观点
"忙碌"的陷阱
蒂姆·克瑞德 2012年07月18日
如果你住在21世纪的美国，恐怕会听到很多人跟你念叨他们有多忙。只要你问他人最近怎么样，几乎铁定会得到这样的答案："忙着呢！""忙极了。""忙疯了。"显而易见，这明面上是在诉苦，实际是隐性的炫耀。通常人们会对此致以祝贺："忙有忙的好"或"总比闲着强"。
你能注意到，告诉你自己有多忙的人，并不是要在重症监护室(I.C.U.)连值两个班，也不是每天坐着公车去打三份最低薪水的工；他们不能说是忙碌，而是疲惫。精疲力竭。疲于奔命。所有抱怨自己有多忙的人，几乎都纯粹是自找的：他们在自愿承担工作和职责，他们在"鼓励"子女主动参加课外班和各种活动。他们忙碌，是因为个人的野心、动力或焦虑，是因为他们沉迷于忙碌，并且为可能要面对的闲散而紧张不已。
我认识的每个人好像都在忙忙叨叨。当他们没有在工作，或是没有在做有利于工作的事情时，就会着急，心生负罪感。他们精心安排时间跟朋友会面，就跟绩点分（G.P.A）4.0的学生见缝插针参加社会服务一样，因为这能让自己的大学申请信更好看。最近我写信给一个朋友，问他是否愿意在这周碰碰面，他回信说没时间，但如果有什么安排的话，他倒是能从工作中挤出几个小时。我想说明一点，我邀他碰面并不是说这是一个初步邀请，这就是邀请。但他的忙碌让人感觉，他是在搅拌机发出的巨大噪音中跟我喊了两嗓子，于是，我放弃了再跟他继续喊话。
如今就连孩子们都是大忙人，他们的课程与课外活动时间安排精确到了以半小时为单位。每天当他们回到家时，跟大人一样累。我是挂钥匙长大的孩子，小时候每天下午，我有整整三个小时的自由时间，也几乎没有大人监督，我用这段时间做各种事情，从阅读《世界大百科全书》到自己做动画片，再到跟朋友们一起去树林里玩，朝对方眼睛扔泥巴块，所有这一切为我带来了各种重要的技能与洞察力，让我受用至今。自由自在的几个钟头成了一种模式，我希望终此一生，都能这样生活。
如今的这种集体歇斯底里，对生活并非必需，也并非不可避免，它是我们在默许之后选择的结果。不久前，我跟一个朋友在Skype上聊天，她因为房租太高离开了纽约，现在在法国南部一个小城里做访问艺术家。她说，多年来，自己头一次感到快乐而惬意。她还是把工作做完，但工作不会消耗掉全天的时间与心力。她说现在的感觉有点像在读大学——有了一大群朋友，每晚大家一起在咖啡馆里相聚。她还交了个男友。（她曾这样悲哀地总结纽约人的感情生活："每个人都忙极了，每个人都以为自己还能做得更成功。"）她曾经误以为自己的个性是冲劲十足、暴躁焦虑、郁郁寡欢，结果发现这纯粹是受环境挤压变形的结果。没人想过这样生活，就像整天在车流里龟速前进，在体育馆拥挤的人群中动弹不行，或像在残酷的高中时代暗中较劲互相倾轧——但我们集体迫使彼此这样去做。
忙碌代表的是存在于世的安心，对抗空虚的保障；如果你这么忙碌，日程紧凑，每天的每一个小时都有人找你，那么你的生活显然就称不上懵懵懂懂、无关紧要或者毫无意义。我认识一个女人，她曾在一家杂志实习，午休时甚至不能离开办公室，因为杂志社觉得总会有什么紧要的事情需要她来做。而这是本娱乐杂志，并无多大价值，自恃甚高的姿态，看起来无非是自欺欺人的习惯罢了。在这个国家，有越来越多人不再从事看得见摸得着的实物的制作生产，如果你的工作连理查德·斯卡瑞(Richard Scarry)书里的猫或者蟒蛇（小说用拟人手法描述这些动物忙于一些重要的工作－编者注）都懒得做，说这份工作不可或缺，我还真是不信。我忍不住好奇，那些装腔作势的疲态是不是只是用来掩饰一个事实，那就是我们做的大部分事，其实并不重要。
我一点也不忙。在我认识的人当中，要数本人最不上进。跟大部分作家一样，我也觉得只要哪天不动笔写作，就无异于一个一天也不应该活在这世上的无赖，但我同时又觉得，每天只要工作四五个小时，我就有资本在人世间多浪荡一天了。大多数时候，我会在早上写作，下午骑很长时间自行车，再处理些杂务，到了晚上，我可以见朋友、读书，或者看部电影。这在我看来是个理智而又愉快的节奏。如果你打电话给我，问我是不是能搁下工作，去大都会博物馆看看翻修一新的美国之翼展厅(American Wing)，或是去中央公园看漂亮姑娘，或者喝上一天的冰粉红薄荷鸡尾酒，我会回答：咱们什么时间见？
但在最近几个月，由于工作需要，我也不知不觉变得忙碌起来。生平以来第一次，我可以绷着一张脸告诉别人，自己"太忙"，没法做他们希望我去做的这事或者那事。我明白人们为什么享受这种抱怨：它让你觉得自己很重要、很吃香、很有利用价值。只可惜我实在讨厌忙碌的感觉。每天大清早，我的邮箱里就堆满了邮件，要求我去做根本不想做的事情，或者立即着手解决什么问题。这让我越来越难以忍受，终于有一天，我逃离纽约，潜伏在某个秘而不宣的地方，在这里写下了这段文字。
在这儿，我几乎不受俗务所累。这里没有电视。要查邮件得开车去图书馆。有段时间，我整整一星期看不到一个认识的人。我慢慢忆起了毛茛、椿象与繁星。我读书。几个月来第一次，我终于能真正写点什么了。如果你不能全身心沉浸在这个世界里，就很难对生活有所感悟，但如果你不能逃离出去，同样也很难认识这个世界，领悟这个世界。
无所事事远非一段假期，一种放纵或一种缺点那么简单，它对于大脑之不可或缺，正如维生素D对身体的作用。剥夺了无所事事的权利，我们的心智将遭受折磨，就像患上佝偻病的躯体将随之变形那样。无所事事赋予了我们空间与宁静，这对于我们是必要的，我们因此能从生活中退后一步，更全面地观望它，能发现意想不到的关联，等待电光火石般的灵感。就像一个悖论，想要把任何工作完成，你必须先让自己空下来。"做白日梦，往往是我们行事之精髓，"托马斯·品钦(Thomas Pynchon)在论懒惰的随笔中这样写道。阿基米德在浴缸里大呼"尤里卡"(Eureka，意为找到了)，牛顿在苹果树下顿悟，《化身博士》(Jekyll & Hyde)的创意和苯环结构的发现——在历史上可以找到大量关于灵感的故事，它都出现在人们无所事事、做着梦的时候。这让你不禁会去想，二流子、懒鬼以及没出息的人，为这个世界贡献的伟大理念、发明与杰作，也许跟孜孜不倦工作的人一样多。
