Stop Performing Busy: Value Results, Not Suffering
We compete in an unspoken contest of who can seem most overwhelmed. “So busy!” becomes the universal greeting, a badge of importance we wear to prove our professional worth. I claim exhaustion from a schedule that’s actually manageable, perform stress about deadlines that aren’t particularly tight.
Busyness has become our collective lie.
The colleague who sighs dramatically about her workload spent thirty minutes this morning organizing her desk. The manager who complains about having “no time” took a long lunch break. I’m no better—describing my day as “crazy” when it was merely full, claiming to be “swamped” when I’m adequately busy but not actually drowning.
We’ve agreed to pretend productivity equals performance, that seeming overwhelmed equals being valuable. The performance is so universal that we’ve stopped noticing we’re performing. The script is so familiar that we deliver our lines automatically.
We mistake activity for achievement, stress for significance.
The cult of busyness makes actual efficiency look like laziness. When I finish tasks quickly, I feel guilty rather than accomplished. Competence creates suspicion that I’m not working hard enough. If the work doesn’t exhaust me, if I’m not visibly stressed, perhaps I’m not sufficiently challenged, not adding enough value, not worthy of my position.
So I learn to stretch simple tasks, add unnecessary complexity, perform struggle even when work flows smoothly. I stay late occasionally even when unnecessary, send emails at odd hours to demonstrate commitment, sigh about workload in ways that suggest heroic endurance rather than basic competence.
We’ve made suffering synonymous with productivity.
This equation is cultural, not rational. Suffering doesn’t improve output. Stress doesn’t enhance quality. Exhaustion reduces effectiveness. But we’ve constructed a professional culture where visible struggle signals value more convincingly than invisible efficiency.
The person who completes work quickly and leaves on time seems less dedicated than the person who stays late struggling with tasks that should have been simple. We reward the performance of difficulty over the reality of results.
My son asks why adults always say they’re busy when they’re doing things that don’t look difficult. Children see through our performance because they haven’t learned that appearing overwhelmed is professional currency.
“You just answered emails,” he observes. “Why did you say you were so busy?”
He’s right. Most of what I do isn’t objectively difficult. It requires attention, competence, experience—but not the heroic endurance my language suggests. Yet I describe it in terms of overwhelm because that’s the accepted narrative, the way we signal professional legitimacy.
We teach the next generation that being busy is more important than being effective.
My son is learning that adults measure worth through stress rather than through results. That the goal isn’t to do work well but to appear sufficiently burdened by it. That success means being perpetually overwhelmed rather than increasingly competent.
What message does this send about sustainable work, about efficiency as a virtue, about the possibility of professional satisfaction? We’re modeling a future where everyone performs exhaustion while wondering why they’re exhausted.
The busyness competition serves everyone by serving no one.
We’re all actors in the same play, performing stress for audiences who are performing stress back at us. Everyone maintains the illusion while nobody benefits from it. The person who claims to be overwhelmed gains status but also stress. The organization that values busyness over results gets neither efficiency nor effectiveness.
We compete to seem busiest, which means we can’t admit when work is manageable, can’t acknowledge when we have capacity, can’t be honest about what actually requires effort versus what we’re performing as difficult.
The competition creates its own reality. If everyone performs overwhelm, then admitting you’re managing fine feels like admitting inadequacy. If everyone claims to be swamped, then having time feels like failure. The performance becomes the reality through collective agreement.
What if we admitted that most work isn’t that difficult? Not easy, necessarily, but manageable with adequate skill and reasonable effort. Not requiring heroic endurance but basic competence. Not causing genuine overwhelm but ordinary professional challenge.
Some work genuinely is overwhelming—crisis situations, genuine emergencies, periods of unusual demand. But most daily work, for most people, most of the time, is simply work. Challenging enough to be interesting, simple enough to be sustainable.
Admitting this would puncture the collective illusion. It would expose how much of our stress is performed rather than experienced. It would reveal that we’ve been competing in a contest nobody wanted to enter.
What would change if we stopped competing to seem most overwhelmed? We might evaluate performance based on results rather than visible struggle. Might value efficiency over endurance. Might reward the person who completes work effectively over the person who performs difficulty.
We might stop treating busyness as virtue and start treating it as what it often is—poor time management, unclear priorities, or organizational dysfunction disguised as individual dedication.
We might create space for honesty about workload, about capacity, about the difference between being appropriately busy and being genuinely overwhelmed. Might develop cultures where saying “I have capacity” doesn’t feel like admitting irrelevance.
And what does it mean that we’ve made peace with perpetual performance of professional anxiety? It means we’ve normalized dysfunction, accepted stress as inevitable rather than addressing its sources. It means we’ve stopped questioning whether constant overwhelm is necessary and started competing over who performs it most convincingly.
It means we’re exhausting ourselves performing exhaustion, stressed about appearing stressed, busy maintaining the appearance of busyness.
The performance extracts real costs. The stress we perform becomes stress we experience. The overwhelm we claim creates actual overwhelm through self-fulfilling prophecy. We’re not just pretending to be busy—we’re making ourselves busy through the effort required to maintain the pretense.
I think about the moments when the performance slips, when someone admits they’re managing fine, that their workload is reasonable, that they left work early because they’d completed their tasks. The confession feels transgressive, like breaking an unspoken rule.
Because we have made a rule, collectively if unconsciously: appearing overwhelmed is required, admitting capacity is suspicious, finishing work efficiently is somehow less valuable than struggling through it.
This is madness. Productive, professional madness that we’ve normalized through collective participation.
Maybe the first step is simply noticing the performance. Recognizing when I’m claiming busyness that isn’t real, performing stress that isn’t necessary, competing in a contest I don’t want to win.
Maybe the second step is opting out, carefully and incrementally. Describing my day accurately rather than amplifying its difficulty. Admitting when work is manageable rather than claiming overwhelm. Valuing efficiency over performance of struggle.
Maybe the third step is creating space for others to do the same, to stop rewarding visible stress and start rewarding actual results, to build cultures where competence can be acknowledged without suspicion.
Or maybe we continue as we are, performing busyness until the performance becomes indistinguishable from reality, competing to seem overwhelmed until we actually are, teaching the next generation that professional worth requires perpetual exhaustion.
My son is watching. Learning what adult work looks like, what success requires, what professional legitimacy demands. And what he’s learning is that being busy matters more than being effective, that stress signals value more than results do, that appearing overwhelmed is more important than actually managing well.
We can change the script. Stop performing the overwhelm we don’t feel. Stop competing in contests nobody wins. Stop pretending that suffering equals significance.
But first we have to admit we’re performing at all.