The Dark Side of the Soul by Stephen Cherry

Author:Stephen Cherry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472900821
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Busyness

Boredom doesn’t make us busy, but fear of boredom might. So too might avarice or anxiety. For busyness is not today simply the way we respond to a set of demands where more than usual is required of us; it has become a way of life, a new norm and even an occasion of boasting, or as someone has put it, busyness is often a boast disguised as a complaint.

We have seen already that in her book Deadly Vices Gabriele Taylor urges us to reconnect the noun and adjectival form of the word ‘vice’. In this way she seeks to return the word ‘vicious’ to its correct meaning. So when Taylor says that something is vicious, she doesn’t mean that it’s like a hungry dog, but that it has the quality or nature of a vice. And so she speaks of the ‘viciousness’ of the deadly sins with sentences like ‘what makes envy vicious . . .’ Adopting this correct use of the word I want to propose that there is more than one form of busyness. There is ‘virtuous busyness’, and there is ‘vicious busyness’. And it is vicious busyness that we are concerned with here.

Vicious busyness is the state we find ourselves in when we start using the word ‘busy’ both as a boast and as a complaint. It’s what happens when we have fallen into the ‘acceleration trap’ of contemporary life. Busyness doesn’t appear on the list of seven deadly sins, and is not usually discussed in the terms I am using here. Busy people are seen to be successful and admirable and yet as oppressed and downtrodden victims of pressures beyond themselves. When it is put like this, seasoned sin-spotters will immediately appreciate that there is something strange going on here in the realm of responsibility.

Vicious busyness is often performed busyness. It draws attention to itself with a range of behaviours such as quick movements, short sentences, darting glances (especially over the shoulder of the person who is talking to you), short attention span, limited peripheral vision, and self-importance. This is ‘white-rabbit behaviour’. Many of these are symptoms of stress, and vicious busyness is in some ways a failure to deal with stress appropriately. But there’s more to it than that. It’s also got a strong narcissistic streak, which is why one of the antidotes to busyness is to remember that ‘no one is indispensable, not even me’. But these are hard words for narcissists to own.

Both narcissism and vicious busyness are signs of our times. Life is speeding up and we speed up with it. Phrases like ‘all in good time’ fall out of use. Busyness is driven by the same change in values that overestimates the importance of fame. Just as the false value of ‘fame’ has replaced the true value of quality of achievement, so in the case of busyness it is the false assumption of urgency that has replaced the reality that there is often more time than we think to do what needs to be done.

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