Chapter 8: The Social Lives of Busyness

In the introduction to his 2015 book The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han summarises the defining condition of the twenty-first century society: ‘[d]espite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age’.¹ This claim that we no longer live in fear of bacteria or viruses in the twenty-first century is fundamental to his interpretation of burnout and the ascendancy of the possibility that we can do things rather than that we should do things. While it is unfair to judge Han’s theorisation of burnout with the benefit of hindsight, his conviction about the demise of viral infection and what this infers for social conditions has rapidly become obsolete. The year 2020 will be remembered as a time when everyday life became conditioned by restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus (the ascendancy of cannot over can) that fundamentally unsettled the overarching direction of theoretical projects to define and explain the twenty-first century. In this final chapter to conclude my investigation into the social life of busyness, I do not intend to follow Han with an alternative interpretation of the social condition of the twenty-first century. The shock of the Covid-19 pandemic has radically undermined the possibility of singularly defining social conditions and the direction of change.² My conclusion is quite simple: busyness has and will always be with us in different forms. It is, however, possible to identify shared narratives about busyness that speak to interpretations of responsibilities we have to ourselves and to others. The intensification of busyness in the twenty-first century condenses the delegation of responsibilities to individuals with little guidance on how to resolve these, so leading to feelings of injustice that this displacement of responsibilities is uneven. In this concluding chapter, I synthesise the empirical material and analysis with reference to the past, present and future of busyness. The last section necessarily reflects on the future of busyness during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.