#‘retirement’ being the term we use when you are freed from our association
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When i said me and my old boss were in our divorce era when she entered retirement last year i MEANT IT
#‘retirement’ being the term we use when you are freed from our association#anyways I NEED HER TO GET A JOB. THIS IS. THIS IS EGREGIOUS#me shaking them. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THAT.#whatever!!! you treated us like shit sometimes last year!! but that was us!! whatever!!#I AM NOT LETTING YOU TREAT /MY/ STAFF THAT WAY#AHHHRHRHTHRJ PLEASE JUST GET A JOB#IDC THAT YOURE RICH GO PICK UP THE IN N OUT HAT#actually i DO care that youre rich bc its DEFINITELY WHY YOURE LIKE THIS#uuughgghhhgghgh i feel so bad for my staff bc none of them had seen me mad until this weekend and i wanted to keep it that way!!#BUT NO#WHY JS MY OLD BOSS LIKE THIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSS#man my hos was like i think theyre feeling insecure abt their term- WELL THEN THEY DEF SHOULD T TALK TO ME#I WILL MAKE THEM FEEL WORSE ABOUT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <- doesnt care anymore#i am such a veteran of the idgaf war bc she ran this office how she wanted to run it#and i watched person after person i cared about and respected be completely and utterly done about it#BUT YOURE NOT IN CHARGE ANYMORE#AND I WONT LET YOU DO THIS TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE UNDER ME NOW#AND I NEED YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! IT DIDNT HAVE TO REACH THE POINT#OF ME BEING ON THE BRINK OF TELLING YOU YOU /SHOULD/ FEEL BAD ABOUT YOUR TERM#bc at the end of the day they accomplished a lot of good important things#over $30 million dollars in funding is insane!! no way im getting that done this year#BUT YOU SCREWED US AS YOUR STAFF OVER R E P E A T E D L Y#AND NOW YOUVE SCREWED NOT ONLY ME BUT ALSO POSSIBLY EVERYONE AFTER ME OVER THINGS I REPEATEDLY TOLD YOU WERE BAD IDEAS#THAT WOULDNT WORK OUT!! THINGS I DID WORK ON TO MAKE SURE WERE DONE RIGHT THAT YOU DECIDED NEEDED TO BE DONE ANOTHER WAY#THAT WAS WRONG!!!!!!!! AND IGNORE THE WORK I AND YOUR STAFF PUT IN TO DO IT YOURSELF….. INCORRECTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#AND NOW HERE WE ARE!!! WHY ARE YOU SO INSISTENT ON BOTHERING ME ABOUT THIS!!! LEAVE IT ALONE!!! STOP TAINTING MEMORIES!!!!!#LET US REWRITE THEM AS JUST GOOD FOREVER OR WE’LL HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT YEAH. YOU DID SUCK SOMETIMES LAST YEAR#WHICH I KNOW IS SOMETHING YOU JUST CANT HANDLE#AAHHWHRHRHRJTBTKTJDKTJDID IM SOOOOOOOOOOOO#v.txt
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are there any sources that say how lafayette reacted to the death of washington and his other friends from america??
Hello Anon,
yes, we do know La Fayette’s reaction - pretty exactly actually. George Washington died on December 14, 1799 and La Fayette wrote to Washington’s widow, Martha Washington, on February 28, 1800. The letter is today hold by the Digital Collection from The Washington Library.
Dearest Madam
My Heart Has for So Long a time and So throughly Been known to You, that I Need Not, Nor indeed Could I Express the feelings Which Over Whelm it—While the world is Mourning, and Mankind weeping Over the irreparable Loss, What Must it Be to You, My dear Madam, the object of His Love, the Companion of His Life, the partner of His Sentiments, the Happy witness to All His private and public virtues? What Must it Be to me, Who from My Youth Have Been Blessed with His paternal Adoption, and Who Ever Have deserved it By the Most filial Affection for Him and for You, Who United in Every thing were particularly So in Your kindness to me? - Continue, I beseech you, to Honour me with this Maternal Predilection, the more necessary to me, as in you, dearest Madam, I Both Love and Revere What Remains of My Respected and Beloved General - My Mind is so wed to introduce Him in every thought, every Sentiment, every Concern of Mine that I Hardly Can Believe that, While I am Living, He Has left us, Nor Could I forgive Myself No to Have personally received His Last Blessing. Had I Not the Remembrance of the Advice By Which You know He Has Repeatedly differed My Departure for America - the Circumstances are Coming on Which Had appeared to Him to proper- for Our Meeting - But Alas, in this World We Can No More Meet! I would think it for me a Sacred and Staeing[sic] Duty to Go Over and Mingle My Tears With Yours, Had I not Lately Reentered My Native Country Where, although I Live in perfect Retirement, and With not Have Any thing to do With public affairs, I am Bound to forward the Business of My friends, Several of Whom, Who followed me in 1792, are to the paine[sic] of Being Restored to their Homes and families - I owe it also to My Creditors and Children to pick up the Remains of My fortune - My Son, not Less a partaker in My Grief than in My Obligations and Gratitude, Has the Honour to write to you, and would Have Gone to Mount Vernon, Had Not the Continuation of the War engaged Him in the Military Senite where He expects to Be Soon employed - But we Both Live in the Hope to present You Again, dearest Madam, the personal Homage of our Respectful Love; and everlasting Regrets Shall ever Make us worthy of the parental affection which from the Greatest and Best of Men, which from You, Dear Madam, we Both Had the Happiness to experience - My Wife, With a Mourning, affectionate Heart, joins in My Sentiments, and as well as the Rest of My family Beg to Be More Respectfully, tenderly Remembered to You - Be pleased to let me Hear from You as often as You Can - permit me to Hold with You the Correspondence I Had with My Beloved General and think often of that adoptive Son of His who with dutiful Respect, and warm, Grateful, filial affection Has the Honour to be
dear Madam
Your obedient Servant and friend
Lafayette
Martha Washington replied to La Fayette on October 31, 1800:
Mount Vernon October 31st 1800
Dear Sir
It was not until very lately that your sympathetic and affectionate letter of the 18th of febary reached my hands - The feeling manner in which you have expressed your sense of the loss which I have sustained demands my greatful acknowledgement. The tribute of respectful veneration which has been every where paid to the memory of my dear deceased Husband, and the tender sympathy which my friends have expressed for the irreparable loss, excites my warmest sensibility, -- But my consolation arises only from that source of infinite wisdom and good help which alone can mitigate our grief and lessen the poignancy of the keenest affliction -- To his will do I resign my self for the few remaining days of my life - Knowing the strong ties by which you were bound to my departed Friend I can readily conceive of your feeling upon hearing of his decease, and I am sure it was not among the least of the manifold afflictions which you have of late years undergone.
To the amiable partner of your heart and the rest of your deserving family I pray you to have my sincear and greatful thanks for their tender sympathy; and be isured that you have my ernest prayers that your and their future years may be freed from that cloud of suffering in which you have been so long involved -, and that every blessing which heaven has in store for the virtuous may be showered upon you,- should you or they visit this country - I need not say how happy I should be to see you under my roof - and it will always afford me the highest satisfaction to hear of your welfare
The kind letter from your son came in closed in yours, for which I pray you to return him my best thanks and issure him that his friends hear hold him in affectionate rememberance and sincerely wish that his career in life may be glorious and happy - with esteem and regard
Im dear sir your friend and obedient(?) servant.
Martha Washington
There is something special about this letter. Martha received at least 55 letters of condolences that we know of, more than 40 of the people who wrote her received a reply - but most of these replies were not written by her but by others, Tobias Lear for example, in her name. La Fayette’s was one of fife identified persons who received a reply written by herself. Martha also send La Fayette two pistols, that Washington bequeathed to the Marquis in his will. Washington wrote in his will:
“To General de la Fayette I give a pair of finely wrought steel Pistols, taken from the enemy in the Revolutionary War.”
La Fayette’s son, Georges Washington de La Fayette, also wrote Martha. He enclosed his letters in the letter written by his father. Beside these letters, there is also an earlier account that illustrates La Fayette’s thoughts about Washington’s demise. Shortly before La Fayette sailed for France in 1784 after his third visit to the United States, Washington wrote him the following on December 8, 1784:
“In the moment of our separation upon the road as I travelled, & every hour since—I felt all that love, respect & attachment for you, with which length of years, close connexion & your merits, have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our Carriages distended, whether that was the last sight, I ever should have of you? And tho’ I wished to say no—my fears answered yes. I called to mind the days of my youth, & found they had long since fled to return no more; that I was now descending the hill, I had been 52 years climbing—& that tho’ I was blessed with a good constitution, I was of a short lived family—and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansions of my father’s—These things darkened the shades & gave a gloom to the picture, consequently to my prospects of seeing you again: but I will not repine—I have had my day.”
