Always in a hurry? The truth about how we all got so crazy busy

Always in a hurry
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Just off the back of a week’s holiday, I’ve come back to a decidedly harsh reality check of the never-ending demands of life. It’s a first-world problem. We are always in a hurry, isn’t it? Ironically, when I first heard about the book Crazy Busy: Keeping Sane in a Stressful World by Thijs Launspach it was because I had missed the initial email in my inbox because I had been myself….crazy busy!

The problem as I can see it is that we are all so entrenched in this culture of busyness that it has become the norm. But this constant state of busyness is clearly doing nothing for our overall well-being, leaving many of us feeling utterly exhausted, strung out and most definitely not winning in life.

Pretty much everyone I know complains about how busy they are. We all think our lives are too busy and we don’t have enough time to do what we want. The truth is that we have all the time in the world. We just have too many things we want to fit into that time!

With that said, here, Thijs Launspach, psychologist and author of Crazy Busy: Keeping Sane in a Stressful World (Capstone) gives his insights into why we are always in a hurry and how we got here.

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I can barely remember the last time I wasn’t busy, and I know I’m not the only one. None of us is exactly modest about what we should aim for in life. To fit the bill, we feel like we have to be rich, successful, happy, healthy, creative, fit, attractive and affable, all while leading as interesting a life as possible (and effortlessly raising our children in the meantime!). If we are not successful in all of these areas, we believe we have failed in some way, that we don’t quite match up to standards.

Always in a hurry & wanting it all

The problem is not only that we want all of the above, but also that we believe that this is in fact possible as well. In fact, we are led to believe that having the life of a superhero is in fact, normal. The media constantly feeds us with images of winners: people who are extremely successful and rich and possess a perfect smile and a flat stomach, and whose babies are always in a pleasant mood. And we don’t even need to feast our eyes on celebrities to see this. A mere 15 minutes on social media is usually enough to leave you thinking that everyone is incredibly happy and successful. Everyone except you, that is. The more perfect other people’s lives seem to us, the more likely we are to regard our own lives as incomplete. 

Consuming our way to happiness

Fortunately, the market has provided us with the perfect solution: you can rid yourself of that feeling of inferiority by spending money. We are told that we can consume our way to happiness and recognition. Just purchase product X and fortune will smile on you again – at least that’s what we’re told. 

No surprise, therefore, that we often get stuck on the ‘hedonic treadmill’. We spend much of our time consuming things in the hope that they will make us happy. In reality, however, the things we consume rarely make us happy, beyond the first moment or two. The ‘buyer’s high’ soon wears off and we find ourselves right back where we started. And when that happens, all we can do is try to find the same sensation again by purchasing another product. Like the metaphorical hamster on the treadmill, we end up chasing product after product in the hope that this will somehow enrich our lives.

The need to experience everything

We also consume experiences – everything from weddings and holidays to parties and festivals – in a similar fashion. The idea is that everything is there to be experienced and we should experience everything so that we don’t miss out on anything or feel excluded. This is why we fill not only our work but also our free time with activities, such as sports and social events. We are so aware of the large number of interesting activities on offer that we are afraid of missing out on even a single one.

Fear of missing out

People suffer severely nowadays from FOMO: the Fear Of Missing Out. Our solution is to try to fit everything in or at least to plan our lives so efficiently that we can get the maximum return from our time – but it is not necessarily the best strategy. All that planning takes a lot of brainpower and means you are always in a hurry to get somewhere else than you are. 

Because of our urge to fit everything in, we often miss out on the very things we want to experience. In our rush to lead the best life possible, we often overlook what is right in front of us. We risk never being present where we are, because the answer is always on the horizon. While, in a very real sense, the present is all we will ever have. The answer to FOMO isn’t to spend your life trying to achieve and attain the impossible. The answer to FOMO is accepting that while your life may not be perfect, it’s the best one you’ll ever have – and there’s a lot to be proud of. And besides, there’s just no way of getting around a simple fact: no matter how much we may fear it, missing out on some things is basically inevitable. 

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This is an edited extract from Crazy Busy: Keeping Sane in a Stressful World, by Thijs Launspach (published by Capstone, September 2022). Thijs Launspach is a psychologist and author of Crazy Busy: Keeping Sane in a Stressful World (Capstone). He teaches at The School of Life Amsterdam, is a trainer and keynote speaker on stress and burnout and writes a weekly column for a national newspaper in the Netherlands. Visit www.thijslaunspach.nl / @thijslaunspach.

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