I'm Busy

An intensifier such as “very,” “really,” or “extremely” often precedes “busy.” The speaker almost always implies at least one of these things when (truthfully) using this phrase:

1. I am important.

2. I wish I had more time.

Being busy is a contest, much like high-schoolers and undergraduates brag about how little they sleep. Who has it worse? We grant people permission to claim they are busy, even if we know little to nothing about their lives. Middle-aged adults who don’t have children could not possibly be as busy as their parent counterparts, and recent college graduates dipping their toes in entry-level positions are loafing compared to the go-getter juggling five Silicon Valley start-ups.

That is not to say that the latter situations are not demanding. They are. Some folks are busier than others. But all in all “being busy” is rarely cast in a positive light, especially in America.

Graduate studies render me less busy than my undergraduate studies did. Some may scoff and immediately assume I am not working “enough,” whatever that means. Although I work more productively now than I did in college, back then there was so much to do that I doubt my current self could have “thrived” in that environment rather than survived perhaps a little less painfully. Anyway, this means I now have more time outside of work to dedicate to hobbies. Great, right? Who could complain about that?

Strangely, I often miss being that busy, even though life stretched me thin. I realize I was happiest when I felt most miserable. A plethora of subjects – not just science courses and research – tugged my brain back and forth, knotting my neurons. I took photos for my college newspaper. I spent all day on the weekends either at the library writing an essay in German or at a friend’s apartment trying to figure out how to even begin one problem on a weekly problem set. I trained at my university’s gym at six in the morning because otherwise it would not fit my schedule. I crept out of Hyde Park maybe only once or twice per quarter, to embrace Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, a world so unlike the one in which I grew up, and to lose myself in live music. I barely slept.

This realization might sound like I, a twenty four year-old, feel my fondest years are long gone. I admitted earlier that I am terribly nostalgic. But at the same time it helps me figure out how I want to live. Back then every day felt like a metamorphosis. I strive to busy myself as much as I did back then. I am busy with things beyond work: reading, physical fitness, foreign language, writing, and more often challenging endeavors. Maybe I am a masochist, maybe I peaked in college, maybe being alone with my own thoughts scares me, maybe a pandemic contracts, turns my focus too inward, rather than expands my world. Whatever the culprit(s), I pursue “being busy” rather than wish it away.