has fully stalled out.) I am functionally retired in my late 40s (not by choice or desire). I have no kids, no partner. The man I love is on the other side of the country. My aging parents live four hours away. The kiddos I would help with are in Brooklyn. I'm estranged from my aging aunts who live nearby. I think there is a level of intentional busyness that puts wind in your sails. Without it, my life has entered a period of doldrums. I need to find a steady breeze. I'm starting to think that will require relocation.
I feel for you and thank you for sharing. It is important to understand that being retired is not paradise for everyone.
Some retired people may lead a leisurely life of choices and comfort and financial security.
But others are poor, physically impaired, lacking of transportation or emotional support, or on the flip side, taking care of young children because their own children are unable to or cannot afford daycare or taking care of an ailing spouse.
I would like us all to keep our eyes wide open to what life might look like behind other doors.
I'm 48 and currently making $25.51 as an admin. The pandemic hit just as I was making the leap to the VP / senior leadership level after years as a director-ish person. I have a solid 20+ years of working life ahead of me.
Ouch, that sounds so hard. I survive on a regular, part-time gig as a freelancer. That is only possible because I live in Sweden and not in California as I used to. Sending you support as you figure out if it is possible to get all the things you need. I want that for you so much!
Wow that first bit about busyness in college just smacked me in the face. So thanks for that insight.
I relate to this and am in a similar position. The doldrums are hard.
C
These are wonderful spot-on insights. I applaud you for making time for yourself—for less essential things that cultivate happiness and health—especially running, because it’s during those unplugged times when we can do our best thinking and engage the imagination. Chair lift rides while skiing are great for this too; I used to feel impatient on the chair lift, having to sit still, my mittened hand unable to work my phone, until I gave into the forced stillness and either became highly observant of the present surroundings if riding the lift solo, or engaged in conversation with a stranger if sharing the chair. My point is, this is quality time with ourselves during the day—moments that seem to expand the day and make it “a good day.” I am reveling in this phase of life (my mid 50s) when I’m less of a caregiver because my kids are grown and parents have passed, so suddenly I can fill my days with more projects and jobs I want to do. Instead of “busy,” I’d call it “active” or “engaged.” For everyone reading this who feels stretched thin and stressed, I hope you have faith that life has many chapters, and a time will come when days feel less overwhelming and rushed. And it’s OK to say “no thank you” to opportunities and requests to volunteer; take that time for yourself instead.
I love the chair lift example. I’ve tried to reframed my impatience as appreciation for whatever’s happening and forcing that perspective shift is really liberating and a lot less stressful!
I am late to the party, but I recently read Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks after too many months of being the wrong kind of busy. It helped me better recognize some of the sources of my busyness -- a sense that I could accomplish everything if only I was more productive, an attempt not to acknowledge the painful reality that I won't be able to do all the things I'd like to do with my one wild and precious life.
It's helped me reflect on the seemingly important things I should consciously reject in favor of actually important things -- in my case, the classic "forgoing certain career goals in favor of spending more time with family and friends". It's a bit cliché, but how many of us actually live our lives in accordance with these priorities even after coming to recognize them?
I'm angling more towards the right kind of busy -- navigating an abundance of beautiful possibilities! But doing my best to consciously choose the few things that feel most meaningful among them, and acknowledge I won't be getting to the others (for now, and possibly forever).
Also, it is much easier to make such choices if you have the means to. I've cut my work schedule down to 4 days/week. I couldn't have afforded this any earlier, and even now the change is felt, but well worth it regardless.
Yes! I have framed my work as "a trade-off between time and money" for the past fifty years. I get it right, I get it wrong, I make corrections. For me finding the sweet-spot produces job satisfaction and satisfaction is worth as much tinkering it takes.
I love this book so much. Right now I’m struggling to implement the lessons from it - my brain now knows I can’t do all the things that are important to me, but my patterns and emotional self won’t let go of the fantasy, and grieve loss of spending energy on some priorities to focus on and actually enjoy others. There is so much good stuff in life to engage with! Lovely to read about how you’ve shifted to focus on family and friends, and have a 4 day workweek - Thank you!
I loved the book Four Thousand Weeks too. So many helpful reminders.
I am in the middle of this book. I'm really happy I picked it up.
