In the modern age we measure out our lives in trend pieces, and a recent rash of stories demonstrates that busyness (both real and imagined) has become a thing: worthy of attention, analysis and snark. In the focus on being busy as either a source of status or a means of evading existential angst, though, a major question often goes unasked: how did it come to be so commonplace? “Busy bragging” may be obnoxious, but what kind of system accords respect to frenzied activity anyway?

Social norms do not fall randomly from the sky, and it’s worth looking at the political economy in which the importance of being busy has grown.

Capitalism demands constant growth, requiring citizens to earn, consume, and produce – and to desire new, shinier goods. The person spending time alone with her thoughts is failing utterly at her designated purpose: she is interacting with the market not one whit and her contribution to GDP is, in that moment, zero.

There is also the matter of work, and the “dignity” it confers: idleness is a terrible sin according to Liberal and Labor politicians alike. Productivity has assumed the status of a secular religion; what could be more shameful than rest? In her new book The Life of I: The New Culture of Narcissism, Anne Manne contends that the valorisation of busyness stems from “a deeper structure of the new capitalism: paid work has been given an enchanted value”. The approving glow that surrounds remunerated work entails disregard for both leisure and, more damagingly, unpaid care. Manne quotes a stay-at-home mother unable to sit down while her children are at school - “I feel anxious. I have to be productive” - and a man looking after his elderly mother who observes that caring for others “shows the world he has failed as a man”.

Being busy, by contrast, denotes success, and much of the focus on this phenomenon centres on the upper middle classes. A recent New York Times article notes:

When people aren’t super busy at work, they are crazy busy exercising, entertaining or taking their kids to Chinese lessons. Or maybe they are insanely busy playing fantasy football, tracing their genealogy or churning their own butter. And if there is ever a still moment for reflective thought … out comes the mobile device.

This all rings true within a certain demographic, yet tends to obscure that distraction is not always willingly assumed. Smartphones are certainly a welcome way of shutting off the anarchy of one’s own thoughts, but they are also a tool employed by some workplaces to extract the maximum benefit from employees, who are never really able to clock off.

There is also a class element here; not all busyness is created equal. Individuals working two jobs to make ends meet and single parents caught in a time bind are not churning butter to distract from their neuroses. In a brilliant 2013 paper on Tertiary Time: The Precariat’s Dilemma, Guy Standing emphasised that “time is a basic asset”, and commented “we have no politics of time. We have little appreciation of the inequality or inequities of time”.

The government has just provided a concrete example of these inequities: the unemployed are to be compelled to apply for 40 jobs per month, and existing (ineffective) work-for-the-dole schemes will also be expanded. Ben Eltham asks rhetorically whether one could “seriously apply, in a meaningful way, for 40 jobs a month” before answering that the “arbitrary nature of the target tells you ... it’s not about helping jobseekers to look for work” but “about punishing them with meaningless paperwork to justify their mendicant status”.

These requirements are also, of course, a means of controlling people’s time. Employment minister Eric Abetz considers it “reasonable” to expect “most of the job seekers …to seek a job of a morning and of an afternoon”; presumably he allows that it’s also reasonable to have a lunch break in the middle while waiting anxiously for replies that may never come.

Employed or otherwise, our time is valuable, and it’s under threat. Witness the arguments made against penalty rates (considered here by Greg Jericho) on the basis that the Monday-Friday working week is archaic, a barrier to progress. That old world, we are told, is being superseded by an exciting, flexible 24/7 economy. There is a sense of inevitability about this, but when were any of us asked whether this rapidly-moving world was what we actually wanted? Whoever voted for the end of weekends? The prospect of a shorter working week is remote in the current political climate, yet surely a lot of us would welcome it?

Stop. It’s time to slow down, to look closely at the direction our society is headed, and to ask ourselves whether we really want to go there.