Chapter 2: Busy Time

In his 2017 BBC radio programme, the social commentator Oliver Burkeman investigates modern-day obsessions with busyness.¹ Beginning his exploration in Times Square in New York, a place that at least in pre-Covid-19 times epitomised the rush of everyday life, Burkeman muses that ‘somewhere when we weren’t looking, it’s like busyness became a way of life’. Clearly busyness has not simply been unwittingly imposed on us. We might be surprised and frustrated by the pace of everyday life and concur with the sentiment that busyness has come upon us by stealth, but there has to be an explanation of why busyness has become omnipresent.