busyness on Consumer Culture

Our culture invites us to experience everything! If we fail to take advantage of it all, we think we are missing out. But honestly, the web of invitations we are called to navigate is massive and c...

If you ever find yourself sympathizing with Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge regarding the commercialization of Christmas, you’re not alone—this has been a common complaint for quite some t...

We know in­stinctively that Christmas is more than shopping mall Santas, silver bells, and snow-flocked trees, but such things are so entangled with our impressions of Christmas that it’s hard to kn...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

In a knowledge-based economy, the way we make ourselves seen and even validated is through more work. Busyness shows us that we’re valuable, contributing members to society. So whether we can’t stop c...

The picture shows cartoon villain Cruella de Vil, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel of her infamous coupe, black-and-white hair waving wildly in the wind, oversi...

We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual and more interested in the movie theatre, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in ...

Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining driven, we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth. If at present ...

Recently I was running the vision of our church by my thera­pist, who is this Jesus-loving, ubersmart PhD. Our dream was to re-architect our communities around apprenticeship to Jesus. (That feels so ...

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...

We are hyperliving, skimming along on the surface of life.

Are these hyperscheduled, overactive individuals really creating anything new? Are they guilty of passion in any way? Do they have a new vision for their government? For their community? Or for themse...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the true heart of the problem related to the complexity of our lives: Let me fir...

Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

On the fridge in our home is a little magnet that shows a flock of sheep meandering down a country road. Underneath is a caption: “Rush hour, Ireland.” It reminds me of a story of a Spanish professor ...

The press of busyness is like a charm. Its power swells. . . . It reaches out seeking always to lay hold of ever-younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retir...

Dear Lord, We come to you this evening with great expectations. Expectations that your Son Jesus has been born, and that his life is a light for us and all people. We come with expectations that He c...

In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. … Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”

As early as April 2020, a debate raged about the responsibilities of those of us turned safely inside during this global storm. For those time privileged enough to find their calendars suddenly cleare...

As we become more intentional about living according to our deepest desires, it becomes increasingly important to notice the effects of technology on our mind, our soul and our relationships.  The ...

When we insist on doing too much, we are not only inflicting the damage of this choice on ourselves, we are sharing this damage with those we love the most.

The great irony of our time is that even as we are living longer, we are thinking shorter.

Aren’t you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: “May this book, idea, course, trip, jo...

Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.” As in, they label it a disease. Here’s one definition: A behavior pattern chara...

Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.

The truth, however, is that when we say yes to invitations that keep us compulsively busy, we may be exhibiting a lazy ambivalence that actually keeps us distracted from the invitations that matter mo...

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.