The effects of being busy
What actually does it mean to be busy? And what actually are the effects of being busy?
I'll tell you what I've noticed in myself. These past few years have been a flurry of activity, with only increases in sight. This state of affairs is very much not something I typically seek. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, as they say. I think what happened is that the "slow is smooth" approach that I had been taking since 2021 actually did work very well. Slow smoothly became fast.
To make this all a little more concrete. After several years of prepping and studying and thinking closely with my comrades, some ideas came to fruition. We started a non-profit, we dove head first into labor work, and our lives became entirely about our political work. I'm now a full-time paid organizer, in a ddition to being an organizer in *all* of my spare time as well. This is something we all wanted. But to be a Lacanian about it, fantasies are always also nightmares.
I now have to *live* with getting exatcly what I wanted. I'm responsible for the political development and labor safety of hundreds of people. I'm responsible for gently and sometimes not-so-gently guiding things in the right direction, and doing so democratically, which is incredibly difficult, emotionally and temporally draining. I'm confronting the forces of evil and the backward forces of "good" daily, dealing with attacks (purposeful or otherwise) from both the left and the right, and all of these have real-world consequences. People lose their jobs. Politicians go down in flames. People are threatened with jail or deportationby ICE. Nothing is abstract anymore: Everything deals with "live amunition" so to speak. Success breeds far more stress than failure, because sussess requires maintenance, brings more responsibilities, more opportunities, more consequences. Failure is easy.
The main effect this has had on me is twofold:
1) I barely read theory, much less create theory anymore. The more time I spend on *practicing* my politics, the less time I *feel like* spending on *thinking* about my politics. You can see how obviously dangerous this is, even f it makes a certain amount of sense. But I genuinely derive less joy from theorizing. All my analytical skills go into social anlysis: What will so-and-so do if the union does X? If my political group does Y, how does that affect these five other labor groups? I guess that scratches the itch? But it's actually disappointing. My whole way of existing was formed by theory and practice together, in combination, and I just don't feel like I have energy for study anymore, even though I love it.
2) What time I do have free, I fill with nonsense. Not internet nonsense, because nothing about the big web reduces stress or feels comforting, but definitely needless entertainment. Comforting entertainment. Rewatching the same shows over and over. Reading fluff novels with no literary value. All hosted on my own servers, of course, and I do get lots of joy spending time maintaining all of that. But I purposefully try to shut off my brain whenever I can.
So this is what it's like to be busy for me. After 3 15-hour days in a row — dealing with grievances, fighting with bosses, cleaning up other organizers' mistakes, fighting with people who should be allies, plannig for the future, sometimes even talking down literally mentally ill people — I can't bring myself to do anything more pause my brain and the only way to pause it is to fill it with nonsense.
I imagine I would feel incredibly differently if I was busy *with* nonsense. If I still had a regular job, making widgets or churning out drivel for some corporation purely for a wage — in that situation I think it would be the reverse. I think I'd be over-emphasizing study and theory, trying to get it in at every opportunity, carrying books and notebooks with me everywhere. I wonder if I'd even interpret it as being "busy," so much as being exploited and robbed of my life. In this sense, the very fact that I feel "busy" and overwhelmed rather than robbed and angry is a good sign that I'm doing things that I care about.
How do you all feel? How would you define being busy?