you ask sneh answers: what does it mean to be "busy"

happy thursday lil bees!

… Yes, I know I said only weekly newsletters.

I couldn’t resist this week, especially when you beautiful, thoughtful souls engage in such interesting discourse. I know I’ve said this before, but this is one of the biggest reasons I started this newsletter.

To give space to pause in our always-on world.

To think and feel deeper around our multi-faceted relationships with money and how it dictates our relationship with purpose, people, and the world.

To create conversation around stigmatized topics like money.

So in honor of open conversation, I wanted to share some thoughts by one of our bees from Tuesday’s article.

Before I share thoughts from Aparna and me, I really want to appreciate the time and effort this subscriber took to write out such a thoughtful response!

It’s always wonderful to learn how you folks think, and I’m so grateful for the active engagement and such a well-crafted disagreement. Our way is certainly not the highway 🙂 So let’s get into it.

When we talk about the exhaustion epidemic, it’s easy to assume that all forms and causes of exhaustion are equal. Of course, this is not true - many work demanding hours at daily-wage jobs, juggle time-consuming child/elderly care, and still others are forced to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet. These are all causes of exhaustion that are a direct consequence of systemic inequity, and therefore, are much more difficult to exercise control over. This article - with its focus on the “cultish attitude to busyness” - is not meant to provide solutions for these systemic issues, since the primary causes of those behaviors are poorly-constructed socioeconomic systems rather than individual behavior choices. 

However, there are some of us (more privileged folk) who do have the ability to exercise more control over what we do with our time. Our experience of exhaustion is distinct: we know that we are responsible for exhausting ourselves, we sometimes also know how to fix it - and yet we struggle to do so.

Why is that? The initial article tries to root this question in an observation of perpetual busyness. This busyness manifests in different ways, like adding habits to our already-detailed routines, maintaining a stacked calendar filled with endless social activities - but ultimately, all manifestations have the same effect: we engage in these activities, feel exhausted and drained, and then succumb to our band-aid solutions to cope. Aka, neither the busyness nor the solution actually serve as energizing activities, and instead combine to form a vicious circle. 

This understanding spawns two questions: 

• How do we define busyness to differentiate between “time-filling” activities vs. “cup-filling” activities? 

• How can we devote more time to the latter, so that we are energized rather than emptied, even if the activity is tiring?

Answers to these questions are very personal - what constitutes exhausting busyness for one individual may be an energizing activity for another. However, in our personal experiences, there is some level of introspection required to arrive at any answer. And this only arrives as we make space in our lives to reduce the noise, so that we can better identify which activities really matter to us, and which ones we’re happy to subtract.

💭 what do you folks think?

closing thoughts

As always, please let me know your thoughts / feedback / streams of consciousness at [email protected].

If you enjoyed reading this, help me spread the word & share with your friends and family :)

until the next 🐝 , and with 💛 ,

Sneha