⚙️ Table Talk #177: The Business of Being Busy 🏃

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TABLE TALK #177
We have become exceptionally good at saving time.

Trains travel faster. Messages arrive instantly. Groceries appear at the door. Emails can be written in seconds. A machine can now produce in minutes something that once swallowed an afternoon.

And yet, curiously, nobody seems to have any time. For all the shortcuts, life feels remarkably full.

Perhaps the problem isn't that we're failing to save enough time. It's what we do with the minutes when we get them back.

🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝 
Ask someone how they are and there's a decent chance the answer will be some variation of: busy.

"So busy"
"Manic"
"Absolutely flat out"

Usually followed by a quick tour of the diary. Work is mad, there's a wedding this weekend, then a birthday, then away for a few days, then friends are staying, then somehow it's December.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this. A busy life can be a wonderful one. But "busy" is a curious answer to the question how are you?

It's a description of how much is happening, not how any of it feels.

Somewhere along the way, busyness seems to have become both a state of being and a rather socially acceptable badge of honour. To have an empty weekend can feel almost embarrassing.

So the space gets filled.

Photo Credit: Halley Morlock


The irony is that modern life is very good at helping.

Every technological leap seems to arrive promising to give us something back. The washing machine. The car. Same day delivery.

All those saved minutes should, theoretically, be piling up somewhere. Instead, the opposite seems to happen. The faster it becomes possible to do something, the more things somehow get done.

One email becomes twenty. A journey that takes half as long makes somewhere twice as far away feel perfectly reasonable. A free evening appears, then rapidly gets claimed. The calendar expands to fit the time available.

And then there's the other kind of busyness: stimulation.

Even when nothing is happening, something usually is. A walk comes with a podcast. Cooking comes with music. Waiting for a friend comes with a phone. Five minutes on the train is apparently enough time to check three apps, answer two messages and discover what a stranger ate for breakfast.

Being interested in the world is a wonderful thing. Being permanently occupied by it might be something else.


Photo Credit: Katie Holtzclaw

Ryan Holiday writes about this tension in Stillness Is the Key.

Despite the title, his argument isn't really a call to spend life sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop. It's about leaving enough space for thought to happen.

Sometimes that can look remarkably ordinary. Walking somewhere without headphones. Sitting on a train and looking out of the window. Acknowledging that the brain can do interesting things when it isn't being given something interesting to do.

There's another, slightly more uncomfortable question buried in all this too. What if busyness occasionally saves us from ourselves?

A packed diary leaves remarkably little opportunity for boredom, uncertainty or any of the other thoughts that tend to appear when everything goes still.

That doesn't mean every hectic week is an existential avoidance strategy - sometimes there really are just twelve things that need doing by Friday. But if every gap in the diary feels like something to fill, perhaps it's worth wondering why.


🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮

Maybe the aim shouldn't be to become less busy, rather a little more discerning about what gets to make us busy.

There is a difference between a life that feels full and one that simply feels crammed.

A full life can contain work, dinners, children, travel, hobbies, ambitions and far too many things pencilled into a Saturday. It can move quickly and occasionally feel chaotic.

Perhaps the difference is simply whether there's still room for something unexpected. A conversation that runs over. A spontaneous pint. An afternoon that wasn't planned three weeks ago.

A full life, after all, doesn't have to mean a full diary.

 

🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷

 

A little reminder, in case you missed our note earlier this week: we’ve brought our prices down. Permanently.

As Wednesday’s Domaine has grown, we’ve been able to find savings that simply weren’t possible when we started out four years ago - and we wanted to pass them on to you.

Thanks to everyone who penned a note in reply to say how thrilled you were about the news. It’s been lovely to hear how much the change is appreciated.

Until next time,
 
Luke x