busyness on Consumerism

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.”

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...

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...

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...

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.

Here is a spiritual peculiarity to explore: that eternity is what we crave, and the first thing our disillusioned brains think to do is cram it into the hours of the working week.

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the w...

The Japanese have a word, ikigai, that captures this sense of drive we all have inside us. Roughly translated as “the happiness of constant busyness,” ikigai reflects your awareness of your life’s pur...

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...

We have the freedom to make choices that can lead to blessing and favor or painful consequences. Battling busyness requires me to take a look inside my heart to make sure that my choices align with my...

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...

Have you ever heard the term "Haole" before? I first heard about it while picking up surfing in High School. I knew it wasn't exactly a positive label, but until recently I never knew wh...

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...