To that La Fayette replied on December 21, 1784:
“I Have Received Your Affectionate letter Of the 8th inst., and from the known Sentiments of My Heart to You, You will Easely guess what My feelings Have Been in perusing the tender Expressions of Your friendship—No, my Beloved General, our late parting was Not By Any Means a last interview—My whole Soul Revolts at the idea—and Could I Harbour it an instant, indeed, my dear General, it would make me Miserable (…)”
On February 8, 1800, France held an official funeral service for George Washington. Everybody expected La Fayette to give a eulogy to Washington but that did not happen. More so, La Fayette was explicitly excluded from the funeral. Why? Because Napoléon Bonaparte, who had just risen to power, did not felt like it and because he was a bit petty.
As with regard to his other friends in America, there is not as much documentation that I know of. Washington wrote to La Fayette on October 20, 1782 that John Laurens had died.
“Poor Laurens is no more—He fell in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina, attempting to prevent the Enemy from plundering the Country of Rice (…)”
I am sure La Fayette was saddened by his friends death, but I have never seen him mentioning it. Moving on to Hamilton, who died on July 12, 1804, La Fayette wrote Thomas Jefferson on October 8, 1804 that:
“The Deplorable fate of My friend Hamilton Has deeply Afflicted me—I am Sure that whatever Have Been the differences of parties, you Have Ever Been Sensible of His Merits, and Now feel for His Loss.”
He further wrote to George Washington Parke Custis after Hamilton’s death that:
“Hamilton was to me, my dear Sir, more than friend, he was a brother. We were both very young, when associated with our common father; our friendship, formed in days of peril and glory, suffered no diminution from time: with Tilghman and with Laurens, I was upon terms the most affectionate; but with Hamilton, my relations were brotherly.”
Another close friend of La Fayette, Thomas Jefferson, died on July 4, 1826 and La Fayette discussed his death in a letter to James Monroe on November 28, 1826. I sadly have no full access to this letter so I can only tell you that Jefferson’s death was discussed in the letter, but not what La Fayette actually wrote.
I hope you have/had an awesome day!
#marquis de lafayette#lafayette#general lafayette#george washington#martha washington#thomas jefferson#james monroe#alexander hamilton#georges washington de lafayette#adrienne de noailles#adrienne de lafayette#letters#handwriting#1799#1800#1804#1826#ask me anything#dear anon#george washington park custis#history#death#mourning#french history#french revolution#american history#american revolution#1784#napoléon
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OCTOBER 2020
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The Stones opened Rolling Stones # 9 on Carnaby St.** Bill Wyman auctioned off many unique items for the Prince’s Trust.**Wyman’s bass used for groundbreaking records in ’69 and ’70 broke a record at $384,000. The famous amp that got him into the Stones went for $106,250 and the most expensive toilet seat cover sold at auction with the tongue logo went for $1,142. Brian Jones Rock and Roll Circus guitar sold for $704,000.
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VOTE!!!!
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In San Francisco people can order dinner and drinks delivered with a drag queen performance.
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Joaquin and Rooney had a baby that they named River.
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Real Time has been renewed thru 2022.
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The new film, No Sudden Move about 1955 Detroit will star Don Cheadle, David Harbour, Benicio Del Toro, Ray Liotta and Kieran Culkin.
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Shep Smith is back with Just the Facts on CNBC.
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The Presidential debate: Well, Good Biden moments-“You don’t panic, he panicked.” “It is what it is cuz you are what you are.” “Everybody knows he’s a liar.” Wouldn’t know suburbs unless he took a wrong turn.” “Will you shit up man?” “Get out of your and trap.” Imagine if Bernie or a younger candidate with real energy were there. Imagine someone quick on their feet because we need that. The bully style of scary clown 45 does fluster a normal person as it supposed to. Joe held his own and had real dignity though. It is hard to not respond to the President’s ridiculousness but he needs to be ignored. Trump and son both seemed like they were about 8 Red Bulls into the day with all that pent up anger. Who should be drug tested? Biden? Trump went on about forest management but most of that land belongs to the Federal government. ** I have never seen my mailperson trying to sell ballots.** Trump said that bad things are happening in Philadelphia. Biden should have showed some love for the state. He is on a tour of it now though. ** Chris Wallace said, “Why you not?” Was that a real question? 45 said, “I was a private business people.” They all had a little trouble talking. It is exhausting the way people put up with his manners. **As soon as the debate was over, the Trump army wasted no time reaching out to goons to be poll watchers. Do they know that you just can’t show up randomly for that??**Apprentice insiders say Trump abuses Adderall.
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The other day when Trump took the podium for a rant, an open mike caught a someone saying, “Oh shit” On Fox.
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For those who insist Trump is a religious man, I’ll grant you he pays taxes like a church. –Stephen Colbert
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Letterman is ready with My Next Guest Needs no Introduction. This season includes Robert Downey Jr., Lizzo and Dave Chappelle.
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There are about 9 million feral swine in this country known as super pigs.
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There is talk of Levar Burton replacing Alex Trebeck when he retires. YES!!!!
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Cigar Afficionado magazine has named CBS Sunday Morning the greatest show on tv.
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The U.S. built tunnels under Trump’s wall to let water, garbage, DDT and other toxins flow thru. Millions were spent for nothing and now millions more will be spent to address this problem that empties into the Pacific Ocean.
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Days alert: Melissa Reeves is being replaced. Is it that she does not want to commute from Nashville or that she is a bit too conservative or something else? Is it an end of Days with old side characters and replacements of the stars??** Ava is coming back, JJ is back, Eric and Sami are gone. ** Absolutely loved the pic of Abigail 1 that confused Abigail 2. Funny!!!! It reminded me of the OLTL moment during Asa’s funeral when Blair saw the 1st Blair in a flashback.
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“Smaller than expected” would probably explain a lot about the proud boys. –Andi Zeisler
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Why does anyone listen to Christie or Rudy??
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Looting isn’t part of protesting just like murder isn’t part of arresting.
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A judge has said that Florida has created an “unconstitutional pay to vote system.” This has now been overturned. What are the things that can be termed felonies to keep one from voting? The list includes releasing helium filled balloons, driving without a license, catching the wrong lobster and disturbing turtle eggs. Amendment 4 was originally put into effect to stop freed slaves from voting. But SB7066 makes sure that felons complete the terms of their sentences. The fines, fees and restitution can be hard to navigate. There must be proof before they can vote but all counties keep their own records and there is no organization statewide. Mike Bloomberg, John Legend, Michael Jordon and others are paying off millions of dollars in debt for felons in Florida so that they can vote if they can unravel some of the puzzles. Now Florida Republicans are saying that that is also illegal.
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Two thirds of the world’s wildlife has disappeared in the last 50 years.
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At our own peril, we have to step up or everything is lost. –John Batiste
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Michael Jordan will start up a Nascar team with Bubba Wallace.
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Laraine Newman signed up to be a poll worker. How do you get people to vote? Celebrity poll workers? Hey whatever works as long as the masses don’t gawk and hold up the lines.
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A refrigerator sized asteroid is headed to earth and may arrive about the time of the election.
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So the coronavirus relief funds were funneled by the pentagon to defense contractors.** What kind of a selfish fucking world do we live in? At least we know which people in this world give a flying fuck about the rest of us. Rally and fair participants, relief money scammers and mask protesters, we hear you loud and clear!!
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The Emmys went on thru the week of the 14th thru the 20th. Winners included RuPaul, Don’t fuck with Cats, Leah Remini, The Apollo, Eddie Murphy, Last Week 2nite, SNL, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Crown, Better Call Saul, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Archer, Hollywood, Maya Rudolph, Dan Harmon, Bad Education, Cherry Jones, Regina King, Julia Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Uzo Aduba, The Last Dance and Stranger Things. Schitt’s Creek (and practically the whole cast), Dave Chappelle and Succession took home the big ones. Norman Lear became the oldest Emmy winner ever. Letterman ‘hitchhiked’ to the Emmy’s to present an award. I was really rooting for Amy Sedaris!!
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Bill Murray and Rashida Jones will star in Sofia Coppala’s On the Rocks.** The Doobie Brothers want Bill Murray to stop using their music to sell his golf clothes.
