Busy is a drug
Why we can’t stop doing—and what it’s costing us to keep going.
We don’t just work too much—we mainline motion. Straight into the bloodstream. No filter, no break, no questions asked.
Call it what you want: hustle culture, late-stage capitalism, startup mode, just-one-more-email syndrome. Underneath it all is the same pathology—one we’ve dressed up in calendars, checklists, and self-congratulatory LinkedIn posts.
We are addicted to doing.
Not achieving. Not succeeding. Just… doing.
(Which is wild, considering most of us don’t even know what we’re doing anymore, or whether it'll even matter tomorrow in a world intent on rewriting the rules on a daily basis. We’re just scared of what happens when we stop.)
"Human doing" isn’t just a clever rebrand of burnout. It’s a full-blown identity crisis. One we inherited, worshipped, and now can’t seem to uninstall. It’s that edge-of-panic urge to optimise every second. That Pavlovian hit of worthiness every time someone says “you’re so productive.” That baseline buzz in your nervous system that doesn’t let you not refresh your inbox at midnight.
Doing is dopamine, disguised as duty. It's fear, camouflaged as ambition. Collectively, it's culture, coded into our cortisol.
And like any addiction, it punishes the pause.
Try resting for a day. Not because your calendar says “rest day,” but because your body says “stop.” You’ll meet the withdrawal symptoms fast:
- Guilt, your brain's way of asking if you're sure you're allowed to exist if you're just
being over there. - Anxiety, the punishment for daring to think you're more than a machine.
- Maybe even a mini-meltdown—your body staging a protest while your brain begs for a productivity loophole.
So you do what any reasonable human doing would: you stop that shit. If (no) rest, then (no) troubles. Just keep doing, doing, doing.
But the body keeps score—and eventually, it calls in backup. When all else fails, it does what your willpower won’t: shut it all down.
(Ask me how I know.)
Here’s the radical truth no one wants to tell you (after all, the industrial school complex you were educated in trained you to do): Being isn’t lazy. It’s literally your default setting. You had it before you learned to prove yourself.
But we’ve been beta-testing performative survival for so long that stillness now feels like system failure. (Spoiler: It’s not.)
So if you’re tired, if you’re slowing down, if you’re dropping balls you used to juggle on fire—maybe that’s not weakness. Maybe that’s healing. Maybe that’s what it looks like when you remember you’re a human being, not a human résumé.
Breathe. You’re still here.
And in case you need permission (you don’t): This is enough.