Go to "Don't Just Do Something; Sit There" Continued (time5)
4. Research
The focus of my research was much narrower than the focus of my project as a whole. While the paper explores the whole issue of how attitudes to time affect environmental issues, the research section concentrates upon the question of what motivates people in choosing to be busy.
I did not try to make any connection between the activities of the people I interviewed and resource consumption or environmental degradation. As explained in the "Assumption" section which follows, I have not attempted to establish this connection, since I believe it to be self-evident.
The question of why people are busy, yet claim to wish they weren't, has intrigued me for some time. I have wondered whether they dislike the alternative of having time on their hands, and if so, why. More recently I have made the connection between our culture's liking for busyness and environmental degradation. My primary objective was, through exploring the issue with the interviewees, to increase my understanding of what motivates so many people in our culture to be busy. I believe the research was successful in this respect.
Through a questioning of these motivations, as well as through a greater understanding of the costs associated with excessive busyness, people may become less enslaved to this tendency in their lives. The costs involved are not just environmental. As these interviews show, being busy can harm people's health and their relationships with others, People may find that they are much happier if t hey are less busy, and that they can easily forego the increased ability to consume that is generally associated with a busy lifestyle. As well as impoverishing the Earth, busyness can impoverish people's lives.
I do not suggest that people are likely to slow down out of a concern for the ecological health of the planet. As is often the case, what is good for the Earth is also good for human beings, and short-term self interest could be reason enough for people to slow down. It is not in individuals' selfish interests to cram their lives with one activity after another. In fact, it is not in anyone's best interests. People have been duped. Compulsive busyness is a fraud which needs to be exposed.
Assumptions
No attempt was made to find a balanced sample. Rather, I deliberately selected people whom I considered to lead busy lives, and who I believed were articulate and aware of what motivated them. So I am not suggesting the fact that all interviewees were busy proved anything. Rather, I am trying to increase my understanding of the widespread phenomenon of busyness by increasing my understanding of a few busy people. I am assuming that the experience of a few people can shed light on the experience of people in general.
I assumed that large numbers of people in our society are busy and made no attempt to establish this fact. I assumed also that by discovering more about what led the people I interviewed to be busy, I would learn more about what motivates the large numbers of busy people in society as a whole.
I believe many of the motives of the people involved will be similar to those of other busy people in our culture. This is despite the fact that the people I interviewed are far from typical of people in society at large. They have chosen a lifestyle which differs radically from the norm, and their values differ accordingly. However, I believe it reasonable to assume that since they have been exposed to the same kinds of conditioning as most people in our culture, many of their motivations will be the same. In addition, the people involved are articulate and have a well-developed ability to reflect critically on their own motivation. Also implicit in my approach was the assumption that in general, busyness is linked to resource consumption and therefore to environmental degradation. I make no attempt to establish this connection, as I believe the link to be clear.
I do not assume that busyness is intrinsically bad. Many people make a conscious choice to engage in a great deal of activity and in doing so, achieve a great deal that is of benefit. If many people in the green movement were not busily working to counteract the impact of other people's busyness, the level of environmental degradation would be even greater than it is. However, it seems to me that many people are driven by motivations they are not aware of, and which do not serve their own interests or those of the Earth as a whole. I aimed to explore whether this was in fact the case and, if so, to discover more about these motives.
I should add here that large segments of society simply do not have the freedom to be less busy. Low-income families have to work hard just to survive. To them, busyness is not a matter of the psychological factors discussed here, but the harsh reality of having to pay health, housing education and transport costs, and if possible make some provision for their long-term security.
This is a major difference between society in general and the people I interviewed. The incomes of the interviewees may be low, but that is largely through personal choice rather than outward circumstances. In addition, their expenses are also lower than average due to sharing of resources and a rejection of consumerist values.
The Interviews
My initial intention was to have a group interview of about six residents of Bodhi Farm, the community on the North Coast of New South Wales where I have lived for the last nine years. However, after discussing the matter with several of the people I wanted in the group, I changed my plans. They all seemed to be too busy! The task of finding a time when they could all attend a meeting was too daunting, and so I decided instead to conduct individual interviews.
ultimately this was more time-consuming, and did not allow an exchange of ideas which could have proved to be extremely fruitful. However, it probably enabled each person to talk about their relationship with time and busyness in more depth than would have been possible in a group discussion. Two of the interviewees, Grace and Cindy, had read some of the material contained in this paper. The other two, Deborah and Geraldine, were familiar with my hypothesis that busyness was related to environmental degradation.