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Danny Trejo and Jessica Tuck will star in ‘The Shift.’
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Illinois is pulling down statues including Chris Columbus. Woo Hoo!!
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13 mummies have been discovered in a well, stacked one on top of the other. The Egyptian discovery from about 2,500 years ago has been well preserved.
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Hysterectomies on immigrant women in detention camps?? Really??
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Scientific American mag is 175 years old has never endorsed a candidate but Joe Biden id their man.
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Word is that in Indonesia the anti- maskers are forced to dig the graves of the Covid 19 victims.
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The Breonna Taylor case continues with a settlement and too few charges.
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Scary Clown 45 announced he will call in to Fox and Friends every Monday or Tuesday but a host told him that they were not committed to that.** The Scary campaign put up ads with “Support Our Troops” but the problem is they are Russian troops and jet fighters.** Trump did a phone interview on Fox Sports and talked about golf.
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It is a shame that Hillary lost the election and many more of us would be alive if she were running the show. But, I can only imagine the shit they would have given her.
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Brad Pascale, Trump’s former campaign manager, went to the hospital after being taken into custody in Florida after threatening suicide.
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Just remember , 1619 Project: Good 1776 Commision: Oh my! Why do these rich old fucks want us to stay as stupid and uninformed as they are? Haven’t we been in the dark long enough? They are the fake news masters.
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Jim Carrey will play Biden on SNL. Chris Rock will be host the season 46 opener on Oct. 3. New players will be Lauren Holt, Punkie Johnson and Andrew Dismukes.
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Gulf War Syndrome is a chronic and multi symptomatic disorder that has affected military personnel from the Persian Gulf War. The DOD is resisting the strong evidence and needs more of a spotlight. The possible exposure to chemical weapons may even have been passed on to their partners through sexual contact. All of this came to light in the mid 90’s thru complaints that were told to Ross Perot. Let’s hope Tammy Duckworth looks into this further.
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Amy Coney Barrett has been nominated to the Supreme Court. Her previous statements tell us she believes the ACA is unconstitutional, abortion is always immoral and the country should undo marriage equality. She is a member of People of Praise.** If she was a Muslim and everything else was the same regarding her beliefs and associations, Republicans would call her a religious extremist and never let her step near the Supreme Court. –Wajahat Ali.** Notorious A.C.B. ?? Do they have one original idea other than new ways to cheat and steal??
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Finn Wittrock has a funny little Emmy Uber ride on Funny or Die.
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Breonna Taylor’s neighbor’s wall got more justice that Breonna herself. –Jordan Uhl
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Go Stevie Wonder!!!
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Dax Sheppard went off the wagon for a while.
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A Giant Gundom? Really?
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A fun prank would be if we stopped this from becoming a dictatorship on Nov. 3rd and whatnot. –George Wallace
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Sen. Kevin Kramer has been acting a little crooked on building the Wall.
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The Metropolitan Opera has cancelled the whole season.
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Happy Doomscrolling
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Can dogs be trained to detect the coronavirus?
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Rand Paul is an idiot. Birx and Atlas have ruined reps. Give ‘em Hell Fauci!! ** Everything Atlas says is false. –R. Redfield
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Eric Trump must testify in court about the Trump business’s a judge has decreed. The Trump biz has made about 19 billion in the last 3 years.** The world is gobbling up the news about the Trump tax returns with tales of debt, the $72.9 milliion refund and foreign influence. How does the IRS let a refund like that happen? How bad of a businessman do you have to be to lose that much $? National security threat. One of his fans will probably bail him out.
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Bet we’d all own houses if we stopped eating so much avocado toast and committed tax fraud. -Kashana
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Mary Trump has sued The President and his siblings for fraud.
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Ellen is selling off $10 mil in art.
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61% say we should abolish the electoral college.
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The Netflix series, Challenger :The Final Flight reminds us that like The Titanic, the arrogance of man can change so many lives.
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Wilderness of Errors is a great doc. It proves just how right the book and mini -series got it.
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The remains of the 1644 warship, Del Menhorst have been found off the Danish coast.
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Everybody is talking about Jeff Daniels in The Comey Rule. The actors were upset when Showtime was going to push back the release until after the election. The actors said they wouldn’t promote the film so the film has premiered.
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David Tennant gets better and better and now he is giving us DES on ITV. Quality AND quanity.
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Independent prosecutors are not going ahead with a case against NE Patriots Robert Craft for soliciting prostitutes.
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America has no memories. –Wallace Shawn
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Tyler Childers has released ‘Long Violent History”. Give it a listen.
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Does it seem like the administration gets a word of the week and they really push it? Caravan-Herd-sedition-looters- Antifa. It is like they all share a brain and do not have a thought of their own.
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Chris Petrovski `will star in ‘Listen’ about a young Israeli soldier.
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On a personal note, I love the way that Autumn makes my brain feel. The spring allergies are gone, the hot muddled summer thinking fades and everything opens up.
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Gubler is back and in the video for Future Islands ‘Moonlight’.
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Niecy Nash wed Jessica Betts.
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Check out the Curious life and death of… on the Smithsonian channel.
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Conan is looking hot with his grown out hair.
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I just love Mel Rodriguez and Weijia Jiang. Some people just don’t get enough credit.
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Vet’s crisis line: 1-800-273-8255
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Donald Trump is taking page out of Charles Manson’s playbook. Start a race war, then convince the public you alone can end it. He’s a lying racist piece of garbage. –Rob Reiner
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Serious Question: Would good Christian conservatives have mounted a Go fund me for Timothy McVeigh? –Michael Mckean
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Old Navy will pay employees to work the polls on Election day.
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Trump is the most effective anti -liberal in my lifetime. –Newt Gingrich
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Tommy Chong does not seem too happy with Joe Rogan.
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Anna Faris is leaving CBS’s Mom as it heads into its 8th season.
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Q Anon should take advantage of the ACA. –Joe Biden
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Word is that the White House told Federal agencies to ban race based sensitivity training. The thinking is that Un American propaganda training sessions have no place in Federal Government.
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I wish I lived in a country where John Kelly, James Mattis and John Bolton had at least half the balls of Sally Yates, Maria Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, Reality Winner, Christine Blasey Ford or Stormy Daniels. – Andrea Junker** If only Mad Dog Mattis had the balls of Olivia Troye – Michael Mckean
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38 million Americans live in poverty.
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80 year old Sam Little with a possible 93 murders has now been called the most prolific serial killer in the U.S. and he has a photographic memory. Whoever takes this on, please let David Alan Grier play him in the movie.
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You must check out the album, the Angel Headed Hipster.
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Everybody is talking about Cottage Core.
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The Trump campaign can’t help themselves with things like playing ‘knockin’ on Heaven’s door’ and ‘Fortunate son’ at rally’s. It was like the time my Grandfathers young wife brought a purse to the funeral that boldly stated ‘Jackpot.’ True Story.
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Glenn Howerton and Seth Meyers should play brothers on something.** Also Meyers and Larry Wilmore wondered if the cancellation of Wilmore’s show was a reason for the racial unrest and terrible results of the last election. Hmmm.
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Can we remember this election enthusiasm for all future elections? We need to take things seriously EVERY time.** So many say that even with our divide, we all want the same things in the end. I do not think that is really true. It seems that in this divide, we have different ideas about what we want this country to be.
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Harry Styles has replaced Shia LaBeouf in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling.
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Cat Cora has filed for a restraining order against her ex- wife, Jennifer who it seems has been stalking her.
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Showtime’s The Comedy Store sounds interesting with stories like Jimmie Walker who claims that Freddie Prinze wanted to kill John Travolta.
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Maplecroft, Lizzie Borden’s last house sold for about $890,000.
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A woman ref in the NFL?? It’s about time!
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Doc Martin will end after its 10th season.
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Kelly Clarkson is being sued by her management firm.
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Pope Francis refused to meet with Mike Pompeo.
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R.I.P. Tom Seaver, Sophie Farrar, Kevin Dobson, Toots Hibbert, Stevie Lee, Bruce Williamson, Ben Cross, Diana Rigg, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Rev. Robert Graetz, Ron Cobb, Gale Sayers, Dan Dettman, Kevin Burns, Mac Davis, wildfire casualties, Covid victims and Helen Reddy.
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The Cult of Busyness
This is part of a special series, We’re Reemerging. What Does the World Look Like Now?, which considers in real time how we cope while living through a historic time. It’s also in the latest VICE magazine. Subscribe here.
