“Hey, how’ve you been?” I ask.
*Sigh* “BUSY!” they grin back.
“Ah yeah, it’s that time of year, isn’t it?”
I don’t know if you’ve had this conversation lately, but I find it has become somewhat of cultural script in my circles. We used to all lie and say we were doing “good” or “well” if you have good grammar. Now, “busy” has become the new “good.” This doesn’t necessarily mean we are suddenly more “busy” rather than “good,” but I think it points to the way we are expected to perform in order to feel like we belong. Busyness and productivity, in our late-capitalist society, have become the most important signifiers of being good members of society. Whether or not we actually have good work to do, we must constantly perform busyness lest anybody suspect that we are not being all that we can be.
But this constant performance of busyness, is not suddenly making us better, more productive citizens. Instead, it is leading to widespread burnout, anxiety, and a fragmentation of our attentions. The Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, has given a remarkable analysis of our present condition in his book The Burnout Society. According to Han, we used to live in a disciplinary society that was structured around telling us what we should do. Institutions like the church, the school, and the prison, formed a disciplinary structure that reinforced right behaviour as a metric of belonging. That paradigm still operates in some ways but increasingly, Han argues, we live in an ‘achievement society.’ The achievement society is structured not around what we should do, but around what we can do. Taboos and “thou shalt nots” are being stripped away and now every option is available. Of course, the human psyche cannot actually handle unfettered access to unlimited options, and the pressure to be or become anything we desire is overwhelming.
Under the conditions of the achievement society, subjects must be constantly producing, constantly improving, constantly saying yes to new possibilities and opportunities. At first, this condition might seem liberatory. No more taboos! No more “shoulds” or “should nots”. You can be anything and become anything. But this flood of possibility is, in the end, debilitating. When everything is before us, Han argues, we struggle to commit our attention to any one thing. Attending in this way would be to close off a possible achievement, to establish a new disciplinary structure or rule for ourselves, and thus risk not becoming all that we can be. What this looks like in my life is a pathological need to keep producing, to write on my days off, to apply for more grants, more opportunities, all while three different screens beckon for my attention while little alerts shake my phone offering their fleeting hits of dopamine. We cannot attend to this for long. Our attentions become so fragmented that we cannot finish any given task before rushing off to another. Or as so often happens, we burnout.
While the disciplinary society caused deep harms of repression and depression, the achievement society, upheld by therapeutic institutions like counsellors, chaplains, and again the Church, is encouraging us to turn ourselves into sites of never-ceasing production which is fueling mass anxiety and burnout as we fail in the Sisyphean effort to be all that we can be. We manically grin at each other while bragging about our busyness – at least for the few seconds we can manage to focus on the exchange.
So, what’s to be done?
Han’s suggestion is that we should draw from the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life, across various traditions to rediscover rhythms of rest and attention that allow us to exist in a way that is not structured entirely by either the imperatives of should or can. It would be tempting to follow Han’s suggestion here with a turn to the contemplative and spiritual practices of the Church – perhaps offering up the Daily Office as a therapy for our fragmented attentions and burnt-out psyches. But this would be a mistake, I think. For the practices of Christianity are not, first and foremost, therapeutic, though they may have therapeutic effects. The practices of prayer, fasting, study, and Sabbath that mark the Christian life can make us more attentive. They can create space and rest as a harbour against the all-consuming speed and busyness of our late-capitalist society. But if that is all they are, we have yet to understand why the Church, in her wisdom, has so often called us back to these practices as the bedrock of the Christian life.
Yet, I am an Anglican, so I will tell you to say your prayers and to go to Church and to take time for Sabbath, and I think doing this really is the best way to resist the burnout of the achievement society. But the resistance is not because these practices themselves will suddenly make you less busy, or more mindful, or less attention deficit, but because they are practices by which we discover the utter gratuity of God’s grace. “Taste and see that the Lord is Good!” declares the psalmist. And this is what the life of prayer is about. That actually we do not need the Church to discipline us to behave, nor therapize us into achieving more, but rather it is in the Church that we discover a place where we do things that are fantastically useless. We take time to sing. Sometimes well. Sometimes in multi-part harmonies! We sit and listen to the wonderous stories of what God has done for people far away and long ago and what God is doing in our midst right here and now. We share our hard-earned money even with people and institutions that we don’t always like or agree with. Sometimes we even come face to face with God. And it is good.
Every week, on the first day of the week, the Church throws a Feast. Feasting is extravagant and gratuitous. It doesn’t achieve anything. It definitely doesn’t make us behave better. But that’s not the point. Jesus is risen and He is in our midst. He is in the Word that we break open and declare for all to hear. He is in the Bread that we break open and share with all who come. He is in the faces of all the broken people who gather, week in and week out because they once met a Man who said, “Come have breakfast with me” (John 21:12).
The Westminster Catechism teaches that humanity’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. From our vantage within the busyness of our burnout society, that sounds like a lot of work. But if this is truly our chief end, then there’s absolutely nothing to lose – and maybe even everything to be gained – from taking the time to begin enjoying God in extravagant, even reckless ways. Who knows? We might even accidentally discover we’re able to focus on something again.
