The Seculosity of Busyness

“The most purely, proudly American genre of writing might be the to-do list”
– Parul Sehgal

The consequences of seculosity is that we have become a society searching for a sense of “being enough” in our everyday achievements. In other words, we begin justifying our lives by what we do and how we perform.

One of the great contributions of my generation – go Millennials! – is the brilliant gift called “memes”. To the uninitiated, a “meme” is a picture that has an image and statement that describes a particular idea, behavior, or style that is easily identifiable within a culture.

Often times a meme like this one is followed by, “#Mood”, “everyday”, “my life”, or “Amen” – a recognition that our fast paced modern life is a shared experience among people anywhere and everywhere.

I am hardly the first person to note how ubiquitous busyness has become part of our day-to-day. With parents working full-time jobs and driving their kids to extracurricular activities or young adults working 60-80 hours a week and making time to spend time with family and friends, no wonder we find solidarity in Cruella Deville’s crazed look! Either we have no time at all or we are trying to “save time”. We measure “the good life” in miles driven, productivity hacks, and checking off boxes on our to-do list. As a result, we have lulled ourselves into believing tha being busy is to be valuable, desired, and justified. It signals importance, and, therefore, enoughness.

As David Zahl writes,

“The demands on our time, and for our attention, only seem to increase with each passing year, growing ever more frenetic and unforgiving. Advertisers have begun to talk of the dawn of “the attention economy” for good reason. Some chalk the escalation up to a changing global economy, some to smart technology, some to post-Christian spiritual restlessness. Whatever the case, “busy” is no longer the sole purview of high-octane professionals and parents of toddlers. Everyone I know is busy, and hardly anyone frames it as a conscious choice. If anything, it feels like the only means of survival. […] The more frantic the activity, the better. The implication, of course, is that if we’re not over-occupied, we are inferior to those who are. Busyness has become a virtue in and of itself.”

Being busy is attractive because 1) it allows us to feel like we’re advancing on the path of life 2) while distracting us from less pleasant realities like uncertainty and death. Additionally, we see our busy life and exhaustion as a benchmark and a status symbol – a public display of a full life.

David Zahl makes it clear that what lies at the root of chronic busyness is performancism.

“Performancism is the assumption, usually unspoken, that there is no distinction between what we do and who we are. Your resume isn’t a part of your identity, it is your identity. What makes you lovable, indeed what makes your life worth living, is your performance at X, Y, or Z. Performancism holds that if you are no doing enough, or doing enough well, you are not enough. At least, you are less than those who are “killing it.”

If this sounds eerily familiar in regards to our favorite passtimes, then it should. Sports like Basketball, Football, Baseball, Soccer, Racing, Swimming, and Rock Climbing are all activities that athletes have to perform and achieve X, Y, or Z – if they are not doing well enough, then they are not good enough. Maybe as a culture we have integrated our criteria of athletes and sports teams to our daily lives.

If the world of professional sports doesn’t hit home for some of you (or at all), then we can look at experiences that are familiar: school and social media.

Grades and Likes are barometers that point to a full and good life. We ascribe a lot of power to a single grade or the amount of likes we get with good reason. Nevertheless, one failure on an exam or less likes may be all it takes to confirm some of our deeper doubts we harbor for ourselves.

“Performancism turns life into a competition to be won (#winning) or a problem to be solved, as opposed to, say, a series of moments to be experienced or an adventure to relish. Performancism invests daily task with existential significance and turn even menial activities into measures of enoughness. The language of performancism is the language of scorekeeping, and just like the weight scale or the calendar, it knows no mercy. When supercharged by technology, the results can even be deadly.”

The Church is not cut off from this phenomenon. In fact, we have grafted the seculosity of busyness and performancism from the world into our church culture. Whether we are trying to outdo one another in good-works, either out of charity or acts of devotion, we instinctively see our spiritual resume as the ticket for God’s approval. Additionally, we can’t help but measure ourselves – and others – and give value to those who are “busy” serving the church. This is not to say we should serve less or not encourage others, but we need to recognize that we have baptize the language and theology of busyness with Capital-R Religion

The Apostle Paul is right when he said that no one is valued higher than another – we are all equals at the foot of the cross.

“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
Galatians 3:26-29 NIV

“But what if instead of distracting ourselves, we simply stopped? What if we said no more often? What would happen if we slowed down?
We could begin to live ordindary time well.”
– Ashley Hales