For as many things that are great and unique about
being a Millennial, there is one that actually makes me a little bit crazy. And to quote Cher from Clueless “not to be a trader to my generation or anything” but I just
don’t understand the culture of busyness.
We are obsessed with being busy. In
my experience, it would seem my friends and I keep ourselves so busy so we don’t
have to stop and think about the areas that we might fall a little short
on. Because here’s the thing:
We are super competitive.
We’ve always been super competitive. I can remember being 9 years old and being
told how important it was for me to get the highest grade in my class to set
myself apart from my peers. And
surprise, surprise, that got worse with age, not better. I remember friends our junior year of high
school working themselves up into panic attacks because if they didn’t get a 4
or 5 on their AP Physics class, their life was over and they wouldn’t be able
to go to their first choice college.
Doesn’t that sound like an insane amount of pressure to put on a 16 year
old?
It has long since been my belief that the microcosm
for real life is high school, not college.
While college is definitely among the best time in most people’s lives
and I would go back in a heartbeat and relive my entire college experience, it doesn’t
prepare you for the real world in the slightest. College teaches you to be idealistic. College instills in you (or at least it did
with me) a sense that the things I was learning in the classroom and in my
campus experience would take me into the real world prepared to take on real
challenges and all before my 30th birthday. I mean, even in a very basic way, college
teaches you that you can make it so you only have to go to class at times that
are best for your brain, schedule or just personal preference, like from 11am
to 5pm four days a week for me, and that weekends start on Thursday. Oh college – how I miss you and your
hopefully idealism and optimistic bright sunny view of the future and three day
weekends.
But let’s think about this just briefly: high
school and the real world are actually much closer related that college and the
real world. High school students are constantly told that
they need to do more to make them look well rounded and to be appealing to
colleges. And obviously, you can’t just
play a sport for one season; you need to play it for all four years. Then there is all the time that that takes
and the need to set yourself apart from the other players on your team and
other teams because again, being different here will also help differentiate
you from the other thousands of applications that are certain to get to the
admissions advisory at your dream college.
Then when that’s done you need to figure out how to do all your hours of
homework and studying. Somehow, you also
have to do a whole bunch of social things.
Here’s a list to ponder (because maybe we forget how much high school
kids are doing or how much we all had to do when we were there): learning how
to date, keep up relationships with your family (which seems to be increasingly
difficult given the new dynamic of the nuclear family), learn to drive, get
your driver’s license, have friends, get your first job (that understands just
how little time you actually have to work) and you know, go through puberty.
This is beaten into our fragile, teenage brains
and adults don’t seem to feel like there is any reason to dial back this
insanity. So we grow up to become adults
who are super competitive with everything from the internships that we compete
for while in college to when we get married and have children to where we buy
our first homes (just kidding, Millennials aren’t buying homes) and so on and so on down
the road. This behavior makes us fill
our schedules so that after the traditional 9-5 that few of us work, we have
jammed the rest of the day with committees and organizations. I’ve found by the time you meet your mid-late
20s, you realize that your body decided it was done playing along like it did
in your early 20s and now you have to find time to go to the gym and go to
Whole Foods or Trader Joes to buy our gluten free groceries because oh yeah, we
can’t process gluten anymore. That stuff
adds up quickly. Hours of
extracurricular activities as adults so we stay relevant in our jobs, engaged
in our communities, meet new people, make sure that we are well thought of and
well rounded. And then more hours of all
those things you just need to do to be a person: grocery shopping, haircuts,
the gym, oil changes, laundry. All piled
neatly on top of all that other stuff like renewing your driver’s license,
finding something to wear to yet another wedding, fret over how you are 20
something and still unmarried, spending time with your family and inevitably
answering questions about why you aren’t married, talking to your friends who
are strewn all over the country at this point and indulging in our many guilty
pleasures: I’m looking at you, Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
Even though I am as guilty as anyone else in my
generation of keeping myself crazy busy, I don’t understand why. I have learned in recent years the absolute
joy that comes from saying no that a lot of my friends seem to struggle
with. Like: do you want to come to some
blah blah forum for a committee about blah blah? No thanks. Or: I really need your help with xyz and I would
be super grateful if you could give me
an undetermined amount of your precious time.
Wow, that sounds pretty awesome but actually I just have too many things
on my plate right now to take on something else. Sure, outright saying “no that sounds dumb”
or “no not ever” would be more satisfying than the polite answers listed above,
I have found they have created the same response. And I also find that I have nights where I
can go to the gym, or schlep it 30 miles away to have dinner with an old friend
or beat 8 levels of Candy Crush while sitting on the couch with my dog instead
of sitting in another board meeting with self-important idiots who are only
doing this for their future political campaigns or to have something to post
about on Facebook so everyone marvels at how awesome they are. If that is your prerogative, good for you,
but I absolutely refuse to equate how busy you are with how awesome you
are. Because even though yeah I’m pretty
busy, I can lounge around like a bum with the best of them. And I’m still pretty damn awesome.
I know that there are some times where you are so
busy that you don’t have time to do your laundry or wash and blow dry your hair
because let’s be real; there are weeks in your life that have deadlines or
elections to work or week where you are trying to shove 5 days of work into
three days so you can get out to that wedding you are in that you still don’t
have your shoes for. Those weeks happen
but I feel like if we treat every week as a hair on fire, no time to stop and
think, busyfest we are going to run ourselves into a ground faster than driving
a car 20,000 miles past an oil change (you only make that mistake once.) I think that this constant stress has
actually contributed to why the Millennials have more weird things wrong with
us than other generations. I have so
many friends who are lactose intolerant, sometimes in the most bizarre of ways,
like cheese induced narcolepsy. I have a
lot of friends who are gluten intolerant, though I’m not sure how much of that
is just an insane low carb thing instead of an actual disease. We have more injuries and more surgeries and
we heal so much slower than our early twenties.
As I sit here, I am still nursing an ankle injury, gained while being a
super idiot during a soccer game over a month ago, I wonder what kind of damage
I’ve done to myself because of all the stress I’ve put myself through by being
so busy. It’s always easier to stop and
think about that when it hurts to walk but really, what about all that stuff
that you can’t see? Like how’s my heart
doing or my kidneys or my bones? Yeah I know,
physical every year to check those things.
I’m not a doctor but I do have a feeling that these things have a way to
build up and then get you in the face when you aren’t looking then you die of a
heart attack in your living room at 52.
So maybe I’m fine now but I feel like I probably should check how much nonsense
I can avoid that is probably going to contribute as a tax on me. I honestly think that I will be so pissed off
if I’m in a hospital bed at 40, fighting cancer and losing my hair and I’m left
alone with my thoughts and have to really come to grips with the fact that I
spent so much of my life fusing over things and not taking time to enjoy my
life instead of a never ending quest to be better than someone else.
Unless there is some kind of competition for how
quickly I can lose my hair during chemo.
Then I might reconsider how mad that really makes me.
