How to Talk to People - How to Look Busy

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Many of us complain about being too busy—and about not having enough time to do the things we really want to do. But has busyness become an excuse for our inability to focus on what matters?  According to Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, time is a sort of luxury good—the more of it you have, the more valuable you are. But her research also revealed that, for many Americans, having less time and being busy can be a status symbol for others to notice. And when it comes to the signals we create for ourselves, sociologist Melissa Mazmanian reveals a few myths that may be keeping us from living the lives we want with the meaningful connections we crave.  Music by Dylan Sitts (“On the Fritz”) and Rob Smierciak (“Slow Money,” “Guitar Time,” “Ambient Time”). This episode was co-hosted by Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost. Becca Rashid also produces the show. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. The managing editor of How to Keep Time is Andrea Valdez. Write to us at [e-mail].  Want to share unlimited access to The Atlantic with your loved ones? Give a gift today at theatlantic.com/podgift. For a limited time, select new subscriptions will come with the bold Atlantic tote bag as a free holiday bonus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the crossroads of artistic insight and intellectual curiosity, we find the edge of reason. Dive into the heart of artistic inspiration rooted in enlightenment thinking and discover how contemporary creators are holding a mirror up to society to reflect who we are, where we've been, and where we're headed. Join me, Jeff Chang, at the edge of reason, a new limited podcast from Atlantic Refink, the brand new content studio at the Atlantic, and Howzer and Worth. Ian I was having lunch with a friend last weekend who was trying to organize a birthday party for her colleague. And typical story, she said she was having trouble gathering everyone because everyone was too busy and it was impossible to get them to commit. Of course. But my favorite part was that she said one person in the group said she couldn't make it because she had to go to Creighton Barrel that night.

She had to go to Creighton Barrel. She had to go go to Creighton barrel at 7 p.m. on a Friday. She'd like to. That was already in her schedule. She has a flat wear appointment. Yeah, I don't. Wow. When people say they're busy, I assume it's for work, but these kinds of reasons, I just don't understand

because collectively, the highest earning Americans, especially men on average, have been working less hours. So how can it be that everyone is busy to this extent? And with what? Like, I just don't know. Yeah, we're not just busy because of work though. It's something else too. something else too. I'm Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of the How-To series. And I'm Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic. This is How to Keep Time. I've been reading a little about this idea called action addiction and I should

say here that this isn't necessarily, you know, fully accepted in the behavioral psychology community. There's a lot of dispute about what kind of behavioral addictions really exist. But the idea behind action addiction is that, you know, beginning a new task, any kind of task whatever it is, releases a little dopamine in your brain, the same way that, you know, that pulling the slot machine lever does. And in the same way that all behavioral compulsions do, that feeling decays and then you long for more.

And that's filling our time too, that desire for novel feelings, novel sensations, which we pursue instead of going out to dinner with our friends. Right, and I feel like many of us say we don't have time for other people or wish we had more time for a social life, but it feels like there's some compulsion to stay busy with random tasks and chores to the point of making ourselves unavailable.

Yeah, I wonder if that unavailability, being unavailable is almost like a point of pride. Oh, yeah. Or a way to just signal to each other, sorry I have better things to do, you should have gotten on my calendar earlier if you wanted to see me. Yeah, I wonder how this happened.

You know, like if it's become normalized to appear busy culturally, calendar earlier if you wanted to see me. I wonder how this happened. If it's become normalized to appear busy culturally, when did it become accepted? Why is busyness supposedly a show of importance when it just feels pretty terrible, actually? Right. So Becca, I talked to Neurupaharia a few weeks ago. She's a consumer marketing professor at Arizona State University and she studies busyness.

