I've been busy ...

Staying on the hamster wheel is a choice

If there’s one single sentence my mother hates hearing from me, or anyone else for that matter, it’s “I’ve been busy.” As in, “the reason I haven’t called is because ...”

We are all busy, it seems. Is there someone in your life who hasn’t reached out because “they’re busy?” “Being busy” has become such a natural part of modern existence. It’s also a collective choice that has been made by society.

We accept “being busy” and absorb it as readily and as natural as we do air and water, so much so that the other day when an Idaho state senator was advocating for the creation of a new government program for four year olds, he went to the classic refrain of “parents are busy” as an excuse supportive of government expansion. Parents don’t have time to teach their kids, he said. Government to the rescue.

Photo by José Martín Ramírez Carrasco on Unsplash

It would be interesting to examine why parents are busy. Could it be that the very government that is trying to “help” busy parents is the same creature that trapped them on the hamster wheel in the first place?

It’s a fact that half of Americans’ income goes directly or indirectly to paying taxes. That’s a big enough problem. Worse, government fiscal policies have made it so that, in a single household, both parents need to work in order to make roughly the same amount of money (when adjusted for inflation) that single-wage households earned just 40 years ago.

That it takes two incomes (and for some, three) just to make ends meet is not an accident. It is a design. The design makes it difficult and perhaps impossible for a lot of families to have the time to learn together, grow together, enjoy together, experience discomfort together, console together, and so on.

More than a hamster wheel, this is a prison, designed by us and maintained by us through our political system. It’s not uncommon, then, for parents who find themselves “too busy” to educate their own kids to demand from politicians the creation of new programs to support their busy lifestyles. Which then forces taxes up, which continues the debasement of the currency, which then makes it so that every dollar doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. Which keeps parents busy and away from their own kids.

It’s odd an place that society finds itself now, considering all of our modern conveniences. Unlike our forebearers, there’s no need for us to go out or hire someone to hunt whale so that we can use the fat to light our homes, for example. It doesn’t take hours to wash and dry clothing. Hunting for and consuming food requires a trip to the grocery store, not the maintenance of a garden and skill with a gun or bow. And yet people are so busy they do not have time to care for their own children. They don’t have time to contemplate and sit with the miracle of existence and the raw beauty of each passing day.

John Adams once wrote, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

And yet, we live in a world designed so that we don’t have the time for the things that Adams imagined in his day. Too many people live meaningless existences, nose to the grindstone, always on the verge not being able to pay the bills, too “busy” to reflect on what it means to be alive, too busy to pass on their own values to their children, outsourcing whatever it is they can to someone or something else.

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