This post touches on something I think about a lot, which is how big or small one's world is. COVID really made my family's world extremely tiny, and small disruptions to our routine or any additional demands on our time felt UNBEARABLE. It made me really sad and I realized that I wanted to expand our world and give us a slightly bigger cup that could hold a few more things. I know this isn't the same thing as busy/not busy, but I think sometimes my experience of "busy" is also just about how disrupted I feel by the activity itself, versus feeling at ease with it.
I think the same thing has happened to me (maybe less so to my household/family members) and I didn’t really recognize it in this way till reading your comment. Thank you for articulating it.
I hear you! I’ve been thinking about this discussion and how it also relates to AHP’s other discussion earlier this week about big life shifts. To me, big life shifts often seem to really amp up busy-ness for at best a lateral positional life change. Which is maybe why I avoid them so often?
I’m a school principal and have been so busy with work for years and years. I found it fulfilling and like it was enough until about a year ago....something clicked, and I realized I wanted other kinds of busy. I rested a lot on the weekends but didn’t feel fulfilled. I still find my work meaningful and I still find it very difficult to not work endless hours.
As an experiment/because I couldn’t think of another way, I joined an exercise class gym and started booking classes within 2 hours of school ending (or less!!) to give myself a reason to leave campus at a decent time and make myself empowered to say no, internally or out loud, to demands of my time and energy. I love it. It’s working. Hoping to develop mindsets through this first move towards life outside of work and towards further abundance.
Thank you SO much for sharing. I am no an educator but am a VP in the financial services world and am feeling the same. Just not fulfilled anymore. The business of my job used to energize me but now it just depletes me. It is also so easy for it to blend into evenings and weekends. I will try to give this a try!
I chose a gym that has a cancellation fee if you cancel within 8 hours! That has helped too! It’s a weird mind game but has been so helpful. Hope it helps fight the blending for you too!
There is busy because you have a lot going on, and busy that’s avoidance.
Came here to say this! When I’m feeling a particular jittery busy, I ask myself, “what am I trying to avoid feeling right now?” Or I end up wondering why I’m crying laying in savasana at the end of a yoga class.
Avoidance!!! I've never been busier than when my marriage was falling apart. I was working 12-14 hours a day and most weekends and had so many social engagements and so many family obligations and had to do so many home improvement projects and I was just a frantic-frenzied-busy mess. And then I left the marriage and moved to a tiny cabin on a creek and somehow suddenly had 2 hrs a day to sit quietly on the dock and sip tea and watch birds.
I’m glad you found some serenity.
For me it’s the fear of laziness that drives a lot of busyness I think. Lazy is not a thing! Lazy is a puritanical concept invented to make you feel guilty for resting! Understanding laziness isn’t real has really helped me.
Have you read the book “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price, PhD? It’s so good and in line with your comment here.
No but I will add it to my audible library!
I am feeling so burnt out with two very young children who are sick all the time, a demanding full-time job, and a partner who is not as supportive as I’d like. I would welcome advice on how to care for myself when it feels like I am drowning and it feels like nothing I’m doing is optional. Like, I can’t just not take care of my sick kids. I can’t quit my job and I also don’t want to. Please share your wisdom!
Not sure it counts as wisdom: This year I started to take all the things I do in my head and my time to keep our lives running and document them. My goal was to make them visible, legible and invite everyone else into being part of them. I haven't been doing it long enough to know if it works but it's very fun to walk up to my six year old and say "what night are you cooking dinner" and then sign him up on the calendar. The approach of "here's what you're doing" combined with visible progress as we work together to make our house easier to use has been good. All of this came out of a long bout of stress, panic, and then acceptance that I wasn't going to work or think my way out of anything. Instead of dreaming of a beautiful home or a cool space when I thought about where I wanted to live I would always flash back to really good preschool classrooms I'd been in. So that's what we're doing now. We are making our house into a preschool so that we can all learn how to be capable humans at the pace that works for us.
I love this because it's like a solution for the thing I see happening to parents a bit older than me who are entering the empty nest phase but somehow still spending an incredible amount of time on "child"care. Like, the child is in college but the parents are still spending a lot of time helping to manage classroom assignments, proofreading essays, doing their laundry on weekends, sending them back to school with a week's worth of groceries. The now-adult children haven't taken over any self-management.
I remember so clearly being where you are.... For me, I dropped things that were not absolutely "mandatory".... I dropped a lot of taking care of my in law side.... planning dinners, buying for birthdays/holidays, keeping them up to date with what was going on with the kids etc. It liberated a lot of time and head space for me. Look at all that you do, plan, buy etc. and drop what is not absolutely essential at this time.
this.