Time has this property of being scarce. So if you think about luxury products, most of their value is not functional and instead is purely symbolic. She had some revealing things to say about the ways the time can be a type of social asset. So if you think about, for example, a diamond ring has actually no intrinsic value, so then the question is why do people spend so much money on something that has no value? And it turns out there's a lot of psychological value in something like a diamond. When we think about products that are scarce, there are very few of them out there, so people

really want them. When we think about a person as being scarce, then we think of scarcity in terms of time. So how much time do you have? Well, if you have very little time, then you, in and of yourself, are somewhat of a scarce resource. And then people might come to feel that you're more valuable or have more social status. So if you say, for example, try and schedule a meeting with somebody and they tell you, well, I have about 15 minutes at 4, 15, two months from now, you know, that is a very clear indication to the receiver of that proposition that they must be

important. Or if you go to a doctor and you can get an appointment today, your inference again might be, well, they must not be very good because they're not in demand. Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Are there other cultures where busyness has the same social status as it does in America?

We ran studies in both the US and we ran studies in Italy. So in Italy, there's more of the sense of status that the wealthy can both waste time and waste money and that you gain your social status from your family and your family name as opposed to the US where you gain your social status by working hard, earning a lot of money and kind of climbing the ladder in that way. And what we found was that in the US, a very busy person was seen to have more social status than a less busy person. But in Italy, it was the exact opposite. Right.

So there, the person who had time for leisure was seen as having more social status than the person who had to work. And so that sort of reflects the more traditional idea that if you're really wealthy, you don't have to work. You have social status in terms of having money and you're really wealthy, you don't have to work. You have social status in terms of having money and you have social status because you have so much time. People who have less resources have to work to buy food, to have housing, they have to work.

Therefore, the busy people are a lower social status. You've looked into this in your work around the kind of humble bragging that people do around their busyness. Can you tell us a little about that? So humble bragging is a brag disguised as a complaint. So I sometimes will just notice what people are posting on Facebook. And one person said something like, I had a meeting in DC this morning and then I had lunch in New York in the afternoon in Boston for dinner for another meeting.

I'm so exhausted. I thought, wow, that, like, what is the point of that post? What is the point of that post? Why would we want to brag about not having free time? Isn't that what we want in theory? I can speak a little bit to the historical context of it. So there was a theory, you know, many years ago by this gentleman named Thurstein-Veblin.

And he talked about how the wealthy have both money to waste and time to waste. So you can waste your money on luxury products, gemstones, et cetera, that kind of stuff. And you can waste your time on learning how to ride horses and learning these very intricate mannerisms of where the fork and the knives and all that stuff goes. So his theory was that the very wealthy and the very high status people have so many resources that they could both waste their money and their time.

That has evolved at least in American culture where having less time is seen as valuable. And I think a lot of that has come from our sense of social mobility, this belief that you can work hard and climb the ladder. I'm thinking back to the diamonds, you need resources to buy them. But I could just pretend like I'm more busy than I really am, which might make myself appear more important. Do people run that kind of calculus or people thinking about their time in that way? Yeah, so you're asking to what extent are people strategically doing this? Right.

I think people are doing it not necessarily with a full consciousness that, hey, you know what, I'm going to say I'm busy because I want people to think I'm important. But sometimes these things kind of linger in our consciousness right below the surface. People are motivated to be busy because they're not only signaling to other people that they're important, but they're signaling to themselves that they're important. So Ian, I guess it makes sense to me that we have some innate desire to feel important and valued by society standards, but I also wonder if people have adjusted their levels of busyness since the pandemic. I mean, I would think that some of that compulsion to use every minute of our time, productively or for some future goal

is a reaction to when we couldn't go out, you know, socialize like normal. Oh, that's so interesting Becca. So maybe some part of this busyness thing is to make up for that time we feel like we lost. It's really tragic to think about it that way, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, business, Maybe it's also because we are conditioned to feel like a busy person. You know, that kind of like busy bee persona where you're always buzzed over and getting things done.

And I certainly feel that way that that's a virtue I'm supposed to pursue. I have like, I don't know, half a dozen different roles at the university, at the Atlantic in my home life. It certainly makes me appear busy. It makes me feel busy. And it's sometimes I wonder, am I busy in a good way? Or do I just appear busy? You know, it's easy to look busy by just doing a ton of things that make it better. Right. Right. And that doesn't seem to match the spirit of what we mean or what we think we mean when we talk about a busy person who's productive and that's why they're busy.

