The Busy Trap Summary

Summary and Review of “The Busy Trap”

Tim Kreider, an American freelance writer living in the New York City (NYC) area, published an essay in 2012 called “The Busy Trap.” He proposed that people who proclaim that they are “Crazy busy” do so in a proud way as if to complain but responses come in admiration or to fill a void of emptiness by remaining busy. Kreider generally caters his argument to a specific working audience, dare I say possibly elite career professionals, by arguing that no one has time to spend together because they choose to sound important to others by saying that they are busy. The author seems to claim that being busy is a choice of whether people work to live or live to work, moreover, he believes that people need to

take time out away from the busyness to be mentally healthy.
In the first four paragraphs of “The Busy Trap,” Kreider defines his audience as people who complicate their life with work therefore making less time for friendships or to shoot the breeze. Kreider clarifies that he is not writing to an audience of blue collar workers that go from job to job to job. He specifically cites asking a professional friend to “ditch work for a few hours” to do nothing but hang out. His friends’ response seemed to sound like a buzz of “some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out…” to the author. Tim Kreider was fed up with people who are too busy to live while arguing that people have time to work and live.
Kreider cites how he grew up with hour hours of nothingness in largely “unstructured” and “unsupervised time every afternoon.” While todays children are scheduled with too much structured time.

He argues that adults in society have chosen this path for themselves and their children by training their children to be busy. Furthermore, that adults desire for their children to remain busy rather than giving their children free time to develop memories of play to draw upon the rest of their lives. Moreover, Kreider continues his argument by telling the reader that as a society of busy people, we value living to work. He tells a story about a friend who left the hustle and bustle of New York to move to an artist apartment in the south of France. Kreider expressed how his friend changes when she moved. This friend discovered that the pressured environment of NYC had made her believe that “her personality—driven, cranky, anxious, and sad” were her not a result of her way of living but instead believe that it was who she was. Whereas now that she lived in France in a different working culture that she was able to get her work done while having time to hand out with friends at a café every

evening.
Tim Kreider specifically expresses that he believes that some people keep themselves busy to fill a void or a deep emptiness, further, expressing that people live to work. He expressed, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.” He argued that some people choose to work for companies that make them feel that as an employee, that they are indispensable with rules such as being grounded to eat lunch at work.
In his effort to express the need for humans to take time away from busyness and to recharge to be mentally healthy, Kreider specifically sited that he wrote the essay at an “Undisclosed Location” with no television or internet. He continues by saying that he rediscovered “buttercups, stink bugs and the stars.” With this recharge, he was able to be more productive than when he was living in an environment of pressure to be busier. Furthermore, he argues that the time that people take to recharge is necessary, “Idleness is not a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as Vitamin D is to the body is to the body and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.” Kreider’s argument continues as he sites how several of life changing rhetoric “of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces” were not created during a busy time. Kreider suggests that he elects “time over money” in the choices that he’s mad throughout his life, indicating that on his deathbed that he will not regret the time out that he took to laugh and enjoy life with friends. He ends the essay with persuasion that “Life is too short to be busy.”
The author clearly has financial security to casually write, “value time over money.” He further proves his position by mentioning his friend who moved to France as well as not mentioning mundane tasks such as the maintenance of a family, household tasks such as doing laundry, cooking meals, mowing the lawn, or grocery shopping. The reader is left with the idea that they author is unrelatable to the majority of Americans because he seems privileged. I would like to have seen the author use more common examples that would be relatable to a larger number audience to express his point. While he specifically says that he isn’t speaking to “exhausted” people who work several jobs and long hours, some of his details remain unrelatable. However, it may be that I do not understand the NYC culture.
Kreider also makes an assumption when he wrote that “The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” He incorrectly assumes that all people believe in God or in the same way that he does.

Many Bible loving people might be offended because “be fruitful” was written in Genesis prior to “the fall” of Adam, meaning that people believe that God created work for enjoyment but it was “the fall” of our first parents that caused the want for food and basic necessities. The entire argument should be removed in consciousness of the audience. I would have liked for Kreider to recognize that some people feel at their best when they are productive and busy and to note that the tug-o-war between what wants or needs may actually not be a tug-o-war for all people. Busy people squeeze in time to laugh amidst activity or nature walks during lunch or a time to create after dinner that is equally refreshing for them as well as the luxury that he had to write at an “Undisclosed Location.” People fill their life with the want to give back by volunteering or giving of themselves in some type of compacity, which can be more rewarding than “idleness.” Even the overscheduled children Kreider spoke of could be volunteering while learning critical life skills, making them less likely to engage in at-risk behaviors and live a balanced

life.
The author generalized that all people are created equal, further, our wants to grow a garden, raise a family, also bring us balance, less cantor, and happiness that fills the void of necessary needs full of mundane necessary tasks. These “Crazy busy” wants many actually be the anecdotal prescription that balances like out for many people or a way of self-prescription for overcoming a death or other mental void. This brings me back to the point that the author seems to portray himself as an elite that is unrelatable.