We wear our busyness like a badge of honor. “How are you?” we ask, and the response comes automatically: “Busy! So busy.” We say it with a mixture of exhaustion and pride, as though our packed calendars and overflowing inboxes are proof of our importance, our productivity, our worth.
But here’s an uncomfortable truth: being busy is not a natural state for human beings. For the vast majority of our existence as a species, humans lived in a rhythm entirely foreign to our modern experience. Our ancestors didn’t wake to alarm clocks, didn’t schedule back-to-back meetings, didn’t answer emails while eating lunch. They moved with the sun, rested when tired, and structured their days around genuine needs rather than artificial urgency.
Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies reveal something startling to modern ears. These communities, which represent the lifestyle humans evolved to live for hundreds of thousands of years, typically worked only three to five hours per day on what we might call “productive” activities—hunting, gathering, preparing food, maintaining tools and shelter. The rest of their time was spent in ways we’ve almost forgotten how to value: talking, playing, resting, creating art, telling stories, simply being present with one another.
This wasn’t laziness or lack of ambition. It was sufficiency. They did what needed to be done, then stopped. The concept of “maximizing productivity” or “optimizing time” would have been utterly alien to them. Time itself was experienced differently—cyclically rather than linearly, tied to seasons and natural rhythms rather than measured out in fifteen-minute increments.
Our bodies and brains evolved in this context. We developed nervous systems designed for bursts of intense activity followed by long periods of relative calm. We’re wired for variation, for rhythms that ebb and flow. The constant, grinding busyness of modern life—the relentless stream of tasks, notifications, obligations—creates a physiological stress response that was meant to be temporary. When we maintain that state chronically, we pay the price in anxiety, depression, burnout, and a host of physical ailments.
The agricultural revolution began to change this pattern, tying humans to the demands of crops and seasons in new ways. But it was the industrial revolution that truly broke our relationship with natural rhythms. Suddenly, time became money. Factory whistles divided days into shifts. Productivity became paramount. The human body, which had no concept of the forty-hour workweek, was expected to conform to the needs of machines and markets.
And now? Now we carry the office in our pockets. The boundary between work and rest has dissolved almost completely for many of us. We’ve normalized a state of perpetual availability, perpetual productivity, perpetual motion. We’ve built a society that treats rest as laziness, stillness as wasted time, and any moment not spent “doing” as a moment squandered.
The irony is that this busyness doesn’t even serve us well. Research consistently shows that exhausted, overstretched people make worse decisions, produce lower-quality work, and experience dramatically reduced well-being. We’re not actually more productive in any meaningful sense—we’re just more frantic. We confuse activity with achievement, motion with progress.
Children show us what we’ve lost. Watch a young child at play and you’ll see a human being in a more natural state. They become absorbed in the moment. They rest when tired, eat when hungry, move when energized. They don’t check their phones during meals or feel guilty about daydreaming. They haven’t yet learned to treat every moment as a resource to be maximized.
Of course, we can’t simply return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor would most of us want to. Modern life brings real gifts: medicine, technology, opportunities our ancestors couldn’t imagine. But perhaps we can acknowledge that the frenetic pace we’ve normalized isn’t inevitable or natural. It’s a choice, or more accurately, a series of choices that our society has made, often without examining whether they serve our actual well-being.What would it look like to design a life around sufficiency rather than endless growth? To build in rest not as an afterthought but as a fundamental need? To create space for the “unproductive” activities that actually make us human—play, creativity, connection, contemplation? To recognize that a day spent walking in the woods or talking with friends or simply watching clouds pass isn’t a day wasted but a day spent honoring what we actually are: biological creatures with needs and rhythms that no amount of productivity hacking can erase?
The cult of busyness tells us that we’re never doing enough, that there’s always more to achieve, that rest is something we have to earn. But our evolutionary history tells a different story. It suggests that we are enough simply by being, that our value doesn’t depend on our output, and that the natural human state includes generous amounts of what our culture dismisses as idleness.
Maybe it’s time we stopped treating busyness as a virtue and started recognizing it for what it often is: a profound disconnection from our own nature.