I don’t have any.new ideas, it’s a hard time. Without family or friend help, it can be just more than you can do. I’m wondering why unsupportive partner is able to walk away from responsibilities. I lived that way for years and I wish I been less accepting. Partners who opt out of the hard parts aren’t partners.
I feel similarly, even with a partner who is pretty supportive. Despite having what I think is a more egalitarian marriage than most, I'd say the household and childcare responsibilities still fall 60-70% on me. a 60-40 split might sound close to equitable, but in actuality that's me doing 50% more work than my (male) partner. As a result, I've shifted into private practice (I'm a clinical psychologist) to give me more flexibility and, in theory, time. That's not really shaking out so far, as starting a business is a ton of work & parenting 2 kids under 5 is a ton of work, even if you don't also work outside the home. I don't really have wisdom except that it feels hard because it is hard. I don't know how to feel less busy. Our kids are not at the age of doing a lot of activities. We have occasional birthday parties and play dates, but that's about it. Our weeks just feel insane. The mornings are crazy, getting 2 small children ready and out the door for day care. The days are busy with work and household responsibilities. The evenings and weekends are busy taking care of small children with tiny needs. We don't have much of a village, and that's really the problem. I wish I had more wisdom, but all I have to offer is solidarity and the assurance that nothing is wrong with you.
Oh and let me add, we are comfortably middle class but not at the point I could stop working. Mortgage + 2 day care tuitions + student loans is a lot of financial burden. We have one old car that is paid off. We don't live in a very expensive area. I know it won't always be this way and that we'll at least regain the day care tuition in a few years when our kids age into public school. But it's not like we are over here grinding so we can buy fancy things or go on fancy vacations. We are just trying to pay our bills, save for emergencies and caregiving burdens (including my elderly mom, who is dependent on her adult children), and save for our children's future so they aren't saddled with student loan debt (hopefully).
I'm in a similar boat as you. It's hard because my partner *thinks* we split household work and childcare 50-50. And I know he does SO MUCH more than was modeled for him by his dad. He usually does what I ask him to do but I still feel so resentful that I have to ask him to do things, and that I am the default parent.
No advice but I do find hope in the work of Katherine Goldstein at the double shift - https://www.thedoubleshift.com/ check out the podcast archive and the newsletter! And also, the sicknesses are OUT OF CONTROL. It did not use to be like this!
I did a lot of one-earbud listening to good soothing, mystery, romantic audiobooks... it kept me sane and less intellectually tired.
I recommend following the amazing writer Zane Villines on FB and right here on Substack: https://zawn.substack.com/
Her newsletter, Liberating Motherhood, has wonderful tips and ways of thinking about how to navigate/balance being a mom + being with a partner who can do more but won’t.
I don't have great wisdom. I just want to affirm (from my own experiences at an earlier stage of my life) that where you are is hard and there's no simple fix. The only way I got through those drowning times is treading water. I'd second what Laura said. I ended up leaving my marriage and changing my job, and it was still hard--but a better hard. I changed/shifted ambitions, also hard (but also better hard). If it's at all helpful, I'm glad now that I prioritized my kids and the work that helped me take care of them and myself. I'm in an easier place now.
If your partner isn’t helping, you may need to be direct about what you need. But, I can also understand not wanting to have a confrontation, since you are already under enough stress. Can you dial in other people to help out - parents, siblings, good friends?
Giving you a virtual hug because been there. As my therapist recently told me before my kids' 20-day winter break, lower your expectations. It's impossible for everything to be firing on all cylinders when the kids are sick and you're working; yet society has conditioned us to believe that it has to. Also, give yourself permission to be "selfish" and do something for yourself. Every day. Lastky, Eve Rodsky's book Fair Play also changed my life and marriage. As a trained mediator, she offers terrific ways to initiate conversations about equitable distribution of household work. Things aren't perfect, but our household is getting closer to the equilibrium we had pre-kids.
Thank you all for your kind and supportive words! It is so helpful to hear from others who remember this phase and who can also affirm that it does get easier as the kids get older - and also that it’s just a HARD time (because of course sometimes I feel like I must be doing something wrong or missing something because it shouldn’t feel so hard). Thanks for helping me feel more hopeful.
Karla, I so feel this. I remember this phase of life so well. Remembering "this too shall pass" really helped me see the bigger perspective. Not in that awful "you must treasure these moments with your young children no matter what" way. Just a "this is really really hard and also it will change again, because all things change" sort of way.