Gwen Clarke’s pre-pandemic days started at 5:45 in the morning. She went to the gym near her apartment in Astoria, Queens, then commuted 40 minutes to her job as a digital content producer. She often worked late into the weekday evenings, and at least one weekend day. After work, she would grab a drink—or several—with co-workers, before returning, exhausted, to her apartment.
The past year has been different. Because of COVID-19, the 26-year-old moved home to Southampton, New York, and the pace of life slowed down.
“I wake up in the morning and I don’t have to get right out of bed,” Clarke said. “I used to close my eyes, count to three, and jump out of bed before I could talk myself out of it. Now I can sit and be cozy and scroll on my phone and do whatever the hell I want for nearly two hours before I get up and start my day.” Her work-from-home days are easily interrupted with midday walks or yoga.
In a nutshell, she’s been freed from the tyranny of busyness. Busyness is not only about packing each day with as much as possible, but also the value placed on doing so: Being busy makes people feel good about themselves, and they use busyness, voluntarily, to signal their worth to others. “Working in TV production, I have always thought that being busy is a good thing,” Clarke said. “It means that the people around you trust you. I definitely have this feeling that being busy means you are important.”
Busyness is a powerful social signal, though a somewhat counterintuitive one. At the turn of the 20th century, economists predicted that the ultimate symbol of wealth and success would be leisure—showing others that you were so successful that you could abstain from work. Instead, the opposite occurred. It’s not free time, but busyness, that gestures to a person’s relevance.
“Being busy made me feel like a valuable resource with abilities that were in high demand,” said Robbie McDonald, a 53-year-old from Vancouver who worked long hours at a nonprofit before the pandemic. “It fueled my insecurity and impostor syndrome. The busier I got, the more I would take on, for fear of seeming irrelevant. I definitely wore the busy badge of honor, complaining about it to colleagues and friends, but I was secretly proud that so many people relied on me to get things done.”
Yet there are indications that people don’t want to slingshot themselves back to a world that determines their value based on how busy they are. A rash of articles has recently expressed a sense of foreboding at returning to the veneration of an overloaded life. In April, New York Magazine wrote about “The People Who Don’t Want to Return to Normalcy,” quoting a man named William who felt that during the past year, for the first time, he “had a great excuse to do nothing… It was the best. I feel guilty saying it.”
In an advice column for the Cut, one reader wrote, “I’m not ready for isolation to end.” The Wall Street Journal announced that the pandemic’s end means the “return of anxiety.” “Many are relieved by the lack of choices and the ability to engage with others almost entirely on their own terms. And they’re not sure they’re ready for it all to end,” the psychologist Peggy Drexler wrote for the Journal. In the last year, McDonald told VICE she has grown blissfully accustomed to her new routine, which “doesn’t include 5 a.m. Teams chats or emergency Saturday meetings about Facebook comments.”
The pandemic offered a rare window of opportunity for some people to become literally less busy, and perhaps more importantly, to get perspective on their cultural beliefs about busyness. Instead of being caught up in the inertia of always projecting a busy life, they had time to reflect on how they used busyness to define themselves—and how it led to stress and the conflation of productivity and self-worth.
Of course, experiencing this slowing down of life in order to gain these insights reflects a certain amount of privilege—but that’s kind of the point. Research has found that busyness is most often assumed as a status symbol for higher-paid workers. The people who value and signal busyness are not typically hourly or gig workers, sociologists told VICE. Busyness in the lower classes is less a symbol of success and more a byproduct of a lack of time autonomy, overwork from low wages, and a lack of social safety nets.
It’s higher-paid workers who were more likely to reap the benefits of the status of busyness, and they are also the ones more likely to have recently tasted a slower, less busy kind of life. If the past year could change the way they glorify being busy, could it help to knock down busyness for everyone as the aspirational state to strive for and maintain?
“I can’t go back to the frenetic pace,” McDonald said. She recalled one recent morning when she found herself sitting on a log at the beach, watching a crow drop sealed clams from the air and swoop down to pick out the meat. “It seemed so simple and so easy. I started to question if my life could look like that.”
In 1840, it was briefly cool to walk a turtle on a string around the Parisian arcades. “You did that to signal time abundance, to signal quite how little you did or how much leisure you had, because that was a sign of status,” said Tony Crabbe, a business psychologist and the author of Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much.
The turtle walker’s “leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. It was also his protest against their industriousness,” the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote.
This is what Thorstein Veblen, a 19th century economist, wrote about in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen thought that elites of the future would participate in “conspicuous leisure,” as a signal to others of their success. This idea was epitomized in Downton Abbey, when Maggie Smith’s character, Violet Crawley, asked, “What is a ‘weekend’?” “The joke, of course, is that the dowager countess is too aristocratic to even recognize the concept of a week divided between work and leisure,” wrote busyness researchers in the Harvard Business Review.
Veblen wasn’t the only one predicting a future of leisure as a status symbol. In 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture, later published as Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in which he foresaw that people in the year 2028 would work only 15 hours a week thanks to a productive economy and technological innovation. With so much leisure time, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won,” Keynes wrote.
Well-off people in the western world are nowhere close to working just three hours a day, nor do they parade around reptilian symbols of how much free time they have. They boast of their busyness instead. “Just as being leisurely around 1900 was a status claim, being unmanageably busy at the turn of this century was a status claim based on the fact that the busiest people also tended to be the richest,” said Jonathan Gershuny, a professor of economic sociology at University College London and a co-director of the Center for Time Use Research.
Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor of business in marketing at Columbia Business School, studies how busyness replaced leisure as the form of “conspicuous consumption.” By being busy, a person signals to others how they themselves are a scarce resource on the market. Not having time to rest indicates that you’re in demand, and that your intellectual capital is highly valued. As a result, others consider you to be higher status.
This form of status signaling can even be found in personal relationships that have nothing to do with “work.” Over the last 20 years, Ann Burnett, a retired professor of communication and women and gender studies at North Dakota State University, has collected letters that families send out over the holidays. As Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, described, “Words and phrases that began surfacing in the 1970s and 1980s—’hectic,’ ‘whirlwind,’ ‘consumed,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘constantly on the run’ and ‘way too fast’—now appear with astonishing frequency.” People were consistently bragging to others about how busy they are. Bellezza and her colleagues have similarly documented celebrities on social media complaining about their busy schedules and lack of time.
This is a crucial component of signaling busyness: Most people don’t earn enough money to have increased leisure time; “busyness” is more often a badge of honor for those with salaried jobs, Wajcman said.
Bellezza’s work has shown that these busyness signals make other people think you’re important. In one of Bellezza and her colleagues’ studies, they found that people who get groceries delivered were perceived as busier and higher class, and a woman wearing a Bluetooth headset had a higher status than another wearing headphones. When people were asked to read imaginary letters from a friend, one letter described how “crazy busy” a person was, while the other said his life was “relaxed.” The participants thought the busy letter writer to have more money, have better skills, and have a higher social status.
But the paradox and masochism of busyness is also laid bare: the study found that while people aspire to be more like a busy person, they also con- sider the busy person to be less happy. An obsession with busyness also taints how people spend what little leisure time they have, Bellezza said, by wanting leisure to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible—called “productivity orientation.”
This phenomenon is stronger in American culture. In an Italian sample, people thought the reverse: that the relaxed letter writer must be better off since, after all, his life was so relaxing. “I noticed that in the U.S. that wasn’t the case,” Bellezza said. “Instead, people brag about how much they work. It’s almost like a badge of honor—the fact that you never take holidays, even if you could afford to.”
This ethos can be found in a 2014 Super Bowl commercial for Cadillac, a luxury car: A well-off man with a nice house and suit brags about not taking his vacation time. “Other countries, they work,” the actor said. “They stroll home, they stop by the cafe, they take August off. Off. Why aren’t you like that? Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven, hard- working believers, that’s why.”
Another reason why Keynes’ vision of a shorter work day hasn’t come true is inequality, according to Judy Wajcman, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London.
“There’s a class of managerial and professional workers who have done very well and whose wages sort of increased phenomenally,” she said. “But there’s been a huge increase in low-paid service jobs, where the minimum wage has absolutely not kept up.”
This is a crucial component of signaling busyness: Most people don’t earn enough money to have increased leisure time; “busyness” is more often a badge of honor for those with salaried jobs, Wajcman said. “People that are paid by the hour may be more likely to define busyness in terms of, ‘I have to have this job—in fact I have to have two jobs in order to pay the bills,’” Burnett said.
