Fetishising Busyness

There's a ritual of the modern workplace - one you've heard and most likely indulged in yourself.

It's the call and response we go through when you ask a workmate how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Mentally busy."

It is pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint. And our simultaneously grim and half chuckled reply comes as a kind of congratulation: "Ha, better than the opposite." When did we start doing that?

As if he didn't have enough to do, Oliver Burkeman asks if we are talking ourselves into feeling overwhelmed with busyness.

Producer: Peter McManus

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.