These are the people I interviewed. The names are fictitious.
Grace
Grace is 34. She has been a resident of Bodhi Farm for four years and is the mother of a three-year-old son. She has for the last six months been starting a small business selling vegetarian food at local markets. She has also worked at the Rainforest Information Centre for the last five years.
Cindy
Cindy is 43. She has lived on Bodhi Farm for eight years and is the mother of two sons, aged nine and fourteen. She is studying for a Ph.D. in alternative economics and teaches part-time at the local Southern Cross university and TAFE College. She was a candidate for the local council elections and at the time of the interview was in the midst of the election campaign.
Deborah
Deborah is 42. She has been a resident of Bodhi Farm for sixteen years and is the mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter. She works full-time in Lismore as a public servant.
Geraldine
Geraldine is 43. She has lived on Bodhi Farm for nineteen years and is the mother of a twelve-year-old girl. She is the director of a welfare organisation in Lismore.
All the people interviewed were women. The effect of gender on attitudes to busyness is one of the aspects of this issue that I would have liked to investigate. Unfortunately this was not possible.
Each interview took about forty-five minutes. I was interested in each person's own experience, and also in their observations about the activity levels of society as a whole.
I began each interview by asking each person whether they saw themselves as busy and if so, what motivated them. All those interviewed talked willingly and at some length about this. I did not have any set questions but asked for details as seemed appropriate. I then invited them to generalise about how they saw the lives of other people.
In general I asked only a few questions and encouraged the speaker to talk at length. This worked well in all cases, and I was pleased with the results of the interviews.
By the time I conducted the interviews, I had read and thought about the issues quite a lot, and had already formed some opinions about motivations for busyness. This influenced the kinds of questions I asked. In my account of the research, I have identified common themes in what different people said. In what follows, each heading denotes one of these common themes. Inevitably, the themes I identified, and the issues I chose to stress are a function of my own biases, and anyone else listening to the interviews and writing an account of them would have identified other issues.
The Connection between Busyness and the Environment
As I pointed out above, I make the assumption that busyness is usually associated with increased rates of the source consumption and therefore with environmental degradation. This approach was questioned by Cindy, who pointed out that most of the adults on Bodhi Farm were involved in "people-centred" activities, and therefore would not consume resources excessively. I believe this does not invalidate my approach, however, since I believe that while the types of activities engaged in by the interviewees are not representative of the activities of society as a whole, the motives involved do have a great deal in common. Furthermore, even "people-centred" activities involve resource consumption if one has to travel in a car in order to engage in them. As Cindy pointed out, "I think the main form of consumption is transport... most of the people [we know] are engaged in people-centred activity".
Grace pointed out that it was not invariably the case that busyness implied environmental degradation:
I mean for instance Geraldine is busy doing a lot of gardening. I wouldn't say she has a negative impact on the environment by using her time as she does.. .but in the main I'd say you're right.
Deborah saw a direct connection between her decision to work full-time and the impact she had on the environment:
I run through what does me working mean?' - It means that I spend 30 bucks a week on petrol and that means carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't have time to plant the trees [to make up for this].. .the ethics of it sit not so well with me.
Level of Busyness
Three of the four agreed that their lives were busy. Deborah's response, however, raised the question of how one defines busyness:
I don't know if I would describe myself as too busy. I know I've got too much too do, that I have too much to do in the time I've got.. .I know I have skimped my sleep for years and that was one of the contributing factors to my illness. I know when work gets really busy and I have a whole lot of things on the go as well as answering the phone and dealing with whatever comes up, I start to not function very well.
Who is to say whether Deborah or anyone else is "too busy"? What is meant by that description?
Clearly, people's values differ and so their perceptions about whether they themselves or others whom they have observed are "too busy". I have used the term, fairly loosely, to refer to someone who has too much to do in the time available and consequently leads a life that is not as fulfilling as it may otherwise be. A more rigid definition may have limited the range of the interviews.
There are no objective standards here. When Deborah said that her health had suffered due to her levels of activity but that she didn't know whether she was too busy, I was confronted with how my own values have affected my inquiry. Like the Kikuyu tribesman whom Karen Blixen writes about in Out of Africa, I thrive on having large amounts of time in which I don't have to do anything in particular. Like him, I would like to "sit down and live". When I listened to tape recordings of these interviews I noticed that I speak more slowly than most other people, and I believe this is an indication that I like to take things slowly.