Past research has found that those people who lament being busy the loudest haven’t actually experienced a huge increase in working hours—busyness is more of a feeling and state of mind than a reflection of labor. The Swedish economist Staffan B. Linder came up with the phrase the “harried leisure class,” which means that as people accrue wealth, they have more consumption available to them, and pack their day with more activities.
“What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”
In their studies, Bellezza said that when they told people that a person was busy or working all the time, participants assumed that it was for a white collar job. If they were told it was a blue collar job, the boosting in status a person got from being “busy” wasn’t as strong as for a white collar job.
“It’s so class specific,” Wajcman said. “Gig workers don’t talk about this. There’s no status from the busyness of an Uber driver or an Amazon worker in a warehouse. It is completely an upper middle class managerial notion that busyness is a good, positive thing.” When it comes to gig work or lower-paying forms of labor, Wajcman said that the experience of busyness is not experienced as a signal of high status, but of a lack of control over their own time.
The pandemic may push people, especially the privileged, to recognize that the ways they’ve wielded busyness is a construct, and one they may try to resist in the future. A small behavioral shift that Burnett recommended, even pre-pandemic: When people ask you, “How are you?” Resist the temptation to say, “I’m so busy.”
“We have to think about our basic interactions with people and think about how you’re portraying yourself and responding to these basic questions. You have to be intentional.” There are many downsides to the culture of busyness, Burnett said. “And honestly, the upside of it being something to brag about is just not worth it.”
A small but passionate resistance against the dominance of busyness existed before the pandemic, said Carl Honoré, the author of The Power of Slow, and one of the leaders of the global Slow Movement—a crusade to slow life down. The Slow Movement, as Honoré has written, urges people to live life by “savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.”
Honoré first realized he was rushing through the moments too fast when he noticed himself speeding through bedtime stories with his son. “I had a lightbulb moment,” he said. “I thought, is this really what I want my life to be? Where I’m racing through it, instead of living it? What a life of speed, busyness, distraction, multitasking, stimulation, impatience does is that it walls you off from who you are. You become your to-do list. You become a ‘human doing’ instead of a human being.”
When the pandemic began, Honoré said many people wrote to him asking if he was pleased that the world was grinding to a halt. “At no point have I ever been over the moon,” he said. “A pandemic is a total nightmare for everybody, in lots of different ways. But I do think that there can be a silver lining. What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”
The Slow Movement is part of a larger trend to “decelerate.” Giana Eckhardt, a professor of marketing at King’s College London who studies deceleration, said she noticed that even pre-pandemic there was a rise in deceleration-type activities, like meditation or yoga retreats, pilgrimage routes, and “slow travel,” where the focus isn’t on cramming in sightseeing activities, but staying in one place for a longer period of time and experiencing the quotidien lifestyle. One extreme example comes from South Korea, where some overworked and busy people check into a fake prison, called Prison Inside Me, which opened in 2008. Shut into a cell, people reduce their stress by removing all forms of outside busyness.
If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well.
The phrase “deceleration” is an attempt to seek relief from “social acceleration,” a phrase coined by a professor of sociology and political science named Hartmut Rosa. He defined social acceleration as an “increase in episodes of action or experience per unit of time”—essentially more things per minute on average per day: more things made, more emails sent, more friends to go out to drinks with, more activities to bring children to.
Acceleration leads to busyness in and of itself, which is also called “time sickness,” or “a sense of urgency; time is running out, there is not enough of it, and we must run faster and faster just to keep up,” Eckhardt wrote in a paper on deceleration.
In response, people seek out oases of deceleration, which is not the same as just flopping down on the couch and watching Netflix. Eckhardt and her colleagues went to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, where they interviewed people and asked them what they were getting out of it. More than 300,000 people from 161 countries completed the trek in 2017—and many were not there for religious reasons, Eckhardt said, but rather to find a way to slow down.
Her work describes three elements that create an experience of deceleration: embodied deceleration, technological deceleration, and episodic deceleration. Embodied deceleration is the physical slowing down of your body: walking or riding a bike versus moving your body around in cars, planes, or buses. Technological deceleration is not giving up technology, but feeling like you have a sense of control over it. And episodic deceleration is having fewer episodes of action per day. “Not feeling like you’re running from meeting to meeting at work, and then you have to run to pick up your kids and drive them to three different activities at the same time as you’re trying to cook dinner,” Eckhardt said.
Episodic deceleration isn’t just about lowering the number of activities, but also the number of activities you have to pick from. If someone achieves all three things—say when walking a pilgrimage—then much of the stress and overwhelm from living a socially accelerated life tends to drop away.
The irony is that deceleration can often be a refuge predominantly for the privileged. After all, who has the means for retreats or slow vacations? Eckhardt argued that because of this, there was a slight shift before COVID in which deceleration was becoming a signal of wealth and status—more in line with Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. For example, take Arianna Huffington’s rest and relaxation brand, or Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week, which promises to teach how to “Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”
During the pandemic, more people, albeit still privileged, have had access to at least one of these modes of deceleration in their everyday lives. Any increase in the number of people accessing deceleration is a good thing, Eckhardt said. If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well. Eckhardt thinks it may be a turning point when the status symbol of busyness finally has some meaningful competition.
“I think in terms of an overall rhythm of life, what people do, will they want to go back to commuting on a subway for an hour to an office five days a week? No, they don’t,” Eckhardt said. “Do they want to go back to getting up at 5 a.m. to go to an exercise class before then doing an hour-long commute? No. I think there are a lot of things about the rhythms of daily life of this past year that people are going to work hard to maintain.”
Eckhardt said that if we want to maintain deceleration after COVID, we should try to maintain the three specific facets of deceleration. But it may be more crucial for us to try to value deceleration as a desirable social signal.
“Try to remember the feeling of making your own food and sharing it with your household, rather than running back to eating many meals out and on the go,” she wrote in the Conversation. “As you emerge from lockdown, try to maintain practices like stopping work to eat your lunch in the middle of the day, and take tea breaks, preferably with others and outdoors when you can. There is much value to be gained from having the rhythm of your daily life be one that you can savor.”
Kevin Roose wrote in April in the New York Times about the “YOLO economy”—the observation that mid-career adults are “abandoning cushy and stable jobs,” to pursue remote work, slower and more easygoing living locales, and fewer daily obligations. But as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen pointed out, many people who are changing careers aren’t just doing it because YOLO, but because the past year has traumatized, exhausted, and pushed them to the edge. Busyness status as a reward just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Emphasizing the pleasure and social benefits of deceleration can help shift attention away from busyness. In Post-Growth Living, the philosopher Kate Soper describes an alternative form of a pleasurable life as a release of “the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today.” She writes that leisure and slowing down is not always about fun or biking in the park. It’s about having time for mental health and grieving too.
Beyond an individual pace of life, slowness can be a way to advocate for others. The slow food, slow fashion, slow design, or slow city movements have emphasized not only a slower pace, but a pace that’s paired with ethical consumption and production—including better living wages, minimal environmental impact, and better quality of life.
Honoré has neighbors who have had the time to volunteer during the past year, and have told him that it’s an activity they’re going to continue. “A big part of slowing down is about creating the time and the space and the patience to build up relationships,” Honoré said. “And not just friends, but also to be of service to other people.”
And while those who were able to slow down the most remained the most privileged, the pandemic gave others the ability to access the kinds of social services that give people more autonomy over their time and busyness. There were larger and more substantive safety nets—like increased unemployment and eviction bans. (Petersen has framed this kind of support as a “permission structure.”)
Other kinds of top-down policy approaches could maintain these revelations about busyness, so that individuals don’t have to act on their own. Brunello Cucinelli, an Italian entrepreneur, mandates a sit-down hour and a half lunch, and requires his employees to leave at 5 p.m. Or take “right to disconnect” laws in France, where workers don’t have to respond to work emails on weekends, or after a certain time on weekdays. If policy enables (or forces) people to slow down, then it doesn’t matter if busyness is overhauled completely as a social signal—the system will demand it.
Will these changes stick? Or will we go right back to worshipping busyness at the cost of everything else? Bellezza isn’t as optimistic about deceleration replacing busyness as the leading social status signal, but she acknowledged that when she started studying busyness, there wasn’t any discussion about deceleration at all. She’s glad it’s entered the conversation, and tries to practice deceleration in her own life.
Steven Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University who studies post-traumatic growth, said that because the pandemic brought death and mortality to the fore, it made people reevaluate their relationships, and what they wanted out of life. Taylor feels hopeful that if enough people change their value systems, that will enact larger change.
