As little as 15 years ago, the ringing of your house bell or the telephone was a small cause for celebration. You would be happy that someone thought of you and would bring out the tea, biscuits and conversation.
Weekends would be spent aimlessly, recklessly and people would take some measure of joy in seeing each other, yet nowadays, things couldn’t be more different. Telephone calls remain unanswered, doors remain firmly shut even though you’re almost a hundred per cent certain there’s someone on the other side and people cancel dinners they have forsworn to attend when you’re already sitting at the booked table. Indeed, if the memes are to be believed, most people just want to spend all weekend in their old pyjamas, watching Netflix and drinking themselves into oblivion, all by themselves.
Of course, no one ever says this and instead we have a new excuse for everything: we’ve, apparently, become ‘too busy’. The ‘too busy’ phenomenon seems to have started around the time that internet became widely available on mobile phones and gradually spread to infect every single waking moment of our lives.
The fact is that, while in the past the weekend was a time for rest and relaxation and possibly meeting a few people, our lives are now so saturated with everyone’s unwanted opinions, constant messages, e-mails and photographs that the minute the weekend hits and we have some say over our lives, we are sick and tired of socialising despite the fact we have only done it from behind a screen.
Maybe we should all make more of an effort to be busy to live before we inevitably die
Even that time isn’t sacred enough for some, which leads to many feeling obliged to check their e-mails every day because they get almost sick with worry that if they don’t answer to things straight away, people’s inner Kraken may be released.
I recently had an afternoon at the spa where everyone around me was checking their e-mails diligently while they were there and when I pointed out to my friend that she should try to enjoy her time there she told me: “I’m too busy, I have to check my e-mails.”
The fact of the matter is that people no longer understand what boundaries look like and so much of our time is dominated by a false sense of urgency that we find ourselves perpetually stressed yet perpetually unable to recover: a vicious circle of unhappiness.
Maybe we should all make more of an effort to be busy to live before we inevitably die.