I have endeavoured not to allow my own biases to distort the message of the people I interviewed. No doubt I haven't been entirely successful.
Someone who to me exhibits all the characteristics of excessive busyness may not feel busy. When I asked Geraldine about whether she was too busy, she asked me if I was referring to internal or external busyness, and Cindy pointed out that the experience of being busy was due not merely to levels of activity, but to how the amounts of activity were experienced:
Cindy: I don't have a sense of it being out of control as I have in the past. I think that's because of my general good state of health, being settled.. and other external factors. People who seem to get an awful lot done and yet seem relaxed-- and they are quite rare -- the key seems to be their attitude.
Cindy felt that often, the external situation was mistakenly seen as the cause of the problem:
We've been trained to believe that time is this external constraint when I actually don't think that's what it is. I think it's your relationship with it that's the key.
Motivation
A logical question to ask people is: "If you think you're too busy, why don't you stop?". This is one of the key questions this research explores, and it seems that a common, implied answer is, "I can't stop because I'm driven by inner compulsions". Here are some of the responses I received.
Geraldine saw her fairly strict religious upbringing as being instrumental:
I feel in my upbringing there was a great emphasis on being busy, on making sure your work was done - and usually there was rather a lot of work.
Grace also pointed to the importance of a religious upbringing in shaping her views. When she had time on her hands, she felt guilty:
I feel like I personally have been brought up with a lot of guilt and I think that's not to do with time but more to do with religion.
Often, guilt and religion go together, long after the particular religious dogma of childhood has been rejected:
Grace: . . when I spend a day on Bodhi Farm there's lots of things that come up for me like "I should be doing something" or I feel guilty... it's not okay to have half a day off specially if its not Saturday or Sunday
Geraldine: It's almost like I've driven myself to work hard to make up for the fact that I'm enormously privileged and I feel guilty about that..so its almost like undermining my own potential for bliss because somehow if I'm a bit more miserable, it might be at least helping other people ...I say that laughingly...the last thing the world needs is another burnt out welfare worker.
At the time of the interview, Geraldine was nearing the end of a period of three months' leave without pay from her job, and she had done a lot of thinking about why she had been so busy before taking this break. Interrupting the busyness of her life seemed to be necessary in order to reflect deeply on what motivated her:
I suppose it's a combination of being in a demanding and reasonably responsible work position that involves dealing with a lot of people, often with fairly delicate emotional issues and that juxtaposed with living here and having a lot of people I can potentially relate with.. and a fairly high energy lifestyle and a fairly busy persona.
Of course, there are clear and rational reasons for working. For Deborah, as for the other respondents, one of the main ones is money:
If I could earn the same amount of money in four days I'd do it in four days.
For Deborah, being busy was to a large extent a means to an end:
For me part of the reason is I absolutely love the results of it, so that I might not feel like gardening, but because I want the results of it I garden. I never a want to be looking out on my verandah with a bushfire coming knowing I've done nothing...I go to some places where it can be really filthy, really run down and people obviously don't do a whole lot, but I don't want to live like that so therefore I keep a routine, especially living in the bush....
For Grace, the need to make money was a basic reason to work, and a busy life was the inevitable result of the intention of making money:
John: Would you say that [being busy] has been necessary in order to make money?
Grace: Pretty much, yeah. Very rarely would you not have to be subjected to that in order to make money.
This raises the question of why the money is wanted. Clearly in our society it is not just for basic needs. Cindy made this point but cautioned against assuming that busyness always implied the desire for excessive consumption:
I think there's many people caught in a survival trap and at the same time they are influenced by the fact that we live in a consumerist society which is saying you have to have more in order to be okay and I think those forces are very strong and it's hard for people to resist them.
Adopting society's values in an unquestioning manner was also seen as a primary reason for people's levels of activity:
Deborah: I think we don't look at alternatives
John: Alternatives to?
Deborah: The status quo. What you do is you do get married, you do have children, you do have a mortgage. You are still different if you're a single parent or you are unmarried.. .1 look at other people's shopping baskets and they produce so much waste and they eat such shit [they have to] work to buy all these things. I notice if we eat fruit and veggies and some dairy foods-- if you don't buy processed food --your bills are so low.... and they work to pay for all this stuff and I think, "Why are people doing this?"
