Lesson 10 The “Busy” Trap

Tim Kreider

1、If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

2、Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted ① . Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose business is purely self-imposed ② : work and duties they’ve taken on willingly,classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

3、Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications.

4、Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular ③ activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation ④ and had three hours of totally unstructured,largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia ⑤ to making animated ⑥ films to getting together with friends in the woods to throw dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

5、The present situation is not a necessary or inevitable ⑦ condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen. Not long ago, I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume ⑧ her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college—she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven ⑨ , strange, anxious and sad—turned out to be a deformed effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic—it’s something we, as a group, force one another to do.

6、Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, something that protects you 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.

7、I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a bad person who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day.On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and do my own business in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a reasonable and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

8、But just in the last few months, I’ve strangely started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I went to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

9、Being empty is not just a vacation; it is as necessary to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental illness. The space and quiet that emptiness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole,for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is necessary to get any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams.

10、Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own and the rest of the world. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd.

11、Life is too short to be busy.

(1,097 words)

Exercises

Ⅰ. How well did you read?

1. [Note the reasons] According to the author’s opinion, explain the real reason(s)why people nowadays are terribly busy.

2. [Note the reasons] Why do people around the author always seem busy?

3. [Check the details/ Note the reasons] According to

Paragraph 4, explain how the author views his childhood and why he thinks so.

4. [Understand the main idea] Write down your understanding of the title “The Busy Trap”.

Ⅱ. Read for words and expressions:

1. Choose one best paraphrase for the underlined words.

(1) They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. (Para.2, line 7)

A. long for B. dream of C. feel anxious about

(2) I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured,largely unsupervised time every afternoon… (Para. 4, line 4)

A. free B. limited C. unplanned

(3) 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. (Para. 6, line 2)

A. unimportant B. tired C. convenient

(4) It got more and more intolerable until finally I went to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this. (Para. 8, line 7)

A. delighted B. conventional C. unbearable

2. Choose one best paraphrase for the underlined expression.

Being empty is not just a vacation; it is as necessary to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental illness. (Para. 9, line 2)

A. set it off B. took it away C. put it off