We've created a society where being "busy" is treated like a virtue, while genuine rest is seen as laziness - and it's destroying us.

I've noticed something disturbing about how we talk about our daily lives. When someone asks "How are you?" the expected answer has become "Busy!" - and people say it with a strange mix of complaint and pride, as if their exhaustion is a badge of honor.

We glorify people who work 60-hour weeks, praise entrepreneurs who "hustle" 24/7, and look down on anyone who prioritizes free time or rest. Even our vacations have become performative - we feel pressured to fill them with activities and post about them on social media to prove we're "making the most" of our time.

What's worse is that we've internalized this so deeply that when we do have genuine downtime, we feel guilty about it. We can't just sit and exist anymore - we have to be "productive" every waking moment. We've turned rest into "self-care" and then commercialized that too, making it another item on our to-do lists rather than a natural part of being human.

The result? We're seeing record levels of burnout, anxiety, and depression. We're losing our ability to form deep relationships because we're "too busy." We're constantly exhausted but can't sleep because our minds won't stop racing with all the things we "should" be doing.

The irony is that this constant busyness isn't even making us more productive - it's making us less effective at everything we do. We're not machines that can run continuously. We're humans who need genuine rest and unstructured time to think, create, and actually live.

Maybe it's time we stopped wearing our busyness like a badge of honor and started seeing it for what it really is - a societal sickness that's robbing us of our humanity.