Right. And it seems like the doing it well is not the point. Right. And I was curious to ask Nero about that about what it feels like, what can happen when busyness starts to just completely take over. There's this tendency to want to over schedule yourself and it could be coming from I want to feel important, I want other people to feel that I'm important. There's some existential dread of too much idleness, you know, if I have too much time, you know, you're

my my go to dark places. I think a lot of people do try and keep themselves busy because it's a distraction, you know, from maybe some of the bigger existential questions that would arise about our life here on Earth and the time that we spend here. So creating a sense of busyness for yourself can lead to a feeling that you yourself have sort of a reason to be in a way. Is there a way to stop normalizing busyness as an excuse? I feel like one of the things I think would be to reflect back and think about, is it making you happy? Is it making you happy to over-schedule yourself if that is, in fact, what you're doing?

Or are you feeling overwhelmed by that? The second question is, what is the fear behind not having a schedule? Is it that you'll have nothing to do or that you'll be bored or that you'll then become agitated, but there is sometimes a compulsion to keep going. Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I wish there were easier answers, but you're right, it's so hard to stop. I mean, one of the things we do in our family is we try and not over-schedule ourselves. So many weekends we have no plans at all and have a few other families and friends who also have no other plans and so then it becomes more of a spontaneous kind of way to get together with people. It gives us some space, you know, that, hey, what do we

feel like doing right now? Well, let's go get a coffee or do something like that. Hey, I'm Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of The Atlantic's How To podcast. I like to think of my work as a way to make self-reflection and introspection part of our daily lives. If you enjoy Atlantic podcasts and exploring ideas, please give an Atlantic subscription to someone you love. Your support can help us produce shows like How-To for years to come. For less than $2 a week, your lucky someone will get a year of unlimited access to the Atlantic, including everything that's worth talking about.

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Go to theAtlantic.com-pod-gift gift. Hearing Nero talk about busyness as a status symbol Ian is kind of funny to me. It's like this personal suffering that we inflict upon ourselves to make people think we have a life or were wanted by a lot of other people were popular. And at the same time, it's its own sort of avoidance mechanism. It seems like I have so many friends who say, I actually like to stay busy because I, you know, I don't wanna be alone with my thoughts. Oh my God.

But what if we would genuinely be happier taking that time to do nothing and not feel bad about it? Right, exactly. And not feeling bad about it's important. Right. Instead of multitasking into oblivion, like holding our phone while we're watching a movie or face timing someone while we're cooking dinner,

always having to do a million things at once. Yeah, and trying to do everything all at once, it's not even the most useful way to get things done well. Right, of course. There's research on switching costs, which is just a name for the time you lose when you switch tasks. And the evidence shows that the cost of switching from reading a book

to checking my phone because it buzzed, that actually causes me to do both of those activities less efficiently, less effectively. Like depending on the tasks that we're switching from and to, once studies shows switching costs can lead to a loss of up to 40% of someone's productive time. Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, I'm not totally surprised by that. Sure. But I also fall into this trap of thinking that those people who are really effective at multitasking

are also the most ambitious or sort of accomplished among my friends, but the sort of busyness for busyness sake, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with accomplishing a big goal or anything like that. You're just taking off boxes. You're doing your to-do's even if you don't need to do them. Right. I think it's tough when busyness isn't a choice, like working parents, the people taking care of their children and their own parents simultaneously. And just keeping up with the drop-offs, the doctor's appointments, the shift schedules,

on top of just being healthy, having a social life, I could go on and on. But that small hit of, I've done everything I need to do today, I'm being responsible, I'm a good productive member of society. That little high doesn't feel the same as I had the presence of mine today to ask my kid how their day went and actually hear their response. Yeah, and the really scary part is it kind of does make you

a good parent or whatever. Like you could probably go your whole career, maybe your whole life, just doing a bunch of things, just taking off box. And people would probably judge you to have been successful. Like you were a good person, you were a noble person. What's the alternative to doing a bunch of things? It's like you were slothful, you're lazy. Right, at least that's the stigma that doing a bunch of things? It's like, you were slothful, you're lazy.

