Listen to how people answer “how are you?” at work and you will hear the same word over and over: busy. Slammed. Crazy busy. Flat out. It is delivered with a particular tone, half complaint, half boast, and the boast is the interesting part. Somewhere along the way, being busy stopped being something to escape and became something to display. Understanding when and why that flipped is the key to opting out of an exhausting performance.
Was it always this way?
No, and the reversal is the whole story. For most of history, the way to signal status was to display leisure, to make visible that you did not have to work. Thorstein Veblen described this in 1899 as conspicuous leisure: the aristocrat’s whole point was to demonstrate freedom from labour.1 Idleness was the flex. Working hard marked you as someone who had to, which is to say, as lower status.
Now look at where we have landed. A 2017 study with the pointed title “Conspicuous Consumption of Time” documented the inversion: people now infer high status from busyness and a lack of leisure time, not from leisure.2 Saying you are slammed has become a way of signalling that you are important, in demand, and valuable. The flex reversed. We went from flaunting free time to flaunting the absence of it.
Why did it flip?
Because in a modern economy, busyness signals scarcity of a particular kind. If you are in constant demand, the reasoning goes, your skills must be rare and sought after, which makes you valuable. Leisure no longer signals wealth, because anyone can be idle; what signals status now is being so needed that you have no time at all. The researchers found the effect is stronger in the United States than in Europe, which fits a culture that especially prizes work and ambition.2 The humble brag about overwork is, decoded, a claim: I am too important to rest.
Why does this matter?
Because it turns overwork into a performance, and performances are hard to stop even when they are hollow. If being busy is how you signal worth, then resting feels like admitting you are not in demand, and so people manufacture and broadcast busyness, padding their hours and advertising their exhaustion, not because the work requires it but because the status game does. This is also why so much busyness is performative rather than productive: nearly half of workers admit to looking busy rather than being busy, and the point of the theatre is partly to send the status signal.3 You end up tired in the service of an image.
It also makes the busyness self-reinforcing across a workplace. When everyone competes to appear the most slammed, the baseline ratchets upward, and choosing to work sane hours starts to look like a confession of irrelevance. The status game converts a shared preference for less work into a collective inability to take it.
How do you opt out?
First, see the brag for what it is. Once you recognise “I’m so busy” as a status move rather than a neutral report, it loses its grip, both when others perform it and when you are tempted to. Second, refuse to compete in the currency. Decline to measure yourself, or others, by visible overwork, and judge instead by results and by whether the life around the work is any good. Third, be willing to signal differently. There is a quiet confidence in being unhurried, in having results that speak without the accompanying theatre of exhaustion, and it reads, to anyone paying attention, as higher status than frazzle, not lower. The people most secure in their value rarely need to advertise how slammed they are. Opting out of the busyness performance is not a status risk. Done with results behind it, it is the ultimate status move: the freedom Veblen’s aristocrats were flaunting all along.
Frequently asked questions
When did being busy become a status symbol?
In recent decades, especially in the United States. Research published in 2017 found that people now infer high status from busyness and lack of leisure time, reversing the older pattern in which conspicuous leisure signalled status.
Why do people brag about being busy?
Because busyness is now read as a signal of being in demand, competent, and important. Saying you are slammed implies your skills are scarce and sought after, which is why complaining about overwork doubles as a humble brag.
How do you stop performing busyness?
Recognise the brag for what it is, a status signal rather than a fact, and decline to compete in it. Judge yourself and others on results and on a life well lived rather than on visible overwork.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): conspicuous leisure as a historical marker of status. ↩
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Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” Journal of Consumer Research 44, no. 1 (2017): 118 to 138. The effect is stronger in the United States than in Europe. ↩ ↩2
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Visier, “Productivity Theater” survey (2023): nearly half of workers reported spending time on performative work, looking busy rather than being productive. ↩