“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
And other great things written by Tim Kreider at NY Times on being “too busy” >
For a lot of people busy means I’m on the phone yaking away all the time. I have little or no time to interact with people face to face. You can get away with a lot over the phone because you can be multi-tasking (typing on the computer – text messaging) while you pretend to be listening. All you have to say is Yep or “That sounds good.” or a few other well chosen phrases. Time flies by and it’s time for another phone call or a coffee break. There goes another day.
I concur with the quotee. People are so very busy because they’re afraid to face their meaningless lives. If you took a lot of modern people out to the sticks with no connectivity and just gave them time to contemplate the topography of their navels, they’d be blubbering wrecks inside a couple of hours.