Right, at least that's the stigma that you got nothing done. Even if the things you got done were meaningless. Right. You still got them done. I found this interesting research about parents like primary concern with their teens, social media use. And aside from just seeing inappropriate content online, the second two top concerns from parents

are kids wasting their time and not getting their homework done. Both which feel like that sort of value judgment about, I don't want a lazy kid. Yeah, you're wasting your time. What are you doing? You're just staring at your phone. And maybe it doesn't have to be, I'm lazy when I'm not occupied. Right. But maybe just not having busyness be the main thing that makes us feel like worthy, valuable members of society.

Yeah, it's like busyness on its own isn't necessarily the problem. You just want the right amount of it and we definitely don't have the right amount of it. I'm curious to learn from an expert who can explain where this pressure comes from. To be constantly busy, be task-oriented ahead of everything else and I wonder if there's a way to balance the social pressure of looking busy with the actual obligations of our day-to-day life. Everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time. And next week or next quarter or next month, it was going to get better. And so I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of our well by feeling like

if we just get over this hump or this deadline. So Ian, I talked to Melissa Mazzmanian who's a sociologist from UC Irvine and she co-wrote a book in 2020 called Dreams of the Overwork, Living, Working and Parent parenting in the digital age. And her research analyzes why American adults struggle with overwork and this sort of unmanageable busyness that she says goes beyond just schedules. My colleague Christine Beckman and a graduate student, Ellie Harmon, in myself spent

around 80 to 100 hours with each family. And we just hung out with these families. And through those kind of micro moments of everyday life, you see how people are trying to be the ideal worker while still prioritizing other aspects of their life. She lays out three myths that motivate American adults to stay constantly occupied, the desire to be the ideal worker, have the perfect body, and be the perfect parent. Yeah, those are definitely dreams.

In terms of the people that I'm studying, I will find that the people who buy in more tend to be more stressed and feel like more of a failure, right? So the more that you feel like, no, no, no, I actually should be able to be a perfect parent and I should be able to run five to 10 miles a day and I should be able to be seen as an ideal worker. The more you're committed to that and unwilling to question, what does it look like to be a good parent

and a good worker and a healthy body, the harder it is because they are fundamentally impossible. So Ian, if Neuro's saying, busyness indicates to others that were valuable in some way, I asked Melissa to explain the other side of that, how busyness can make us feel valuable to ourselves. I don't think I'm alone in someone who's always carrying almost like, you think about like a wave going out and there's like the trickle of water after the wave that we're carrying

along this trickle of water of all the things we didn't get to, all the emails I didn't answer, all the times I didn't do my workout, all the times I wasn't there for my children. And managing that is, I think, one of the interesting kind of truths of living in Western society. So, first of all, I have no idea what it means to be genuinely overworked. I don't know if many people do. There's some studies that show that people will literally hit a breaking point, which means that your body breaks down or you develop addictions of various kinds, et cetera.

That's extreme. So what is it being to live a sustainable life? Like that you're every day feeling like you know, you're be able to wake up the next day and maybe there's some ups and downs but that it feels genuinely sustainable. One thing that was fascinating was that everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time. And next week or next quarter or next month,

it was gonna get better. And so I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of our well by feeling like if we just get over this hump or this deadline. But there's a lot in our lives such that those humps and deadlines continually happen. We're balancing the cycle of a school year, we're balancing the cycle of financial quarters, we're balancing the cycle of artificial deadlines that we make for ourselves at work and in our personal life, we also have these kind of life-cycle deadlines

that we put on ourselves. Everything from what age should I get married? I think some of these are crumbling, but if I want children, what age should I have children? We are living in terms of a million kind of created deadlines, which make it feel like there is always a next thing that if I just get over this, I will feel better. Did you find anything in your research that explains that optimism that people have that right now is the busiest moment, but next week it'll certainly get better and I'll have

more free time to do the thing I actually want. So I will say one of the explicit things to mention here is that people in our study were not unhappy. Because we're not people who actually said like, I want to do less. What they're saying is I want to do what I'm doing better. This is everyday life that at least for these human beings doesn't feel like that overwork burnout about to lose it. This is just, I just wish I could do it with a little more sanity, a little more sleep, you know, a little less intense. We've become so committed to the idea that

