There is a question that gets asked at almost every social gathering, every catch-up coffee, every “oh my goodness it has been ages” reunion in the middle of a Pick n Pay aisle, and the question is simple: “How are you?” The correct answer, apparently, is some version of exhausted. You are supposed to say you are slammed. Crazy busy. Running on no sleep. Barely keeping your head above water. You name the metaphor, and someone in South Africa has used it to describe their Tuesday.
Here is the strange part. Nobody is actually asking because they want the answer. They are asking because they want you to confirm that life is a lot, that the world is relentless, and that both of you are suffering through it together in a kind of performative solidarity. The correct social move is to match their level of overwhelm and raise them one meeting, one deadline, one WhatsApp group they cannot leave. Bonus points if you look like you have not slept since 2019.
What nobody ever says, and what would cause an almost visible glitch in the interaction, is: “Actually, I am pretty good. I have been taking it easy lately.” That answer lands like someone announcing they voted for a different political party. There is a pause. A recalibration. A very specific kind of suspicion.
Because somewhere between hustle culture becoming a lifestyle brand and LinkedIn deciding that waking up at 4 am makes you spiritually superior, we collectively decided that being busy was the same thing as being valuable. That exhaustion was evidence of effort. That if you were not overwhelmed, you were not trying hard enough, and if you were not trying hard enough, you were probably a problem.
This is, to use a technical term, completely unhinged.
But here we are. A species capable of building the internet, composing symphonies, and figuring out that the universe is expanding, and we have decided that the highest possible expression of a life well-lived is having no time for anything. The calendar is full. The inbox is full. The body is running on cortisol and convenience store coffee. Achievement unlocked.
The cult of busyness did not arrive quietly. It rode in on the back of several decades of productivity culture, capitalism’s deep and abiding love of output as a measure of worth, and social media turning every aspect of life into a performance. Instagram gave us the highlight reel. LinkedIn gave us the hustle sermon. Twitter, before it became whatever it is now, gave us the hot take economy where opinions had to be fast, frequent, and furious. And all of it, all of it, rewarded volume over depth, speed over stillness, and noise over quiet.
The people who bought into it completely, and there are millions of them, started posting about their 5 am routines as though the sun rising earlier than you did was a personal failing. There were books about getting more done. Podcasts about optimising your rest so that your rest could make you more productive. Entire industries were built around the idea that you were one productivity hack away from finally being the version of yourself that had everything under control.
And then, at some point, being busy became more than a state of being. It became a personality. An identity. A way of answering the question “who are you” without ever having to think about the answer. You are the person who is always on. Always available. Always grinding. You are, in the language of LinkedIn, a go-getter. A self-starter. Someone who does not wait for opportunity but apparently chases it down the street at 5 am in expensive running shoes.
The problem, obviously, is that humans are not built for this. The body knows it. The nervous system knows it. The number of people walking around in a low-grade state of exhaustion so normalised that they have stopped noticing it suggests that something, somewhere, has gone very wrong. But pointing that out has always felt faintly embarrassing, like admitting you could not keep up. Like the issue was personal weakness rather than a collective agreement to treat rest as something you had to earn.
This is where it gets interesting, though. Because the people who started opting out of the performance, not dramatically, not with a manifesto, but simply by deciding to slow down and then refusing to apologise for it, discovered something that the cult of busyness does not advertise. It turns out that choosing to do less, deliberately and unapologetically, is one of the most genuinely countercultural moves available to a regular person right now.
Not quitting your job and moving to a mountain. Not becoming a monk. Just deciding that you are not going to perform overwhelm anymore. Not going to compete in the misery Olympics. Not going to open your calendar and feel virtuous because there is no white space left. Just quietly, calmly, somewhat smugly, deciding to be a person who has time.
And people will find this alarming.
There is a very specific social friction that comes with not being busy enough. Someone asks how you are and you say fine, actually. Good. You have been reading. You had a nap on Saturday. You took a long walk for no reason. Watch their face. The processing happens in real time. A nap? Just because? On a weekend? Without it being recovery from something catastrophic? Suspicious. Suspicious behaviour.