Grace appeared to agree:
They're part of our schooling, which for most of us has been conservative, they're part of our parenting which for most of us has been conservative. I really think that there's few people out there, even in the so-called alternative movement, that are revolutionary thinkers. I think that most of us still have quite conservative attitudes around things that concern our everyday lives, including how we view something like time. I think it's very much part of what we were brought up to believe.
Cindy pointed out that high levels of activity were part of our culture's values:
It has a lot to do with the dogma of economic rationalism and ... a work ethic that is such a strong part of the ideology.
The Importance of Being in Control
A crucial determinant of whether people experience themselves as being busy is whether they are obliged to be doing whatever they are engaged in, or whether they are doing it because they want to. To use Grace's term, people are more likely to feel busy if they are "operating on someone else's clock".
Deborah: Going to Byron Bay doesn't feel like relaxation because it's not absolutely my choice.. it's not that that's what I want to be doing. Usually there may be something else arranged or Leah wants to go.. .the part that is rejuvenating is doing what I want to do.
Cindy: I don't have a sense of it being out of control as I have in the past
I retrospect, I see this as an issue which I would have liked to explore further. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the value of seeing all time as one's own irrespective of whether one is obliged to be doing whatever activity one is engaged in (Nhat Hanh 1985). Work is usually something which people feel they "have to do", and they will have some resistance to doing it. Their experience of the time spent working will be strongly influenced by this.
Busyness as Avoidance
In other parts of this paper, I have suggested that being busy is often a way of avoiding unstructured time. This was supported by remarks some of the speakers made.
Geraldine: The reality of Bosnia and Muraroa. . it feels hard to be awake to the pain and people are encouraged to be busy so they don't notice.
Geraldine: My sister, even much more than me, keeps busy to avoid dealing with emotional things.
Grace saw the desire to avoid idleness as a reason for some of the hostility directed against the unemployed:
Grace:...part of why society ridicules [not being busy], you know, "dole bludgers are lazy good for nothing ratbags" and so on. For me it's part of the whole conspiracy. It keeps the lie alive.
John: So its a way of avoiding looking inside yourself sometimes?
Grace: - and looking at what you're doing. Absolutely. It sustains environmental degradation and inappropriate attitudes about each other and our lives.
Busyness and Age
Cindy pointed out that age is a strong determinant of how busy an individual is:
It's no accident that you're looking at this issue at this time of life [I am forty-two - JR]. It's the time when people are consolidating the areas of work or interest they're involved in. When you're younger I believe people have a sense of, 'there's more time ahead'...It's about making meaning and feeling worth while and this is the time of life that we do this and if people get to our age [forties] and they haven't figured out what they want to be active in, then there's a sense of desperation or concern about that and I think that's what the midlife crisis is about. There's a sense of 'I've got to get it done now'...
I asked Chris, one of the teenagers on Bodhi Farm, whether he thought adults were too busy and he said that they were:
John: Do you think you'll be like that when you get older?
Chris: I hope not.
John: Why do you think they are so busy?
Chris: Because they want to make a difference in the world, but when they're so
busy they don't have time to reflect on what they do.
Grace talked about the differing views of time held by children and adults -- and about how early
the conditioning starts:
Grace:...But what is very interesting about this question of time is when I try to explain it to my three-year-old son. You know, he has such a different concept of it and I'm basically teaching him bit by bit this very vulgar economic.. "come on Tane we've got to get to Preschool", getting pissed of cos he wants to look at a flower or a hole that an insect's dug and he's dawdling and I'm often trying to hurry him up. I get really pissed off when I find myself doing that--with him, with myself, with the world--it's usually when I'm participating in the system that everyone else is involved in. On the Farm I can chill out to a large extent ...it feels like a tempo thing. If 100 is the units of speed in Lismore and zero is not giving a fuck about how much you get done, then when I'm on Bodhi Farm I'm maybe around sixty and Tane is zero. He's got very different concepts. He's starting to realise its a very important thing. He talks about time and he wants a watch even though he doesn't understand it. He sees that it's important and it's precious.
John: So many parents talk about the frustration of trying to get kids off to school in time and it's like the meeting of these two different ways of experiencing time.
Grace: That's a good example
The Impact of Busyness
Geraldine, Deborah and Grace spoke about the negative impact of busyness on their lives, particularly with respect to their relationships.
John: Another thing I'm interested in is how this busyness affects relationships. Do you see it as having an impact on your relationships with your friends and the people you live with?
Grace: Absolutely. It really disappoints me, really disappoints me...
