Women never retire.
That was my holiday epiphany last Christmas, or Thanksgiving, when I
noticed that all the men in the house were watching TV, playing Xbox, or
napping, while the women were busy cleaning house and making dinner for
a gazillion relatives.
Even mom, at the ripe age of 81 (or 82?) doesn't get a respite. It
seems no one told her at age 65 that she could stop doing all that
"woman's work" around the house at about the same time dad stopped being
an auto executive.
The retirement gap between men and women is likely easing somewhat in
"modern" families where men take on more of the traditionally feminine
roles of "keeping house." But still, it's an obvious, and probably
overlooked, observation (by men at least) that women don't ever get to
"stop" like we do (again, in traditional homes).
Which leads to articles in the
NYT and
Slate about "busy" people.
Hanna Rosin sums up the
NYT piece in Slate:
The “Busy Trap,” after all, is written by a man and one who
does not mention having children. And in his view a 23-year-old single
man has a daily reality not all that different than a 40-year-old mother
of three. “Almost everyone I know is busy,” writes Tim Kreider, “They
feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing
something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the
way students with 4.0 G.P.A.s make sure to sign up for community service
because it looks good on their college applications.”
But after that brief moment of revenge/relief I began to feel pretty
uneasy, because what good does it do me that men live this way too? So
many lines in that story made me cringe in self recognition: “Even
children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with classes and
extracurricular activities.” And then this part, which really hit home:
“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against
emptiness; obviously your life can not possibly be silly or trivial or
meaningless if you are so busy.” My one quibble with Kreider is his
insistence that this kind of busyness is a form of bragging, a
one-upsmanship over who worked more hours, familiar from how my
investment-banker friends from the '90s used to act.
I've
always been annoyed by "busy people." I've never been one. Perhaps
it's my inherent laziness, or my inner Greek, but I've never understood
people who "don't have time." Putting parenthood aside (and even with
parenthood, moms still seem to get the shaft), the busy people began
about the time of college, which for me was the early 1980s, and it
moved into full swing in law school.
The busy people were your friends and fellow students who always spent
far more time than you did studying. The thing is, it's not like they
necessarily
got better grades (though some did). Which begs the question of
whether busy-ness, in school at least, is a sign of the over-achiever or
the UNDER-achiever (i.e., does the student study more because he's a
geek, or because he needs to study more to keep up with the rest of us?)
There was certainly a "cult of study" when I was in law school. People
were insane. They formed elite study groups at the beginning of the
year, because "that's what law students do." And they studied every
night for a gazillion hours and never had time to do anything social
because, you know, law school is just insanely hard. I never understood
that.
(It used to drive me nuts when people would find out I was in law school, and then wax about how "hard" it must be. It
was
hard, like any good education at any good school. But it simply wasn't
nearly as bad as people made it out to be - which has always made me
suspect that med school is its own busy-trap.)
Law school was certainly harder than undergrad (and harder than grad
school, for me at least). And undergrad was harder than high school.
But law school wasn't such a quantum leap harder than undergrad that
everyone needed to suddenly stop having a life outside of school. Yet
many law students did. And they were proud of their lifelessness. For
many, being busy was a form of bragging. But that doesn't necessarily
mean that they
made themselves busy
so that they could
brag. The bragging could have been an afterthought to the busy-ness -
making ego lemonade out of busy lemons, as it were.
While my lack of busy-ness - I'm the last person who would say no to an
invite to do something because "I have something else scheduled" (and
I'm also the last person to schedule any weekend plans in advance) - is I
suspect due in part to my own laziness, I sometimes suspect that the
busy-ness of certain friends comes not from any desire to brag, but
perhaps from the opposite of my lazy-ness. While I like to turn my
brain, and body, off after a long day of work, they like to turn it on.
Thus the endless tennis lessons, polo lessons, book clubs, etc.
And to some degree I'm jealous of my busy friends. There's a certain way
of life in Paris, and I suspect NYC, where people tend to take
advantage ("profiter", as we say in French) more of their surroundings.
In Paris, my friends are always going out to the latest show, exhibit,
or just for dinner, or a nighttime picnic, with friends. My New York
friends are similar.
But, recently a New York friend complained that, yes, people are always
out and about it NYC, but the problem is they're ALWAYS out and about,
making it impossible to organize anything with her friends. In Paris in
August, the traditional vacation time, a friend posts a single message
on Facebook that they're having a "pique-nique" at 7pm next to the
Seine, and the next day somewhere between 7 and 20 friends will
eventually show up, no further organizing necessary. In NYC, she said,
you'd have to organize the picnic a good month in advance, or no one
would show (same in DC, I fear). "Can you imagine just posting on
Facebook that you're throwing a picnic, and then just expect people to
show?" she asked me.
So I'm torn on the whole "busy" thing. There is a part of me that feels
like maybe I'm not "living" enough. But there's also a part that feels
far too many of my friends are living a
bit too much, and thus not living much at all. They've lost any sense of the impromptu, of caprice, in their lives.
I'm reminded of the T.S. Eliot passage:
We do not wish anything to happen.
Seven years we have lived quietly,
Succeeded in avoiding notice,
Living and partly living.
There have been oppression and luxury,
There have been poverty and licence,
There has been minor injustice.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.
So is "busy" a prerequisite to living? Or an impediment?
The 
Want
to be happy? Don't try to think yourself happy, just smile instead (regardless
of how you feel). Want to boost your will power? Tense up.
