Someone asks how you’ve been, and you tell them you’re busy. Often it’s a complaint. But there can be a small satisfaction in saying it, too. People need you. There are deadlines with your name on them. Your time is in demand.
I know this feeling myself. When I worked in finance, I remember that a packed day could feel like an achievement in itself, even when I couldn’t have told you what all that activity had added up to.
The Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith noticed how much we care about appearing successful long before anyone had a shared Google calendar. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, he asked, “For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?” Much of our pursuit of wealth and rank, he argued, comes from a wish “to be observed, to be attended to”. As he put it, “It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us.”
Smith was writing about wealth and social distinction, not modern office life, but I wonder whether something similar is happening when we tell people how busy we are. Are we proud of what we're accomplishing, or partly of what being busy seems to say about us?
Busyness as a badge of status
In 2017, Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan published Conspicuous Consumption of Time in the Journal of Consumer Research. They argued that “a busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol.”
Across a series of studies, they found that people could interpret busyness as evidence of high social standing. Someone with little time to spare was judged competent, ambitious and in demand. Like a rare gemstone, as the authors put it, a busy person seemed scarce and sought after.
The effect had limits, though. Among Italian participants it reversed, and the person with more leisure was seen as higher status.
The study examined how people perceive others, not whether busy people enjoy their schedules or deliberately overwork to impress anyone. However, I'd say it helps explain why “I’ve been incredibly busy” can sound like more than an account of the past week. It can also suggest importance.
That is roughly where the modern research meets Smith. He thought the pursuit of status was driven in part by wanting other people’s attention and approval. A crowded diary may serve as a different kind of status symbol from the wealth he described, but it draws on a recognisable desire: to feel that we matter in other people’s eyes.
There is another attraction, though. Busyness can change how we feel about ourselves.
The pride we take in being busy
In a 2018 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Jeehye Christine Kim, Monica Wadhwa and Amitava Chattopadhyay investigated what they called a busy mindset: the subjective feeling of being busy. Across seven studies, they found that people who were prompted to feel busy went on to make more self-controlled choices, and traced that effect to a boost in their sense of self-importance.
A different kind of reward appears in research by Ioana Lupu and Joonas Rokka. In “Feeling in Control”, they drew on interviews and weekly diaries from professionals at two firms. They identified a state they called optimal busyness, when people felt energised, productive and in control of their time. Some wanted to prolong or recover that feeling. One particpant, Nicola, described the attraction: “You become a little bit of a junkie for a deadline and for work.”
Both studies help explain why we might become attached to being busy. It can make us feel important, capable and in control. But neither feeling establishes whether the work we're doing is worthwhile. That's a different question.
Being busy isn’t the same as doing something worthwhile
In November 1857, during a financial panic that was bringing down banks and businesses, Henry David Thoreau wrote to his friend Harrison Blake. Early in the letter, he asked a question that has stayed with me: “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”
Thoreau was challenging the assumption that hard work was admirable regardless of its purpose.
I think there is a habit of striving that can obscure that question. Once we’re used to chasing the next promotion, qualification or project, reaching another milestone can feel so rewarding that we forget to examine why we wanted it. The goals may be perfectly worthwhile. But progress towards a goal is not evidence, on its own, that it was worth choosing.
This isn't an objection to hard work. People often work long hours to provide for themselves or others, with little freedom to choose otherwise. Work can also be absorbing and valuable in its own right. Thoreau's challenge is most useful where we do have some choice: are we pursuing a goal because we value it, or partly because the pursuit lets us feel accomplished?
A note on leisure
Think about how we justify our free time. We read because it makes us better informed. We exercise because it keeps us healthy. We take holidays so we can return to work refreshed. These are perfectly good reasons. But does everything we enjoy need to produce some additional benefit?
In a 2023 review of research on leisure and meaning in life, Seppo Iso-Ahola and Roy Baumeister argued that leisure can contribute to a meaningful life through freedom of choice and intrinsic motivation. They described activities pursued “for the inherent pleasure of doing it,” rather than to achieve an external goal. Not all leisure is equally fulfilling, they acknowledged. But activities can be meaningful even when the skills they develop have no practical use beyond the activity itself.
The philosopher Alan Watts illustrated the idea rather wonderfully in his lecture Work and Play. He began by swinging an orange around on a string, fascinated by the simple pleasure of watching it move. “Because it’s not useful, it doesn’t really achieve anything that we would call purposive work, it simply is what we call play,” he explained.
Watts returned to this idea later in the lecture, questioning the assumption that everything has to be useful. “Useful for what?” he asked. His point was that play doesn't need an outcome to justify it. The pleasure of the experience can be enough.
Some of the things that make life better don't need to accomplish anything beyond the experience itself.
The difference between being busy and living well
So back to that small glow of satisfaction when you tell someone you're busy. Perhaps it means other people rely on you. Perhaps you’ve spent the day working hard at something you care about. There's no reason to distrust that satisfaction automatically.
Busyness can come from necessary responsibilities, meaningful ambitions or commitments we've never thought to question. The research helps explain why a packed schedule can feel flattering or rewarding. It cannot answer Thoreau's more difficult question about what the effort is for.
Being busy tells us that our time is in demand, and it may make us feel important. It tells us much less about whether we're giving that time to the things that deserve it.