Grace talked about how being busy made her feel:
I feel like I'm not in control, not empowered, that there's something greater that is forcing me to rush around, something that is pretty stressful, not carefree. It's very obvious when you go to town that people are operating on someone else's clock.
Grace talked about the influence of busyness on our consciousness and how we relate with the natural world:
I feel like if we don't pay too much attention to things we will abuse them. And time is very much a facet of that. If we don't pay too much attention to the beautiful forests that we could be breathing every night and walking in and sitting in and becoming part of, it's much easier to abuse them. If we could sit in the abattoir for twenty minutes and just listen to the noises and see the blood it'd be a lot harder to push the bullet into the steer's head. It seems like speediness allows little time for reflection about things.
Deborah also felt that busyness had affected her relationships:
My job erodes into my communal life enormously.. Can I re-establish it when my job finishes?
Geraldine felt that her busy and demanding working life reduced her capacity for intimacy with the people she lived with:
My work is about family support and all that, but sometimes I've felt so unrelated when somebody here has been having a bit of a hard time and wanted to talk about it. I guess [I have been] almost feeling problem-saturated and in a way being saturated with difficult things.
What Happens When You Slow Down?
For Geraldine, slowing down was sometimes a painful experience, because it caused her to see the busyness which is such a fundamental and destructive aspect of our culture:
Partly as a result of having this slow time, I have seen far more acutely than I have seen before it's really like a disease. It's so common people don't know they've got it and it's really easy to feel stupid or redundant if you don't have that disease, so [I am] almost seeing it more and more as the dominant paradigm.. the idea of "you have to do more and more" as the whole basis of how the culture keeps turning .. sometimes I find it deeply sickening... I've been doing a bit of weeping and the weeping is about my own frailty and occasionally feeling like, "why am I going back to my work?" I don't feel like I even have anything to offer sometimes.
Grace spoke about a powerful experience she had of experiencing time in another way. This different experience of time was accompanied by changes in the way she experienced her body.
John: Can you Say something about the experience you had driving home the other night?
Grace: Yeah, that was amazing. What was so classic about it was I'd put my name down for some counselling and someone had actually wiped my name off because the counsellor was going away on holiday and she hadn't had the time to ring me and tell me my appointment wasn't happening and I had a sense of "well shit, I can't wait another month. I'll have to do something for myself", and I've been incredibly anxious about time. I think a lot of it's to do with some programming that I allowed myself to encounter around my work at RIC [the Rainforest Information Centre], around the urgency of the Earth dying, around the urgency that I felt of me doing something about that. ..so I feel like I've been anxious about time for a long time. I don't like wearing a watch but I'm still entwined in the system that requires that sort of information and I'm often running late and I speed in my car because I'm trying to get home to my family and the other night I was driving home in my car and the road was straight in front of me, so it was quite visually impacting on me. It was linear and it had two borders around it, it was narrow and it was functional. .
John: Lots of straight lines in our society.
Grace: Yeah, and it kind of reminded me of a time line basically, and along that road I saw I had to get to The Channon by a certain time to pick you up, I was anxious that Tane was asleep and not hassling Kilty, I had to get to The Channon shop by a certain time and that was just in the next half hour. After that there was getting up at six in the morning and cooking for the market and getting everything together to take to market, but... couldn't see beyond the next 500 metres which was representative of the next two hours and I noticed I was speeding and it was great, it just came to me . . . that this internal flutter that I sometimes have, it's anxiety-producing, this anxiety that I'll never get enough done and I'm always racing against this thing that's in front of me--i.e., the road, you know, and this image came to me of instead of the road being vertical and in front of me, and bordered by these two sides of the road, reasonably narrow, I actually viewed it as horizontal and what happened was the line which made it narrow dissolved and it was basically this encompassing vision of the moment and its beauty. It's hard to describe but all of a sudden I dropped ten kilometres in my speed, the moon was up, the stars were up and I didn't have that border any more. It was like it was expansive. My moment was expansive and um. .
John: Physically you felt different?
Grace: Absolutely, and it was an amazing vision that I hope I can use a bit more -- make that line horizontal and the edge dissolved. It didn't exist and all that existed was that I was driving home and all I had to do was drive that road and it wasn't a race that I could never win. It became an experience that I was involved in. I like that: not a race I could never win but an experience that I was involved in. That's not bad is it? Did you get that?
