29. Busy is the new lazy
October 3, 2025
To have a modern life is to have a drive to feel busy. To feel busy is to feel needed, worthy, valued. There is another layer as well – when we are busy, we don’t have time to think. We don’t have time to wonder “what if?,” to consider roads less traveled, to question the experiences we had, and the decisions we made, and the decisions we made that led us to the experiences we had. We are living on auto pilot. Our brain is full and yet we keep filling it with social media, streaming shows, video games. We are learning how important it is for our physical and mental health to do nothing, to meditate, to rest. Yet, we don’t. Perhaps we stay busy to avoid quiet time with ourselves, because we aren’t sure we will like what we find.
At one of my jobs, a few of us had been discussing our concerns about the way some things were going, and we took them to our manager. He said – if you were busier, you wouldn’t be coming to me with this! This was true, but whereas he thought he was calling us out, I thought he had touched on something important – when you are busy, you might not have the bandwidth to care about how you are being treated or whether things are fair. You keep your head down and do the work and don’t make waves.
My bold claim for this week is that busy is the new lazy. If we keep ourselves busy, we don’t have the time or inclination to think about what things in our lives are not going the way we’d like them to, to consider how we might go about doing things differently, to try to make a change. Busy is the new lazy because when we keep ourselves busy, we are being lazy about our inner growth, neglecting our awareness, and being non-committal about what we want to be, where we want to grow. We can keep out head down and keep doing the things and not be confronted with messy aspirations or hopes for ourselves or our lives.
As I have discussed in this forum before, our language is rather weak in many important areas, like this one. So, for lack of a better term, I will refer to this ability and desire to regularly reflect on your life as “self-awareness” work. An important area of the Elders-in-Training lesson plan will be self-awareness. I believe that we each have deep innate knowledge that is hard to access with a busy, noisy life. I have experienced this in my own life and heard many others talk about this as well. When I left my job a few years ago, three different women, all a little bit younger, said to me – oh, I can’t imagine not working. When they each said that, I heard, “I’m not ready to not be busy.” Now, all of them are no longer working full-time by choice. A friend recently moved from a house to a condo with no yard. She thought she’d miss the outside work because that had been important to her. But she realized spending time on the yard, even though she enjoyed it, was part of keeping herself busy. She felt a pull to let that go, to slow down and make a deliberate effort to take things off her plate so that she could have time to think, explore, be, and wonder. I feel as though I am observing a shift, an opening, an awareness among many women, a realization that they can choose, that they can step off the carousel and make their own way.
When we quiet down and give ourselves time with ourself, we can hear our own voice and learn or re-learn things that are true about us. Things that may have been hidden by veils or masks that we put on during our walk in the world. Not necessarily bad things, sometimes very necessary things. And with self-reflection time, we can decide what we want to keep, and what we want to leave behind. “Let go of what does not serve you,” is a common phrase among women who are working to build a new chapter. We can make space and build habits in our lives to bring in awareness are of the things I’ve been writing about here for the past six months – our values, connections, stories, creativity, intuition, attention, work, focus.