doing it all is what the goal is. This is productivity, this is what I need to do to feel good about who I am in the world. And so that optimism comes with the idea that I'm actually getting a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from feeling like I can be the superhero. So Melissa, some data shows that moms with intense time pressure can face a higher risk of mental health issues. So I'm surprised to learn that in your research busy or overworked people aren't necessarily more stressed or unhappy just by way of being busy. Were there any gender differences in the optimism around busyness or did you discover anything about

who's most likely to achieve that sort of superhero status with their busy schedules. There is research by Aaron Reeve that shows that both men and women chafe against these ideal worker norms in the workplace, but men have an easier time, quote, passing as an ideal worker, meaning that if they leave early, someone watches them leave early and they assume, oh, that guy

is leaving because he's got another meeting somewhere else or he's going to visit the client. A woman leaves early, people tend to assume, oh, that woman's leave early because her kid has a doctorate appointment. So, you know, we have gendered associations with how people use their time and display at it work. How did we go from that sort of eight hour work day standard to becoming obsessed with controlling

every little block of our days? Like the 8 a.m. to 8 15, I'll eat breakfast, 8.30 to 9, I'll do my workout. Like how did we get to that point of scheduling every minute? Going way back in time to the Benedictine monks, the Benedictine monks, this was the first place in Western society, and this is work from Zerubavel.

Avatar Zerubavel, scholar of time and scheduling, and kind of the histories of time. He looks back at the Benedictine monks as the first time where what was seen is a kind of a valued social order and a kind of desirable social order, what in one which is, you know, spiritually pure, I guess, is one in which time is regular at the level of the hour.

Before that, you kind of have like religious rights during this time of year or schedules based on kind of festivals or holidays. But the Benedictine monks, they brought it down to the level of the hour and every hour was supposed to have a spiritual purpose and this idea that you wake up at this time and this, and it had the glory of God from 8 to 8.30 and then you go to, you know, mass or whatever it is. And in the monastery, you could look around and know what time it was based on what everybody was doing. So what you do for a second, third in the day was really sedimented in these monasteries.

And I think you can see the roots of that into what you're talking about in terms of our everyday lives today. I wanted to get back to something you said earlier about these cycles of time or these cycles in our lives, all of those sort of time markers that indicate when we should do what at what time. And as that relates to the 9-5, and like how did we develop this cadence? So prior to the Industrial Revolution, people were working incredibly long hours, their work in life were totally merged together. Then with the industrial revolution, people leaving and going to factories, they were completely overworked, exploited to the point where their bodies were breaking down and so forth. Ford established an eight hour work shift on his

manufacturing plants. And that was right before the Great Depression. Then the Depression happened. A lot of people got laid off and Kellogg was the Kellogg serial guy. He actually instituted a six hour work shift. He paid people a little bit less, but we get more people back at work by doing six hour. Now, interestingly, Kellogg actually had other belief in the value of free time and leisure time. And there was this whole like language around the industrial revolution that we were going to become so efficient that everybody was going to have a ton of leisure time. And that this was actually going to be a crisis of humanity because we wouldn't know what

to do with all of our free time. So there's a whole academic scholarship at the time that was like leisure studies, which was like, oh no, what are we gonna do when we all have too much time? Well, you know, fast forward a hundred years, that is not the case. And it turns out that in the end,

the capitalist enterprise is so strong that if you have free time, people tend to commit it back to work in order to try and make more money. So Kellogg kept his six hour shifts, but by the 1950s, basically everyone had chosen to go back to an eight hour shift because they wanted those extra two hours and the more money.

So we tend to prioritize money over time, and I don't know why, but I think that is a bit of like a moral and social value that we've become accustomed to. So Becca about 10 years ago now I invented this term, this phrase, hyper employment. Is it different from just choosing to work more in order to make more money? It's the idea that you have all these little jobs that you didn't previously have. They mean it'd be real jobs like you're not getting paid for them, but you're responsible for the work.