“Social systems can change,” he said. “They’re influenced by the people who live within that system. Changes in attitudes lead to changes in behavior. And both attitudes and behavioral changes lead to changes in social structures.” If leisure and shorter workdays were once valued, it’s possible we could value them again.
And during post-traumatic transformations, one change that Taylor has observed is that people are less interested in work. “They love to spend their time doing nothing in particular, just enjoying being in the moment and being alive in the world,” he wrote in the Conversation.
Clarke said she’s soon moving back to New York City after a year of being away. She said that while she’s excited to be closer to friends, restaurants, and city life, she wants to hang onto the good parts of slow. “I enjoy my slow mornings, and some slower work days that allow me to escape to the grocery store or for a walk outside,” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong—I still have days where I am booked solid from 9:30 a.m. through 6:30 p.m.,” Clarke said. “But I have a whole new perspective on being busy, and I understand now that you don’t have to be slammed to be considered valuable.”
Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.
The Cult of Busyness syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/
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The holidays.
The holidays are a time for family and friends to get together, and focus on what’s important in life. It’s not so much about the food, the gifts or even the act of getting together. It’s about taking the time, isolating ourselves from all the distractions, slowing down and appreciating what we have.
The end of my daughter’s birthday signifies the start of the holidays. I have a rule now that we don’t put up the Christmas tree until after my daughter’s birthday. This ensures that she knows that she is important.
As soon as her birthday ended, that evening I packed up my car, and headed out to my brother’s house. This was to be the evening that I would have the talk with my family. Coincidentally, my favourite teacher from High School also happen to be having her retirement party at the same time. I had brought my dog with me and dropped her off at my brother’s house, went to the retirement party, said hello and met up with some old friends then headed back to my brother’s.
At this point I wasn’t really eating much, I had been trying to do my best to eat, but the grief was really getting to me. We sat down for dinner and I started to discuss what I was feeling at the moment. It was just myself, my sister-in-law and my brother. The discussion eventually led to where they as well, expressed concern for me in how their interactions with my ex was. They all knew how horrible she was treating me, they all had to bite their tongues and let me handle it because she was my wife, as well as the mother to their niece and nephew.
They really made me feel welcome again, for the last while when I visited them it had always been with my ex and the kids. It was always the same story, she would be sitting down chatting and I would be doing the minding of the kids. Even if I was able to sit down, it wasn’t long before my ex would be barking me to do something. As well I always felt held back, like I was in some way putting on a face in those moments.
It had been a really long time since I was able to just sit down and talk to them like adults. It felt almost redeeming to hear them tell me how much they cared for me and how much they were going to be there for me. I finally felt relieved that they knew. It had been 2 weeks of me sitting with this sadness in my heart, and while I had my friends to hear me out, it was just now starting to feel real. This is because now, my family knew.
At this point I hadn’t told my parents yet, they are unfortunately in Florida and with how they are setup for communication, getting us to talk together requires planning. I had sent them an email telling them that we needed to talk, however I guess they didn’t understand what was going on. So it wasn’t until 3 days later that I finally told over the internet phone.
Meanwhile on my ex’s blog she posts the following:
So yeah, calling my family petty is pretty low in my opinion. They know my side of the story because it appears to be the only one that includes the truth. Those last comments, back then, certainly hit me hard. I mean noticing how quick she is looking at moving on is so striking considering this has only been 2 weeks since our split. I guess at this point she’s trying to fill the void in her self-confidence and given that she’s unapologetically detached from me, it makes complete sense given the context.
One good thing that was secured in terms of Christmas was that she would have the kids on Christmas Eve and I would have them on Christmas Day. My family invited me to their usual Christmas Eve tradition of going to my “aunt” and “uncle’s” house for food and a late night game of Monopoly. Now I put those associations in quote because by blood they are not my aunt and uncle, but my aunt was raised next door to my mother’s childhood home. They have always been a part of my family. I hadn’t seen them in years and walking into their house felt so familiar and warm.
That evening was amazing, we ate and drank and I ended up beating my nephew at Monopoly, a title he’s held for 2 years now. Although if you ask him he didn’t lose (he’s hyper competitive).
Christmas day comes around and there is a massive snow storm. Something like 10cm of snowfall from the previous evening. I had to leave and meet my ex in the parking lot of a mall at the half-way point to exchange the kids. Given the weather I left 15 minutes early, and arrived 10 minutes late. She had texted me on the way that she had arrived 10 minutes early (I guess she was eager to dump the kids off at this point). She complains as I arrive, and hands me 2 kids covered in Cheetos dust which they then proceed to rub all over my car (LOL).
Anyhow, the exchange sucked but now they’re with me and we drive back to my brother’s house. We open up the gifts and it was a really fun time. My son soon approached his nap and like a champ I brought him into my nephew’s room, set him up on a mattress that was on the floor and surrounded him with pillows and he went fast asleep.
In this time, it was so amazing, I was able to leave my daughter to roam around and play with my younger nephew (who is an amazing kid), I was set up in my brother’s newly built insulated sun room and talk with the adults. There was family on my sister-in-law’s side, and friends who knew us and even they were all empathetic. Again, a common theme, one of my brother’s friends who he and his wife had come and stayed with us in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics had even noted how he saw the way she was around me during our last interaction last summer. He and his wife even commented on it.
The beauty of that whole Christmas experience was that I was starting to feel like myself again. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time, as well the stress of minding the kids at that time was gone. They were there, they were fine, they were happy. It’s honestly the first Christmas, in a long time that I spent relatively stress-free. I realized the common thread, it was her. She was the ultimate source of all the hustle and stress I had felt. That it was completely unnecessary. I could handle this, I am a very capable father.
In between Christmas and New Years I actually had a show booked at Yuk yuks. Something I had to ensure my ex was able to watch the kids for that evening. These types of shows are something you book a month and a half in advance and therefore it was planned long before the split.
I wasn’t at all sure what the hell I was going to do that night. I couldn’t do a lot of my previous material as they all talked about marriage. Something I felt very wrong doing at that time. I also felt very hurt and angry. So I wrote about that. It had been probably a month since I had last been on stage and I was very nervous. Could I be funny?
I stepped on stage that evening and started off with a few very vicious jokes about my ex. Something the audience at first didn’t respond to, but after a few of the punchlines they were all on board. I then broke into some of my nostalgia material and it sorta clicked.
The takeaway I took from that show was that I was nervous and from my stage presence, it showed. Afterwards, the owner of the club came up to me and talked to me. He asked me if what I said up on stage was true and I told him yes. He was completely understanding and showed me some encouragement to keep writing. This was a great boost for me, often he would forget my name. Now I was memorable.
Finally New Years came and my in-laws offered to take care of the kids. This freed me to attend my old high school friend’s house party. I played board games with that crew and eventually went home.
2017 ended up being a complete garbage year, however I think in some ways it also marked a turning point in my head. I was no longer going to have to suffer. I mean for now I am hurt, but it will only get better from here on out. It was that evening I decided to challenge myself to being sober for the month of January. Something I stuck to and might very well continue to do for a while. I figure in this time of stress, the added crutch of alcohol is a slippery slope.
So I stocked up on Perrier and rang in the New Year with a renewed sense of hope. I was going to get better and aspire to be happy this year. This year will be the year I find myself and reconnect with who I am. For that I am eternally grateful.
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The Cult of Busyness
This is part of a special series, We’re Reemerging. What Does the World Look Like Now?, which considers in real time how we cope while living through a historic time. It’s also in the latest VICE magazine. Subscribe here.
Gwen Clarke’s pre-pandemic days started at 5:45 in the morning. She went to the gym near her apartment in Astoria, Queens, then commuted 40 minutes to her job as a digital content producer. She often worked late into the weekday evenings, and at least one weekend day. After work, she would grab a drink—or several—with co-workers, before returning, exhausted, to her apartment.
The past year has been different. Because of COVID-19, the 26-year-old moved home to Southampton, New York, and the pace of life slowed down.
“I wake up in the morning and I don’t have to get right out of bed,” Clarke said. “I used to close my eyes, count to three, and jump out of bed before I could talk myself out of it. Now I can sit and be cozy and scroll on my phone and do whatever the hell I want for nearly two hours before I get up and start my day.” Her work-from-home days are easily interrupted with midday walks or yoga.
In a nutshell, she’s been freed from the tyranny of busyness. Busyness is not only about packing each day with as much as possible, but also the value placed on doing so: Being busy makes people feel good about themselves, and they use busyness, voluntarily, to signal their worth to others. “Working in TV production, I have always thought that being busy is a good thing,” Clarke said. “It means that the people around you trust you. I definitely have this feeling that being busy means you are important.”
