Bowing to the Altar of Chaos
I still keep busy. But I'm not Busy; it's no longer who I am.
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I USED TO GET HIGH on my own frenzy. I never tired of my tirelessness. I put the ass in assiduousness, bowing to the altars of Chaos and Ego. But finally, in my graying years, wisdom lapped ambition and I plotted my escape from what Substack essayist Tamara calls “The Cult of Busyness.”
We are, she says, obsessed with acting busy.
The irony, of course, is that busyness has almost nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with anxiety management. It’s not a virtue but a tranquillizer, a culturally endorsed way to avoid collapse by rehearsing control. We call it “drive”, but it’s often fear in a tailored suit. The busier we are, the less time we have to notice the cracks forming: the conversations avoided, the intimacy postponed, the silent terror that maybe we’re sprinting toward nothing. Busyness offers the illusion of progress, the narcotic of motion. Doing something, anything, becomes the psychological equivalent of keeping the lights on in an empty house, just to prove to yourself that someone still lives there. Because to stop… to actually stop is to risk hearing the one question our entire civilization is built to drown out: Who are you when you’re not performing usefulness?
For most of my adult life, I was a hard-driving journalist who overcame imposter syndrome through good luck and great mentors to cover the White House and politics, write best-selling books, run newsrooms, run businesses, and make a late-career transition to consulting. I was part of the band of bustling brothers and sisters who Tamara calls “heroic casualties of capitalism, sprinting toward enlightenment via Wi-Fi.”
They don’t breathe; they buffer. Their coffee costs more than therapy, their sleep schedule could qualify as avant-garde performance art. They wear AirPods like rosaries and mistake Slack pings for divine intervention. Their inboxes are cathedrals of guilt, their calendars sacred scrolls of self-importance, their very identities bound not by love or leisure or laughter but by logistics. These are the faithful of the new religion: the Church of Constant Doing.
She gets me. (And God I wish I could write like her!)
Nine years ago, Lori and I moved back home to Michigan after raising our children in suburban Washington, D.C. We wanted to be closer to our families. We wanted balance in my life.
I’m now a full-time husband and grandfather with interesting side hustles: executive consultant, independent writer, non-profit board member, neighborhood kibitzer, woods walker, golf hacker, and nap taker.
I keep busy. But I’m not Busy; it’s not who I am.
Read Tamara’s essay to find your escape.
But take your time.
I WOKE UP this morning to this maddening story on Mike Donilon, a top adviser to former President Joe Biden.
You might recall: Donilon refused to acknowledge that his boss was a fatally flawed candidate for re-election. He kept the president in the dark about his polling decline. He chastised anybody who dared to question Biden’s mental fitness.
Turns out, he had four million reasons to bury the truth.
Donilon, who has worked with Biden since the early 1980s, said during a July interview with the House Oversight Committee that he was “paid just a little bit short of $4 million” for his work as the chief strategist of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign. If Biden had been reelected, Donilon would have received another $4 million bonus, he said, according to video footage of the interview released Tuesday by the Republican-led committee.
What a selfish, whorish act by just one of countless Democratic enablers who chose power and money over honor, becoming co-conspirators to Trump’s corruption and incompetence.
And yet most of them still work in Democratic politics. They are morally and strategically bankrupted hacks whose solipsistic service not only decimated the Democratic Party’s brand, but now jeopardizes our democratic system: They are the reason Trump is president again.
God I wish I could write like you!
"They are morally and strategically bankrupted hacks whose solipsistic service not only decimated the Democratic Party’s brand, but now jeopardizes our democratic system."