"未来的目标是充分失业，这样我们才可享乐。因此我们需要摧毁现有的政治经济体制。"这听起来像是吸大麻的无政府主义者发出的宣言，实际上语出亚瑟·C.克拉克（Arthur C. Clarke），他在玩水肺潜水、打弹珠的间隙，写出了《童年的终结》(Childhood's End)，并提出了通信卫星的构思。我的老同事泰德·拉尔(Ted Rall)最近写了篇专栏，提出将收入与工作脱钩，为每份公民发放一份有保障的薪水，这想法听来简直疯狂，但一个世纪之后，它将跟废奴、普选和八小时工作制一样成为基本人权。清教徒将工作变成美德，他们显然忘了上帝发明工作的初衷是为了惩戒。
如果所有人都跟我一样，这个世界也许很快就会完蛋。但我觉得，理想的人生，应该介乎于我本人目空一切的懒散与世人无止境的疯狂之间。我的角色只是提供坏影响，我就像那个站在课室窗外，对端坐在书桌前的你做鬼脸的小孩，催促你找个什么借口溜出课堂，去外面玩耍，一次就好，下不为例。我本人决绝的懒惰与其说是优点，倒不如说是一种奢侈，但我是在很久以前就有意识地做出了决定，在时间与金钱之间选择了前者，因为我一直相信，这一生时光短暂，最好是将时间花在我喜欢的人身上。我想，临终之际，我或许会后悔当年没能工作更努力些，没有说出那些该说的话，但我又觉得，在最后一刻我真正的愿望，可能是能再跟克里斯喝杯啤酒，能再跟梅根散长长的步，能再跟博伊痛痛快快地笑一场。人生苦短，请勿忙碌。
蒂姆·克瑞德（Tim Kreider）是《我们没有学到什么》(We Learn Nothing)作者，这是一本随笔与漫画合集。他的漫画《痛苦—什么时候是个头？》(The Pain - When Will It End?)由Fantagraphics出版公司出版，共为三册。
本文最初发表于2012年6月10日。
翻译：詹涓
The 'Busy' Trap
By TIM KREIDER July 18, 2012
If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy busy." It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."
Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.'s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it's something we've chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist's residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn't consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college - she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: "Everyone's too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.") What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality - driven, cranky, anxious and sad - turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school - it's something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d'être was obviated when "menu" buttons appeared on remotes, so it's hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I've insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was "too busy" to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I'm writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I've remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I'm finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. "Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do," wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes' "Eureka" in the bath, Newton's apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren't responsible for more of the world's great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world's endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I'll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com.)
Tim Kreider is the author of "We Learn Nothing," a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, "The Pain - When Will It End?" has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
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