“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” — Henry David Thoreau
A man can spend a whole life moving and never actually go anywhere.
Thoreau is not Stoic but he is working the same territory Marcus and Seneca worked. Activity is not the same as purpose. Movement is not the same as direction. A full calendar is not the same as a well-lived day.
The problem is that motion feels like progress. The phone full of notifications, the inbox at three digits, the day broken into fifteen-minute pieces by other people’s needs — that feels like working. It feels like doing something. And at the end of the day, when nothing of substance got moved, the response is usually to schedule more, work harder, sleep less. Treat the symptom by doubling the disease.
I worked in the papermill at Mead for years before I ever sat behind a desk there. I had a manager — call him Dave — mid-level, ran the converting side of the plant in Chillicothe. Smart guy, lot of stress on him, took the work seriously without taking himself seriously, which is rarer than it sounds.
Three things he said to me have stuck for almost thirty years.
First. I was a young guy, ranting about pressure. Something had gone sideways. People were yelling. I was wound up. He let me finish and then he said, calm down. At the end of the day, all we’re doing is making paper. We’re not making heart medicine.
I have repeated that line in my head every time my current job tries to convince me that the most important thing in the universe is whether a shipment got picked correctly. We’re just making paper. It is not nothing. It is also not what people who panic about it think it is.
Second. I was filling out my first real expense report and I kept asking him what I could claim. Can I claim this meal? Can I claim this drink? Can I claim this thing? He looked at me and said, if you were at home, would your wife be cooking that for you? Would you be eating that anyway? That was the test. Not “is it legal.” Not “will the system flag it.” Would you be doing this anyway if the company wasn’t paying?
Third — and this one is just him: you can kiss your expense report, but you can’t screw it. Self-explanatory. He was telling me to not get cute. Do the work. Don’t try to be clever with what already works.
Three lines from a mid-level manager at a paper mill in southeastern Ohio in the late nineties, and they form most of how I evaluate my own busy three decades later. Is what I am scrambling over actually heart medicine, or is it paper. Would I do this at all if no one was paying me. Am I trying to be clever with something that is already working.
The Sermon on the Mount is not gentle about this. Jesus points to birds and flowers — creatures and things that do not scramble and accumulate and perform productivity — and says: look at these. They are cared for. Your Father knows what you need. The anxiety that drives the busyness is itself the thing being addressed.
That is not an argument against work. Scripture takes work seriously and so should any man who is paying attention. It is an argument against the specific kind of frantic activity that mistakes motion for meaning and fullness for abundance.
There is a kind of busy that is faithful. A man who has a household to lead, work to do, and a soul to keep is going to be occupied. That is the calling. But there is another kind of busy — the kind that uses motion to avoid the harder question of what am I actually building, and is any of it worth what it is costing me?
The question worth sitting with at the end of any given week:
What was I actually busy about? Did I choose it? Does it matter?
If you cannot answer the first one, the rest of the week was rented to someone else. If you cannot answer the second, you are not the one driving. If you cannot answer the third, you are working hard at something you will resent later.
A man who knows what his time is for cannot be sold the lie that being busy proves it is being used well.
It’s just paper. Most of it. Pay attention to the parts that aren’t.