Because if you are not busy, two possibilities present themselves to the observer. One, you are failing at something. Your business is slow, your social life is thin, your ambition has curdled. Or two, you are doing something deliberate, and that deliberateness is a quiet judgement on the choices of everyone who is still performing exhaustion. Neither interpretation is particularly comfortable for the person standing across from you.
The truth is simpler and less loaded. Some people have just decided they are done.
Done with the idea that rest has to be earned. Done with treating their nervous system like a machine that exists to produce. Done with measuring a good week by how little of it they actually experienced because they were too busy moving through it. Done with the version of themselves that described stress as a badge and sleep deprivation as hustle.
This is not laziness. Laziness is a moral judgement that has been wildly overused. This is something closer to sanity. It is choosing presence over performance. It is deciding that a life where you experience almost none of it because you are always rushing towards the next thing is not actually a life well-lived, regardless of how full the calendar was.
There is also, if we are being honest about it, a class conversation buried in all of this that most productivity content does not want to have. The ability to choose to be less busy, to have white space, to refuse to grind, is an enormous privilege. A lot of people are not performing overwhelm at all. They are just overwhelmed. Multiple jobs, rising costs, complicated family situations, structural inequality. The busyness is not a flex for them. It is just reality. The cult of productivity has done something quietly cruel, which is to take the genuine pressure of economic survival and rebrand it as optional hustle, turning real hardship into aspirational content.
So when we talk about refusing to be busy, we are really talking about two different things. For the people who have been told that rest is weakness, refusing busyness is a reclamation. A small act of self-preservation dressed up as radical. And for the people who have no actual choice but to keep moving, the cultural pressure to perform busyness on top of their real busyness adds an extra layer of exhaustion onto an already heavy life.
Both are worth naming. Neither cancels the other out.
But for the people who do have the option, and who have been living under the self-imposed pressure to always be doing, always be grinding, always have something impressive to report when someone asks how they are, the permission to simply stop performing it is its own kind of release. You do not have to be overwhelmed to be worthy. You do not have to be running on empty to prove that your life matters. You are allowed to be a person who has an afternoon with nothing in it, who sits somewhere and does very little, who reads slowly, who watches something forgettable, who exists without justifying it.
Here is what actually happens when people start doing this, by the way. Not some spiritual transformation. Not a complete reinvention of the self. Just a very gradual recalibration. The anxiety that used to live in the throat because there was always something else that could be done starts to quiet down. The guilt around rest, which is apparently something we have all internalised so thoroughly we feel bad about taking a bath for too long, starts to loosen. The need to have an impressive answer to “how are you” begins to matter less.
And strangely, the things that actually get done tend to be done better. Not because rest is a productivity hack, because framing it that way immediately puts you back in the same trap, but because a brain that is not running on fumes can tell the difference between what matters and what is just noise. You make fewer decisions out of panic. You say yes to things you actually want and no to things you do not, which sounds simple and is apparently one of the harder skills a human adult can develop.
The political part of all of this, and it is genuinely political even if it does not feel like it, is that a population of people who are chronically busy and chronically exhausted is also a population that has very little time or energy to think too carefully about the bigger picture. Tired people do not organise. Tired people do not question. Tired people scroll, consume, click, and start again tomorrow because tomorrow there are more things to get through. The busyness keeps you small in a very efficient way.
Choosing rest, choosing presence, choosing to stop performing overwhelm, is a refusal to participate in that particular mechanism. It is a small, ordinary, slightly ridiculous act of rebellion dressed in comfortable clothes on a Thursday afternoon with nowhere to be.
Nobody is going to write a news headline about it. There will be no statue. Your LinkedIn will look quieter than usual and that one person who posts at 6 am about discipline will probably not notice that you have stopped competing.
But you will know. And your nervous system will thank you. And somewhere in the middle of a perfectly unremarkable Tuesday with time in it, you will have the strange and slightly disorienting experience of feeling like your actual life.
Which is, when you think about it, the whole point.
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