Busyness is a powerful social signal, though a somewhat counterintuitive one. At the turn of the 20th century, economists predicted that the ultimate symbol of wealth and success would be leisure—showing others that you were so successful that you could abstain from work. Instead, the opposite occurred. It’s not free time, but busyness, that gestures to a person’s relevance.
“Being busy made me feel like a valuable resource with abilities that were in high demand,” said Robbie McDonald, a 53-year-old from Vancouver who worked long hours at a nonprofit before the pandemic. “It fueled my insecurity and impostor syndrome. The busier I got, the more I would take on, for fear of seeming irrelevant. I definitely wore the busy badge of honor, complaining about it to colleagues and friends, but I was secretly proud that so many people relied on me to get things done.”
Yet there are indications that people don’t want to slingshot themselves back to a world that determines their value based on how busy they are. A rash of articles has recently expressed a sense of foreboding at returning to the veneration of an overloaded life. In April, New York Magazine wrote about “The People Who Don’t Want to Return to Normalcy,” quoting a man named William who felt that during the past year, for the first time, he “had a great excuse to do nothing… It was the best. I feel guilty saying it.”
In an advice column for the Cut, one reader wrote, “I’m not ready for isolation to end.” The Wall Street Journal announced that the pandemic’s end means the “return of anxiety.” “Many are relieved by the lack of choices and the ability to engage with others almost entirely on their own terms. And they’re not sure they’re ready for it all to end,” the psychologist Peggy Drexler wrote for the Journal. In the last year, McDonald told VICE she has grown blissfully accustomed to her new routine, which “doesn’t include 5 a.m. Teams chats or emergency Saturday meetings about Facebook comments.”
The pandemic offered a rare window of opportunity for some people to become literally less busy, and perhaps more importantly, to get perspective on their cultural beliefs about busyness. Instead of being caught up in the inertia of always projecting a busy life, they had time to reflect on how they used busyness to define themselves—and how it led to stress and the conflation of productivity and self-worth.
Of course, experiencing this slowing down of life in order to gain these insights reflects a certain amount of privilege—but that’s kind of the point. Research has found that busyness is most often assumed as a status symbol for higher-paid workers. The people who value and signal busyness are not typically hourly or gig workers, sociologists told VICE. Busyness in the lower classes is less a symbol of success and more a byproduct of a lack of time autonomy, overwork from low wages, and a lack of social safety nets.
It’s higher-paid workers who were more likely to reap the benefits of the status of busyness, and they are also the ones more likely to have recently tasted a slower, less busy kind of life. If the past year could change the way they glorify being busy, could it help to knock down busyness for everyone as the aspirational state to strive for and maintain?
“I can’t go back to the frenetic pace,” McDonald said. She recalled one recent morning when she found herself sitting on a log at the beach, watching a crow drop sealed clams from the air and swoop down to pick out the meat. “It seemed so simple and so easy. I started to question if my life could look like that.”
In 1840, it was briefly cool to walk a turtle on a string around the Parisian arcades. “You did that to signal time abundance, to signal quite how little you did or how much leisure you had, because that was a sign of status,” said Tony Crabbe, a business psychologist and the author of Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much.
The turtle walker’s “leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. It was also his protest against their industriousness,” the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote.
This is what Thorstein Veblen, a 19th century economist, wrote about in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen thought that elites of the future would participate in “conspicuous leisure,” as a signal to others of their success. This idea was epitomized in Downton Abbey, when Maggie Smith’s character, Violet Crawley, asked, “What is a ‘weekend’?” “The joke, of course, is that the dowager countess is too aristocratic to even recognize the concept of a week divided between work and leisure,” wrote busyness researchers in the Harvard Business Review.
Veblen wasn’t the only one predicting a future of leisure as a status symbol. In 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture, later published as Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in which he foresaw that people in the year 2028 would work only 15 hours a week thanks to a productive economy and technological innovation. With so much leisure time, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won,” Keynes wrote.
Well-off people in the western world are nowhere close to working just three hours a day, nor do they parade around reptilian symbols of how much free time they have. They boast of their busyness instead. “Just as being leisurely around 1900 was a status claim, being unmanageably busy at the turn of this century was a status claim based on the fact that the busiest people also tended to be the richest,” said Jonathan Gershuny, a professor of economic sociology at University College London and a co-director of the Center for Time Use Research.
Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor of business in marketing at Columbia Business School, studies how busyness replaced leisure as the form of “conspicuous consumption.” By being busy, a person signals to others how they themselves are a scarce resource on the market. Not having time to rest indicates that you’re in demand, and that your intellectual capital is highly valued. As a result, others consider you to be higher status.
This form of status signaling can even be found in personal relationships that have nothing to do with “work.” Over the last 20 years, Ann Burnett, a retired professor of communication and women and gender studies at North Dakota State University, has collected letters that families send out over the holidays. As Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, described, “Words and phrases that began surfacing in the 1970s and 1980s—’hectic,’ ‘whirlwind,’ ‘consumed,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘constantly on the run’ and ‘way too fast’—now appear with astonishing frequency.” People were consistently bragging to others about how busy they are. Bellezza and her colleagues have similarly documented celebrities on social media complaining about their busy schedules and lack of time.
This is a crucial component of signaling busyness: Most people don’t earn enough money to have increased leisure time; “busyness” is more often a badge of honor for those with salaried jobs, Wajcman said.
Bellezza’s work has shown that these busyness signals make other people think you’re important. In one of Bellezza and her colleagues’ studies, they found that people who get groceries delivered were perceived as busier and higher class, and a woman wearing a Bluetooth headset had a higher status than another wearing headphones. When people were asked to read imaginary letters from a friend, one letter described how “crazy busy” a person was, while the other said his life was “relaxed.” The participants thought the busy letter writer to have more money, have better skills, and have a higher social status.
But the paradox and masochism of busyness is also laid bare: the study found that while people aspire to be more like a busy person, they also con- sider the busy person to be less happy. An obsession with busyness also taints how people spend what little leisure time they have, Bellezza said, by wanting leisure to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible—called “productivity orientation.”
This phenomenon is stronger in American culture. In an Italian sample, people thought the reverse: that the relaxed letter writer must be better off since, after all, his life was so relaxing. “I noticed that in the U.S. that wasn’t the case,” Bellezza said. “Instead, people brag about how much they work. It’s almost like a badge of honor—the fact that you never take holidays, even if you could afford to.”
This ethos can be found in a 2014 Super Bowl commercial for Cadillac, a luxury car: A well-off man with a nice house and suit brags about not taking his vacation time. “Other countries, they work,” the actor said. “They stroll home, they stop by the cafe, they take August off. Off. Why aren’t you like that? Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven, hard- working believers, that’s why.”
Another reason why Keynes’ vision of a shorter work day hasn’t come true is inequality, according to Judy Wajcman, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London.
“There’s a class of managerial and professional workers who have done very well and whose wages sort of increased phenomenally,” she said. “But there’s been a huge increase in low-paid service jobs, where the minimum wage has absolutely not kept up.”
This is a crucial component of signaling busyness: Most people don’t earn enough money to have increased leisure time; “busyness” is more often a badge of honor for those with salaried jobs, Wajcman said. “People that are paid by the hour may be more likely to define busyness in terms of, ‘I have to have this job—in fact I have to have two jobs in order to pay the bills,’” Burnett said.
Past research has found that those people who lament being busy the loudest haven’t actually experienced a huge increase in working hours—busyness is more of a feeling and state of mind than a reflection of labor. The Swedish economist Staffan B. Linder came up with the phrase the “harried leisure class,” which means that as people accrue wealth, they have more consumption available to them, and pack their day with more activities.
“What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”
In their studies, Bellezza said that when they told people that a person was busy or working all the time, participants assumed that it was for a white collar job. If they were told it was a blue collar job, the boosting in status a person got from being “busy” wasn’t as strong as for a white collar job.
“It’s so class specific,” Wajcman said. “Gig workers don’t talk about this. There’s no status from the busyness of an Uber driver or an Amazon worker in a warehouse. It is completely an upper middle class managerial notion that busyness is a good, positive thing.” When it comes to gig work or lower-paying forms of labor, Wajcman said that the experience of busyness is not experienced as a signal of high status, but of a lack of control over their own time.
The pandemic may push people, especially the privileged, to recognize that the ways they’ve wielded busyness is a construct, and one they may try to resist in the future. A small behavioral shift that Burnett recommended, even pre-pandemic: When people ask you, “How are you?” Resist the temptation to say, “I’m so busy.”
