Busy People are Lazy
SA Episode #20
BUSY PEOPLE are naturally very active as officials, bankers, lawyers, engineers, consultants, managers, or academics but there isn’t any “higher activity” they’re concerned with, to paraphrase Nietzsche. In this respect, they’re lazy. This is the main deficiency of busy people. They’re busy doing something, anything, yet what they’re doing is “almost always a little bit senseless.”
By contrast, if you’re concerned with a “higher activity”—let’s say your name is Francis Bacon or Marie Curie—you may often choose to strategically waste your time with elegance and style, as doing nothing is a sign of strength and nobility; you refuse an artificial pace of life.1
I discussed, in-depth, the definition of “higher activity” in this essay; therefore, my goal with today’s essay is to tackle how busyness isn’t merely a social condition but an intellectual and spiritual one. Busyness is a disease which joyfully and stealthily feasts upon the marrow of your vision, sipping your creative juices; then exploiting them to extinguish your inner fire, thus canceling your imagination.
Q: Does your work make you think about work during the hours not officially spent working? And if it does, do these thoughts stir anxiety or excitement?
I use this heuristic to tell whether a project serves me or owns me: if I give it only a few hours a day in theory but it haunts my nights in practice, then somewhere along the way I’ve been fooled into servitude.
Omar F. Najjarine isn’t wrong: “Wage labor is so destructive because what’s left of you after work is only a tiny fragment of your potential. By the time you clock out, the damage is already done. You’re too drained to do anything worthwhile with your soul. Free time is not, in any meaningful sense, free. It’s time spent in recovery. Evenings and weekends thus become a desperate attempt to recover the self that has been annihilated during the work week. Wage labor doesn’t just make life exhausting but shallow. It causes what we might call monotony-induced blindness. Monotony dulls cognition. It erodes the mind’s freshness.”2
Such levels of burnout encourage more and more degenerate “leisure” activities (playing video games, watching Netflix shows, scrolling TikTok) to rise in order to cope or feel relief of some kind...which only renders you even more unlikely to build and elevate a creative project to a noble mission.
My bet is that this kind of spiritual lethargy is at least highly correlated with—if not caused by—our economic system’s near-religious faith in specialization and the hustle culture. I have yet to meet someone (prematurely) specialized in data analytics, financial risk modeling, or intellectual property rights who enjoys their work at least from time to time, let alone regularly.3 This is an unimportant signal anyway; you’re not encouraged to enjoy your work. The hustle culture by default gives utmost priority to work for the sake of work, treating it as an absolute value or principle to abide by. Likewise, I have yet to meet someone who hustles for a living whom I truly admire. BONESAW 🕊️ came up with a great observation: “Working with a chip on your shoulder is inferior to having fun doing the work. Struggling labor is romanticized yet it’s the echo of an impotent spirit. If no love can be derived from it, move on!”4
Specialization kills the craft; division of labor dulls your soul; and thus love is neutralized. I recall with great satisfaction the days when I worked on publishing my 1st book—The Sovereign Artist—and how everything felt like play. As modern books are largely ugly, I decided to take care of the entire process from start to finish (strategy, research, writing, editing, design, visuals) except for the cover. Nassim Taleb is right; authors get to act like artisans by writing while typesetting. Many writers rely on a few researchers to help them write their books; then they hire an editor, of course a publisher, maybe a designer, a visual artist, some consultants, and so on.5 The creative process gets very efficient and thus no longer creative, as efficiency is precisely what you want to avoid in all arts and crafts.6 If your goal is to turn artists into workers, focus on separating them from their final product.7
I’d like to close this essay with a striking reflection by Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, who helped establish the study of religion as an autonomous field rather than merely a branch of sociology or psychology. He rejected specialization both in theory and in practice:
“Contemporary scholars are no longer generalists or polymaths but ultra-specialized experts on ultra-narrow niches. The thought that one day I might become one of them numbs my sarcasm and saddens me. These people know a great deal about very little; this is how a friend defined the contemporary scholar: someone who knows more and more about less and less. X knows everything about certain stones; Y almost everything about certain papers from Egypt. If they spend their days and nights in laborious research, they don’t do it for the discovery of higher truth—but because they can do nothing else; because they’re driven by a mania equal to that of a stamp or snail collector. Specialists are tireless slaves by choice. On their faces, you can’t seize the noble fatigue of meditation, the boundless obsession with fundamental problems, or the passion for a global understanding of life—what you seize is only physical exhaustion or the absence and timidity of their spirit. Was this what the likes of Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz wanted from the world; was this why they suffered and struggled?!” — Mircea Eliade8
Some Updates
I’ve started writing my 2nd book! And, in the same fashion as with my 1st one, I’m writing it in public. This newsletter is the playground that gives me the freedom to organize my research, exercise my creativity, and seek feedback. Not sure about its title yet; but in terms of structure, expect philosophical essays—this essay itself is a teaser—and aphorisms, both sprinkled with fiction and poetry, in contrast with my 1st book which had little fiction and no poetry.
