Alissa Moffit, a 23-year-old who works at a radio station in Winnipeg, told me that even when she has leisure time she doesn’t feel like she’s using it well. “It does sometimes feel like I need to be working towards something rather than doing nothing for nothing’s sake,” she says. When she’s at home watching Netflix, she’ll often also be on her computer and her phone, doing her best, she says, to maximize her free time. “It never really feels like it’s benefitting me,” she says.
This is the frustrating irony of our obsession with busyness. Our leisure time rarely if ever feels rejuvenating and restorative, and whatever work we do during it never really feels important or productive in any meaningful way. We lose on both fronts.
If the cult of busyness is making it more difficult to enjoy guilt-free downtime, social media compounds the problem as an outlet for us to show the world just how active and interesting we are, even in our supposed free time.
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