I was obsessed with being ‘busy’ – this is how I finally gave myself permission to give up

It was in the deep time of the supermoon that I began plotting my escape from my life as I knew it.

I was riddled with existential questions, but the main one was: how did I get here? How did I become so consumed with the need to “keep busy” all the time, to “be successful”?

I’d been a “gifted child”, so “gifted child syndrome” may have contributed to the way I was feeling. But I think that the impact of three years of disrupted university tuition thanks to the coronavirus pandemic also contributed to me putting myself under enormous pressure.

Along with my peers, I knew I would come out of university to find us all vying for labour during a time of stagnacy and inflation; facing a world that looked completely different to previous generations. To people of my age group, the prize of “success” feels hard to grasp; a far more illusory goal. Many of us will be lucky to ever buy a house.

I decided to study from home to avoid Covid and became addicted to it. Sundays were dedicated to timetabling: I would carefully rearrange the next 168 hours of my life, weigh up the option of quick meals against longer dinners I could afford to spend with people I loved.

My obsession with planning out my future became synonymous in my mind with success – and at the beginning of my third year of studying, I spent a week timetabling the entire term ahead of me, even down to lunch breaks. I clocked time almost to the second; then, at the end of the day, would look at my “to do” list, aghast at how only half was scratched off. On “good days”, I would get into bed already feeling anxious for the next.

I have a hunch that equating being “busy” with self-worth is a universal dilemma. Burnout is a severe condition. Yet it rarely catches you by surprise. Most who experience burnout see it coming weeks in advance, yet still sprint towards it. Those who “make it” boast scars of sleepless nights, severed relationships and skipped meals. Our priorities are completely out of whack.

We are ruled by algorithms that keep us enslaved to the cult of being busy. Whether it’s TikTok, Love Island, wellbeing colouring books or drinking green tea, we are encouraged to buy and work our way to a “healthy” work-life balance. Can’t afford it? Work harder.

During my commute to work I tried to squeeze in a meditation, and later stumbled across a series of talks by Oliver Burkeman called Time Management for Mortals. In the talks, Burkeman radically attempts to “give [us] permission to rest”. And this is what I finally decide to give myself: permission to rest.

As Burkeman points out, all we really have – successful or not – is our attention and where we choose to put it. If my attention is always on work, it means I am working in anticipation of its completion. When it’s completed, my thoughts are occupied with the work I’ve just carried out, and whether it’s good enough.

And even when I “switch off”, I don’t really. Instead, I spend caffeine-comedown evenings watching 20 minutes of three different shows; open messages from friends I miss but still somehow don’t reply; and note down ideas for novels I will never write. Whole weeks can blink by like this.

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I began to realise I needed to give it up. I had to learn to be okay with “just this”, and accept I may never finish all the items on my list. I realised I also needed to appreciate what I already had. I live in the countryside, where I can spend my evenings totally alone. I’d spent years obsessing over the idea that I “should” be crammed away in Southern galleries, networking over sour wine. Not anymore.

And so, on the night of the supermoon, I walked up the steep curve of the valley with a girl I like very much. I realised that I’d spent so long worrying about being “busy” and being “successful” that my ambitions had stopped me from making a deep connection with the present.

Put simply, I was worrying too much. And that was stopping me from living. I also realised I had to dramatically change how I qualify “success”. I should realise that in so many ways, I’ve already “made it”.

I’m only just beginning this new life journey. But from this vantage point, it seems that really I have been looking for permission to “give up”, all along. And I’m learning slowly that I’ll only ever be able to get that permission from myself.