Cindy pointed to the importance of treating each moment as it comes, rather than thinking about the future:
In the last few weeks I've had a sense of not being rushed, even though I've got a lot to do. If I actually take more notice of each moment and feel less worried about how I'm going to have enough time to do the next thing -- because a common feeling I have is that whatever I'm doing, I'm thinking about the next thing I have to do, or all the things I'm not doing while I'm doing this thing. That really impinges on your experience...When you focus on the moment you don't have that sense of there not being enough time
Deborah and Geraldine stressed the importance oft heir relationship with nature in slowing down and relaxing:
Deborah: I'm going to try a fortnight's holiday by the beach and see what might change if I'm actually on the ground, really in nature. The best feeling lever get is out in nature. There's no other way. Every morning I go out in the forest and I'm clearing leaf litter. It is like a different sense of time.. .and it's not complex bush. I just wonder what it would be like if we lived in real nature.
I asked Deborah about a remark she made that when she was working in the forest near her house, she experienced the passage of time differently:
Maybe it's more a completely different experience rather than a different experience of time.. very much like I'm watching the ground, the plants. I'm looking at things in detail I'm watching which birds come around ... it's probably more that its quality of experience is very different... and I have to wear a watch or I'd still be there at sunset... it could be that I just like a habits d call it my meditation. Its renewing, a lovely thing to do and I don't like stopping it. Maybe some people meditate like that. I've never been in meditation like that...
When working in this way, she was less pressured by time constraints:
Deborah: Time not being like a time line any more. It's not so much a problem any more.
Geraldine said she experienced a deep joy and relaxation when planting trees and clearing away weeds:
Geraldine: When I'm out hacking about in the forest with trees I planted 12 years ago and are really big now and there's a sense of being god's handmaiden and there's a sense of us breathing each other that I find quite intimate and quite wonderful
Time and Education
Deborah on education and our perception of time:
I really think our concept of time is distorted by our education system.. .my experience was: be a good student, work hard, don't think about whether I like it or not, go to school every day, 5 days a week, bus in and out-- do that all through primary school, then go to high school, then go to university, then go to teachers' college. I've had 19 years of producing things for other people, and not a lot of experience of learning that I'd organised for myself-- a little bit, not a lot. I still have a sense of-- I've two things from that: One is I almost need a deadline to get stuff done and the other thing is an enormous sense of relief not to have time deadlines. To me the greatest pleasure in life - one of the best times in life -- I think this is why holidays work - is not to have to do anything by a particular time and as soon as a time frame starts to come into things I start to panic a bit... I don't understand it. I wish we could understand it better but I really think school sets some patterns there that I don't like.
John: By putting deadlines?
Deborah: It's possibly quite comprehensive. By the fact that we're doing stuff that isn't our choice, by the fact that we're regimented. The fact that we're going to the same place every day, that we have timetables. If you look at the experience of a hunter-gatherer or people in other indigenous cultures, they have a very different experience of life in these years...and I don't know where to go with that, but I'd really like to see some studies done on the impact of education and the way it's set up on our view about life and time and the way we get things done, because I'd say most people in our society do things by a rush at the deadline--the exam style--which is probably the worst way to do things and I grapple with that one -- not to put myself in the exam deadline mode.
Deborah pointed out how long it had taken her to realise what her education had done to her:
Deborah: I've been out of school for twenty years and I'm only just starting to understand...
She did not want Leah, her daughter, to suffer from the same kind of conditioning:
Deborah: The thing I've tried to teach Leah is, if you've got homework to do this weekend, do it Friday night. Her view of herself and whether she's enjoying life is according to whether she's got stuff to be done...
It seems clear from these interviews that the feeling of having too much to do in not enough time is a common and major problem in the lives of many people. It also seems clear that people feel they would like to change this situation but for various reasons, feel unable to do so. Due to their conditioning and societal pressures, they feel trapped in their busyness.
One of the explanations I had for some people choosing to be busy was that having a full schedule and being in a hurry can make people feel important. These interviews did not confirm this, but I still believe it to be a possibility. I could have asked specific questions about this.
The reasons for busyness which did emerge in these interviews included: the influence of upbringing (particularly religious), the desire to earn money, pressure from the rest of society, unquestioning conformity to social norms and the desire to avoid unstructured time.
Another thing which appears to emerge from these interviews is that for some people at least, their most intensely fulfilling experiences involve a release from their usual ways of experiencing time. In the cases talked about) a close connection with nature played a part.
It is also fair to say, based on these interviews, that many people find that their relationships with others suffer as a result of their own and other people's busyness.
Go to "Don't Just Do Something; Sit There" Continued (time5)