We say we're too busy to think. But what are we so busy doing?
Most of us move through our days accumulating tasks like children gathering shells at the beach. We answer emails, attend meetings, run errands, scroll feeds. We call this productivity. We call this living. But when someone asks what we did today, we struggle to remember anything of substance.
The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of busyness: ascholia—the opposite of scholē, which meant leisure. But their "leisure" wasn't idleness. It was time for contemplation, for pursuing knowledge, for the activities that made us distinctly human. Our word "school" comes from scholē. We've inherited the word but inverted its meaning. Now school itself is where we train children to be busy.
Consider your last truly idle moment. Not scrolling, not watching, not listening to something—just being. For many of us, that moment is hard to locate. We've equipped ourselves with devices that ensure we're never truly alone with our thoughts. We call them phones, but they're really portable escape hatches from ourselves.
But what exactly are we escaping from?
Maybe it's the discomfort of our own company. Maybe it's questions we don't want to answer. Maybe it's the realization that much of our busyness is performance—for others, for ourselves, for some imagined scorekeeper who's tallying our worth.
The philosopher Seneca wrote about how we treat our time as if we'll live forever, while knowing we won't. We guard our money carefully but give away our hours freely to whoever asks. We protest when someone steals our property but never when they steal our attention. We die before we've truly learned how to live.
This isn't a call to quit your job and meditate on a mountain. It's simpler and harder than that. It's noticing the difference between motion and direction. Between filling time and using it. Between being busy and being purposeful.
What if the question isn't "How can I find more time?" but "Am I living the time I have?"
#philosophy #mindfulness #busyness #contemplation