“We have to think about our basic interactions with people and think about how you’re portraying yourself and responding to these basic questions. You have to be intentional.” There are many downsides to the culture of busyness, Burnett said. “And honestly, the upside of it being something to brag about is just not worth it.”
A small but passionate resistance against the dominance of busyness existed before the pandemic, said Carl Honoré, the author of The Power of Slow, and one of the leaders of the global Slow Movement—a crusade to slow life down. The Slow Movement, as Honoré has written, urges people to live life by “savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.”
Honoré first realized he was rushing through the moments too fast when he noticed himself speeding through bedtime stories with his son. “I had a lightbulb moment,” he said. “I thought, is this really what I want my life to be? Where I’m racing through it, instead of living it? What a life of speed, busyness, distraction, multitasking, stimulation, impatience does is that it walls you off from who you are. You become your to-do list. You become a ‘human doing’ instead of a human being.”
When the pandemic began, Honoré said many people wrote to him asking if he was pleased that the world was grinding to a halt. “At no point have I ever been over the moon,” he said. “A pandemic is a total nightmare for everybody, in lots of different ways. But I do think that there can be a silver lining. What we’ve had over the last year is a global workshop in slow.”
The Slow Movement is part of a larger trend to “decelerate.” Giana Eckhardt, a professor of marketing at King’s College London who studies deceleration, said she noticed that even pre-pandemic there was a rise in deceleration-type activities, like meditation or yoga retreats, pilgrimage routes, and “slow travel,” where the focus isn’t on cramming in sightseeing activities, but staying in one place for a longer period of time and experiencing the quotidien lifestyle. One extreme example comes from South Korea, where some overworked and busy people check into a fake prison, called Prison Inside Me, which opened in 2008. Shut into a cell, people reduce their stress by removing all forms of outside busyness.
If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well.
The phrase “deceleration” is an attempt to seek relief from “social acceleration,” a phrase coined by a professor of sociology and political science named Hartmut Rosa. He defined social acceleration as an “increase in episodes of action or experience per unit of time”—essentially more things per minute on average per day: more things made, more emails sent, more friends to go out to drinks with, more activities to bring children to.
Acceleration leads to busyness in and of itself, which is also called “time sickness,” or “a sense of urgency; time is running out, there is not enough of it, and we must run faster and faster just to keep up,” Eckhardt wrote in a paper on deceleration.
In response, people seek out oases of deceleration, which is not the same as just flopping down on the couch and watching Netflix. Eckhardt and her colleagues went to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, where they interviewed people and asked them what they were getting out of it. More than 300,000 people from 161 countries completed the trek in 2017—and many were not there for religious reasons, Eckhardt said, but rather to find a way to slow down.
Her work describes three elements that create an experience of deceleration: embodied deceleration, technological deceleration, and episodic deceleration. Embodied deceleration is the physical slowing down of your body: walking or riding a bike versus moving your body around in cars, planes, or buses. Technological deceleration is not giving up technology, but feeling like you have a sense of control over it. And episodic deceleration is having fewer episodes of action per day. “Not feeling like you’re running from meeting to meeting at work, and then you have to run to pick up your kids and drive them to three different activities at the same time as you’re trying to cook dinner,” Eckhardt said.
Episodic deceleration isn’t just about lowering the number of activities, but also the number of activities you have to pick from. If someone achieves all three things—say when walking a pilgrimage—then much of the stress and overwhelm from living a socially accelerated life tends to drop away.
The irony is that deceleration can often be a refuge predominantly for the privileged. After all, who has the means for retreats or slow vacations? Eckhardt argued that because of this, there was a slight shift before COVID in which deceleration was becoming a signal of wealth and status—more in line with Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. For example, take Arianna Huffington’s rest and relaxation brand, or Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week, which promises to teach how to “Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”
During the pandemic, more people, albeit still privileged, have had access to at least one of these modes of deceleration in their everyday lives. Any increase in the number of people accessing deceleration is a good thing, Eckhardt said. If deceleration becomes the more dominant signal of well-being, social status, and “making it,” rather than busyness, it could set the standard for what we try to help others achieve as well. Eckhardt thinks it may be a turning point when the status symbol of busyness finally has some meaningful competition.
“I think in terms of an overall rhythm of life, what people do, will they want to go back to commuting on a subway for an hour to an office five days a week? No, they don’t,” Eckhardt said. “Do they want to go back to getting up at 5 a.m. to go to an exercise class before then doing an hour-long commute? No. I think there are a lot of things about the rhythms of daily life of this past year that people are going to work hard to maintain.”
Eckhardt said that if we want to maintain deceleration after COVID, we should try to maintain the three specific facets of deceleration. But it may be more crucial for us to try to value deceleration as a desirable social signal.
“Try to remember the feeling of making your own food and sharing it with your household, rather than running back to eating many meals out and on the go,” she wrote in the Conversation. “As you emerge from lockdown, try to maintain practices like stopping work to eat your lunch in the middle of the day, and take tea breaks, preferably with others and outdoors when you can. There is much value to be gained from having the rhythm of your daily life be one that you can savor.”
Kevin Roose wrote in April in the New York Times about the “YOLO economy”—the observation that mid-career adults are “abandoning cushy and stable jobs,” to pursue remote work, slower and more easygoing living locales, and fewer daily obligations. But as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen pointed out, many people who are changing careers aren’t just doing it because YOLO, but because the past year has traumatized, exhausted, and pushed them to the edge. Busyness status as a reward just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Emphasizing the pleasure and social benefits of deceleration can help shift attention away from busyness. In Post-Growth Living, the philosopher Kate Soper describes an alternative form of a pleasurable life as a release of “the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today.” She writes that leisure and slowing down is not always about fun or biking in the park. It’s about having time for mental health and grieving too.
Beyond an individual pace of life, slowness can be a way to advocate for others. The slow food, slow fashion, slow design, or slow city movements have emphasized not only a slower pace, but a pace that’s paired with ethical consumption and production—including better living wages, minimal environmental impact, and better quality of life.
Honoré has neighbors who have had the time to volunteer during the past year, and have told him that it’s an activity they’re going to continue. “A big part of slowing down is about creating the time and the space and the patience to build up relationships,” Honoré said. “And not just friends, but also to be of service to other people.”
And while those who were able to slow down the most remained the most privileged, the pandemic gave others the ability to access the kinds of social services that give people more autonomy over their time and busyness. There were larger and more substantive safety nets—like increased unemployment and eviction bans. (Petersen has framed this kind of support as a “permission structure.”)
Other kinds of top-down policy approaches could maintain these revelations about busyness, so that individuals don’t have to act on their own. Brunello Cucinelli, an Italian entrepreneur, mandates a sit-down hour and a half lunch, and requires his employees to leave at 5 p.m. Or take “right to disconnect” laws in France, where workers don’t have to respond to work emails on weekends, or after a certain time on weekdays. If policy enables (or forces) people to slow down, then it doesn’t matter if busyness is overhauled completely as a social signal—the system will demand it.
Will these changes stick? Or will we go right back to worshipping busyness at the cost of everything else? Bellezza isn’t as optimistic about deceleration replacing busyness as the leading social status signal, but she acknowledged that when she started studying busyness, there wasn’t any discussion about deceleration at all. She’s glad it’s entered the conversation, and tries to practice deceleration in her own life.
Steven Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University who studies post-traumatic growth, said that because the pandemic brought death and mortality to the fore, it made people reevaluate their relationships, and what they wanted out of life. Taylor feels hopeful that if enough people change their value systems, that will enact larger change.
“Social systems can change,” he said. “They’re influenced by the people who live within that system. Changes in attitudes lead to changes in behavior. And both attitudes and behavioral changes lead to changes in social structures.” If leisure and shorter workdays were once valued, it’s possible we could value them again.
And during post-traumatic transformations, one change that Taylor has observed is that people are less interested in work. “They love to spend their time doing nothing in particular, just enjoying being in the moment and being alive in the world,” he wrote in the Conversation.
Clarke said she’s soon moving back to New York City after a year of being away. She said that while she’s excited to be closer to friends, restaurants, and city life, she wants to hang onto the good parts of slow. “I enjoy my slow mornings, and some slower work days that allow me to escape to the grocery store or for a walk outside,” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong—I still have days where I am booked solid from 9:30 a.m. through 6:30 p.m.,” Clarke said. “But I have a whole new perspective on being busy, and I understand now that you don’t have to be slammed to be considered valuable.”
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