On June 30, 2012, the writer Tim Kreider published an essay in The New York Times called “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” It begins: “If you live in America in the twenty-first century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are.”
He calls the complaint of being busy “a boast disguised as a complaint.” He writes, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.” The essay drew more than 500 comments, and sales of his book jumped.