The main theme revolves around artistic creation as a vehicle of revolt against modernity, against an age that feels more and more profane. I want to write something that hasn’t been written so far that paradoxically feels shockingly familiar. This book will serve as a constellation of moral values and symbols that’ll help the starving artist (starving for passion, meaning, and obsession) tap into sacred ways of work, thus edifying the soul.
Being busy must be so passé to the extent that you consider it a clear sign of failure; an outdated tactic to lie about your productivity. Being busy means you talk too much through (flashy and useless) actions, not just words.
I adapted this quote for brevity and clarity to serve my essay.
Artists who only study art happen to be clumsy artists; as well as philosophers who only read philosophy tend to be foolish philosophers. You can’t bring out the flavor of your mind if you’re afraid to tackle subjects that lie outside of your intellectual or professional comfort zone. Ashwin Sharma wrote: “Let all your ideas crash and burn and mix in ways they were never meant to. Don’t try to solve the tension. Give your mind permission to stay restless.” Psychologists should read more poetry. Scientists should check out the Bible. Architects should study biology. Entrepreneurs should study history. And lawyers should study ethics.
To derive great pleasure from your work doesn’t necessarily mean that your project is concerned with a “higher activity”—but without pleasure, joy, and play, without rejecting specialization, a noble mission may hardly emerge. This is my hypothesis.
I wouldn’t say NO to a publisher (as I’m not satisfied with Amazon KDP; the hardcover version they produce is decent yet the paperback is quite bad) but it’s hard to find one, even among the “big” names, that respects and values the artisanal approach. Paul Millerd stroke a great deal with Infinite Books in this sense (watch this video) and I’m also a big fan of Tune & Fairweather. These two are exceptions though.
Note added after I published this essay, thanks to some (very useful) comments/feedback I got: Collaboration is a great skill; even highly underrated. It’s wise to understand and accept your limits and ask for help from professionals. My intention is not to suggest that writers or artists should shoulder every task themselves. A certain degree of efficiency is beneficial, but an excessive focus on efficiency destroys the creative process.
Karl Marx’s theory of alienation; the irony is that communism encouraged the same (perhaps even a worse) phenomenon.
I adapted this quote for brevity and clarity to serve my essay.
"Specialization kills the craft; division of labor dulls your soul; and thus love is neutralized."
I keep turning this over. I think the key word here is "division," as with labor divided by market function (designer, editor, whatever) pre-slotted before the work reveals what it actually needs.
But what about collaboration based on a choice to focus? Two people going deep on different sides of something because that's who they are.
Maybe specialization only kills the craft when it's externally imposed. When it emerges from actual interest and aptitude, it might do the opposite.
Do you think there's a version of collaboration that escapes this trap?
You might be interested in Montessori's moral theory of work. She argued work is not just an economic activity, but avenue for self-construction. We tend to think of our relationship to work as something that happens when we get our first job, when it's actually much more formative. I wrote my latest piece on this: https://samvuong.com/p/work-is-how-we-become-human