I'm sorry you're in this tough stage, and I'm also reassuring you from the other side that it WILL get better, day by day. Kids get older, immunity builds, and you start to be less exhausted. One day, you'll have the strength to drive the change on your own, at least a little. And slowly but surely, you'll get to a new and better place.
I saw something recently about burnout being borrowing tomorrow’s energy today and it stuck with me. I got Covid for the first time right at the holidays and the energy recovery has been A LOT! I cannot push past or through it like I normally have during periods of burnout. It is forcing me to have to stop and have to rest. Having that forced time has been so eye opening in how much I think I’m recovered vs. actually not being there at all. For my future physical and mental health, I’m forcing in breaks and slow downs regardless of the guilt I feel because for the first time in years I’m allow myself to see the benefits of rest.
Thank you for this post! I really started rethinking my ideas about being busy and all of the seemingly “urgent” things that aren’t really urgent after losing a parent a few years ago. There is nothing like a major wake-up call to knock you out of the normal *grind*. Ever since, my relationship with time has massively changed (although, it has been a slow process to unlearn). Life is too short to spend our time on things just because society expects it or external influences encourage it. Our values & priorities are all different and being in touch with ours and creating time for them is a wonderful kind of busy.
Nowadays, I am busy reading, writing, completing jigsaw puzzles, making time for friends & family, attending broadway shows, walking, lifting, listening to music, hanging with my pets, etc. This kind of busy is full of joy and I love it.
I can really relate to this. Coming out the other side of ahead injury, which made me realize all the progress I hadn't made in recovering from...well, all kinds of things, but especially about how I spend my time. I'm encouraged to see that you've held onto changes you've made, as I've seen myself already slip back into old patterns.
I’m glad to hear you’re on the other side of your injury. I’m sure that wasn’t easy. I do sometimes have old patterns creep in and at one point I was very much an all or nothing thinker like, well if I can’t stick to this then it’s just not for me. Now I take more of a “both-and” approach. Like I can both slip into old patterns sometimes and still celebrate the changes I’ve made overall. It’s so hard to unravel old habits & behaviors. Be patient with yourself☺️
I really like this way of thinking about progress. Thank you.
Reading this has made me realize that I am the wrong kind of busy. I bought a small business last year (an independent bookstore). I love it. And I hate it. It consumes all of my energy right now. I’m working on that in several different ways, although perhaps with less hope and vigor than is required to make real change. The worst of that though is that I’ve made very little time for friends and other activities in the past year. The time is often there but the mental and emotional energy is not. Add to this that I am a recent empty nester who actually misses my life being organized around feeding my family, tennis matches, quiz bowl, all the things. I’m completely lost in terms of how to spend my time right now. As others have mentioned, these are phases. I definitely can look back and see the phases...first job with no other responsibilities, early marriage with a job but no other responsibilities, early parenting while working, parenting without working, parenting while caretaking and working part time, etc. I did not enjoy the hands on and very physical parts of having small children nearly as much as the phases when they bathed themselves and could engage in interesting conversations. But those weren’t “bad” years. I found ways to make those years work for me and I need to do the same for these. I’ve realized that I often use the excuse of being busy to avoid things that would be good for me. I am an extreme introvert, meaning I need a lot of alone time to feel like myself. Owning a business has meant giving up the flexibility to be alone on any given day and now I protect anytime that I’m not at the store like it’s my life. I use the “busyness” of the store and my role there as an excuse from engaging outside of it. But that has isolated me from relationships that are important to me. I’m not good at self reflection and it’s one of the reasons I love this community. The questions discussed here are often ones that I would never ask myself. I find so much wisdom, encouragement, and often the challenge I need to make a change in my life for the better.
Have you thought about checking your network to see if there are any other new freelancers or self employed folks who’d like to handle a day a week or some other combo of shifts covering your bookstore? I’m a new self employed person and miss the stability of a paycheck but also can’t really justify leaving my new business to take an Actual Part Time Job That Demands Too Much. If I had someone like you who paid me to cover a few shifts a month at their bookstore, this is like, literally something I’ve dreamed about.
Close an extra day a week and use that as your personal day. If you can’t afford to give up the revenue, turn the store over to a trusted employee and check out for the day. Tell your staff you have meetings. The meetings can be for coffee or lunch or a movie, you don’t have to be specific.