The glorification of busy

We live in a world that worships time. We live in a world where the value of things get measured by their instantaneousness, by their capacity to be time-bound, time-specific, time-efficient.

It manifests in our rehearsed language: “Due to the interest of time…”

It manifests in the way we emphasize the social status based on people’s productivity and output: the tambays and the proletariat’s white collar jobs; the bourgeois and their blue collars.

We are in a society that glorifies productivity more than presence. We confine ourselves to cubicles and offices all day, keeping ourselves occupied enough not to allow relationships and reflective thinking, which is socially construed in the productivity-based culture as insignificant.

We are walking machines on busy streets, not having even the luxury of looking at the people we come across. We are busy, we are productive, but we are not present.

This culture that glorifies busy could be attributed to that materialistic notion of society.

Commodities

We, as individuals, are turned to commodities to be sold to industries and businesses to generate profit.

Our bodies, abilities, and skills are commodified to serve the interests of a dominant class, hence, we are in constant need for training and work.

The more we are bound to be productive, the more marketable we become. The more marketable we become, the higher probability of us being in higher positions, being included in a certain set of ‘quality individuals’.

We are the manpower, the machines, the legworkers of a struggling economy. Therefore, we should be busy.

The busier we are, the better.

School 

Isn’t the concept of school yet another witness to this zealotry?

For some, they have to stop their education to go to school, which is essentially two different things.

The education which doesn’t concern tuitions, uniforms, classes, grades, pedagogy; which was liberating, substantial, unconditioned; that which celebrates the boldness of learning was interrupted by a structured, manipulative, and busy-bodied fortification of ideologies.

We are made busy with things we ought to learn, but may never be applicable and necessary for our future.

We are once again materialized and objectified to be docile bodies, hammered towards a linear mentality; a singular way of thinking; that we may be pawns for the gamemasters’ disposal.

And yet, we are glorified. We are celebrated and recognized as we had made our lives productive to a purpose. We had used our time wisely writing papers, scanning readings, following instructions, meeting deadlines, graduating.

Compared to the delinquents, to the artists, the student-rebels who used up their time doodling in classes, writing poems and stories of untold lives, fighting for views nonconformist to the majority, exploring beyond the spectrum, questioning the veracity of life, we were the right kind of busy. We are the glorifed busy.

Are we?

We are individuals inclined to technicalities, processes, and science of everything.

Ours is a culture which breeds ‘scientification’ and conformity.

These bearings of productivity, busyness, turn us to focus on the trivialities of life, to be engrossed in the details and pettiness of our living.

We are slowly being dehumanized to fleshed vessels performing actions. Our curiosities and passions about society and life are being diverted to the subliminal.

So for the nonconformist few who find their idle time comfortable, for those who found calm in the unrest in absence of productivity, for those who sought a different path to where we are all heading, for those who are brave enough to go against the flight of tradition, for those humans who devote time to make meaning out of this preconceived world, my toast to you.

You, to me, are the busy. – Rappler.com

Allison Danao is a third year Communication Arts student from the University of the Philippines Los Baños.