Maybe you have to do your own accounting and expense reports at your job where previously someone else would handle that work. There'd be a whole job taking care of accounting, for example. Think of all the things that you do because smartphones and computers let you do them. You're your own travel agent. Probably. Right. Right. And you have to manage your personal brand on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever. And you kind of need to do that to be a professional in the world. It's optional, but also kind of compulsory now. Interesting. And that hyper-employment also adds that extra scheduled component. Like now you have to buy a move ticket in advance, or you have to put in the work in advance to

schedule it. Yeah, and now that's your responsibility. And if you mess it up, it's your fault too. Right. if you mess it up, it's your fault too. Right. Right. A lot of what motivates us to act, what motivates us to spend our time in certain ways, what motivates us to use technology in certain ways, well, oftentimes, your core motives are truly a sense that, you know, I'm a worthy human who's doing the right thing and I can feel good about myself.

And those core sense of self, sure they come from personality, they come from background, they come from some innate character traits. But as a sociologist, I'm a firm believer that a lot of what gives us value is based on our society. But why would people aspire to do it all when they quite literally know that they can't? You are giving these units of time what's appropriate to do at 8 a.m.

a workout, let's say. It's much harder to do at 2 a.m. at least for me. So, is it even possible? Well, you're making us sound like very rational humans. And I just don't think we are. So I think that we have these kind of values that translate into desires or thrusts or hopes or dreams or how we feel like we should live our lives.

So Becca, learning to catch yourself in this act of talking about being busy, of feeling busy, maybe that's the first step to taming it. Like for me that like how are you, I'm busy, refrain, I think it means like I know what I'm doing but I'm disconnected from why I'm doing it or where it's leading. Interesting. So for you, the busyness feels like some distraction or cop out from actually thinking about how you're doing. Right.

I think that Creighton Barrel's story to go back to that bothered me because someone is trying to celebrate their birthday. They have to also accept the fact that they're less important than, you know, a flexible home decor chore that obviously can shift it around. Right, that could have been done anytime. But the person doing the home decor chore, they may not even really be prioritizing it

over their friend, they're just like, I'm busy, I'm busy, I have what's the next thing, I gotta go to the store, I've gotta do that thing, I was gonna do it today. I know when I'm in that mode, I just have this strong sense that I don't know what I'm doing next and I need to figure that. And that sort of, it gives you some feeling of security, right? Like, I know, I know what's next. And you're right. I guess maybe I'm making it more personal than it has to be because, you know because mainstream American culture doesn't make it particularly

socially acceptable to actually tell someone how you're feeling. So many conversations in adulthood are what I call life update talks. It's just sort of an exchange of plans and schedules and vacations coming up and things that I have left to get done this week. Right. I'm gonna free up right after I get this thing done. Yes, and yeah, I mean, shocker, it does make it harder to actually get a sense of how someone's doing. I think it would be helpful to tap into why we do what we do, and if we could explain or communicate a bit more of that, it's better than just, I'm busy and I don't want to let you into my world. Yeah, and you know, when you are busy,

it might mean that you're just on autopilot. Hmm. So, you know, like, it's just, when you feel yourself saying or thinking, I'm busy, that's a good red flag. It's like an opportunity to reflect and to ask yourself, what am I feeling in this situation? What am I doing?

And the answer might be nothing. Or at least less. Or at least less. That's all for this episode of How to Keep Time. This episode was hosted by me, Ian Bogost, and Becca Rashid. Becca also produces the show. Our editors are Claudine Abade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineers Rob Smerciac, Rob also composed some of our music.

The executive producer of audio is Claudine Abade, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Baldes. Ian, have you ever tried eating a clock? Eating a clock, I haven't tried that back up. It's very time consuming. Oh my gosh. I'd that back up. It's very time consuming. Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh. Hahaha. Hey listeners, we want to hear from you. When was the last time you remember being alone, without using your phone even, for more than an hour? Please record an audio clip with your phone no longer than three minutes and send it to howtopodcastatheAtlantic.com.

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