A culture of busyness?
Soon, it’ll be that time again. You’ve hit Week 5 of Michaelmas, found a minute to breathe, and now you’re looking at the blurry image of your family at the other end of a video call. You’re rattling off the items on your calendar: the work due next week, the society events you’re heading to, the time slots you’ve meticulously booked for your hobbies and your mates. It’s a smooth recitation at this point – after all, you did have the chance to rehearse it earlier with that friend you bumped into on Broad Street. And the only question you were asked was: “How are you?”
At Oxford, it seems like we get used to talking about our lives as nothing more than a summary of the things we’ve accomplished lately, or at least are just about to. The longer your list, the better you must be doing, because to be busy is to be making the absolute most of your time here – and who doesn’t want to be doing that?
What this actually creates is a culture of ‘busyness’ in which having a full diary – regardless of what with – is valuable, and downtime is dangerous. It’s an attitude that has managed to pervade everything from our everyday conversations to the way in which we (and the University) present ourselves online.
For one, the popularity of Oxford ‘day in the life’ content means we’re never short of reminders that reinforce this mindset, even from official channels. Examples of the typical student day on the English Faculty website cite “my busy day” and wall-to-wall activity, where even the smallest lulls are filled with something worth mentioning. YouTube videos offering a glimpse into life at Oxford and attracting millions of views paint similar pictures of days with little blank space on the canvas. Cherwell’s own depiction makes no bones about an “intense” lifestyle and “long to-do lists”.
You might be quick to dismiss this as content produced for its entertainment value, and there would be some truth to that; no one clicks on a five-minute read about a midday lie-in. But in doing so, you might also miss the important truth that the things we say about ourselves often reflect the way we talk to each other. The language of these students sharing their schedules is used thousands of times each day, in coffee shops and colleges, kitchen catch-ups and corridor chitchat. If it’s one that reflects the same romanticisation of hurtling from one thing to the next, then the case for a cult of busyness is clear.
Oxford students aren’t alone in this either; a culture that prizes constant productivity seems to be an almost universal university experience. Last year, London School of Economics student paper The Beaver published a piece on the ‘performative busyness’ there, describing an attitude of “relentless hustle” that will ring familiar to the reader who knows all too well what it’s like to define success by the sheer volume of studying they’ve managed to pile up. American accents are saying the same at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where The Daily Cardinal writes that “rest starts to feel unearned unless it follows exhaustion”. Just like in Oxford, to have free time means to fall behind – whether academically, socially, or even simply in how much enrichment you’re extracting from your university experience.
This is the crux of the issue, and, importantly, the reason why the belief in busyness is more than just a performance. Having a lot to do earns you respect, yes, but these writers suggest the motivation is more intrinsic than simple social currency. Students are busying themselves not only because they worry that their peers will find their level of activity inadequate, but because of the far more dangerous fear that they aren’t doing enough for themselves and their futures.
What is left, then, is a way of talking in which ‘making the most’ of your time is causally conflated with taking on as much as possible. If plans with friends or recreational pursuits must be considered ‘things to do’ to meet this high and rising bar, then so be it. We’re busy, and we’re proud of it. Some of us are so busy that we decided to spend the summer vac writing about it.
Where has this come from? And what’s keeping it up?
Naturally, some of this reflects the fierce competition between students. Sixty-two per cent of undergraduates get straight to work in high-skilled jobs after they leave Oxford, concentrated around industries like finance, consulting, law, and technology. Many of these will be competing directly with one another for a small number of opportunities at a handful of top firms, where any edge on a CV could make all the difference. You can’t afford to feel like you’re wasting precious years that you could spend adding to this at university, especially given the spectacular range of ways to do so that we’re so fortunate to have at our disposal.
Another look through Cherwell archives confirms this: at least part of our desire to be busy comes from an awareness of just how talented the people entering the same job market are. An article debating whether Oxford works too hard describes one student’s acute awareness that here, you might find “your neighbour is a world debating champion fluent in 5 languages or your college mum has already been headhunted by NASA”. Better get working if you want to keep up with that.
University is a uniquely difficult place to manage these expectations; much of your workload is organised on your own time, and there’s no clear limit on the amount you need to do, even before all the extracurriculars come in. There’s no ‘9-to-5’, no office to clock out of at the end of the day, and no space to leave your work behind.
Still, despite the stereotypes, Oxford students are often at pains to demonstrate that they do know how to have fun, and competition is far from the full story. The desire to ‘be busy’ extends beyond flashcards and job applications, into the activities intended to be more exciting than productive. The implication is that the more you do, the more you get out of your time; busyness is valuable because it shows you’re taking every opportunity you can. This gives you cause to be suspicious of your spare moments, to worry about the things that will rush past you if you dare to spend a minute standing still.
Economists will be familiar with the term ‘labour theory of value’, which holds that the true worth of a good is determined by the total amount of labour needed to produce it. We risk applying the same logic to our time at Oxford, worrying that we can’t be having the best experience possible if we’re not doing all we can – a dangerous value system when the list of fun pastimes is practically endless. Besides, the theory has been rejected by mainstream economics for over a century.
So why are we so preoccupied with being busy? The best argument, perhaps, is that university represents a golden window for young people, one in which it’s really possible to pack each day with the things that excite us. Our daily workload isn’t bound by a convenient time window, but neither is our chance to explore beyond it. We live within minutes of our mates, surrounded by societies, sports teams, and student productions. And it’s not just that we can busy ourselves, but also that we should – ahead of us lies an increasingly difficult working world, above us the hefty amount we’ve given up to be here. We have a precious period on our hands that we can’t afford to waste.
More than that, this is a precious period made available for just eight weeks at a time, adding to the feeling that such opportunity is remarkably fleeting. The lengthy holiday awaiting at the end of each term seems to be a green light to reach breakneck pace in those two months, a whispered suggestion that it’ll be over before you know it and that there’s plenty of time to be tired later.
So, is it bad for us?
The fact that time at Oxford is brief and full of chances to do exciting things is not a particular revelation, nor is the insightful observation that we try to take as many of them as we can. Neither is a new theme to a University which is famous for attracting students ambitious and talented across a huge range of disciplines, including but never limited to academia. The reason we talk of a ‘cult of busyness’, then, is not because the lives of students look drastically different – it’s because the conversation has changed.
Instead of recognising that we’re able – and willing – to be so busy because so many interesting things are happening in the community, so many incredible people around us, we’ve begun to treat the Oxford experience like a burden. We see busyness as a standard we’d be wasteful not to reach. We’re rattling off hobbies to reassure ourselves that ours is not a fortunate position we’re letting fall by the wayside. These things aren’t, and never have been, the bar for belonging in the university community – what’s changed is how we talk to ourselves. This doesn’t mean we’re any less aware of how much we’re getting from our three, four, maybe six years here; that much, at least, is the same. The ‘cult of busyness’ arises solely from that negative attitude towards it, one that frames busyness more as a bare minimum than a remarkable result. It exists only insofar as the language we use to describe what we do, the way we perceive other people telling us what they’ve been up to. In fact, we’re making the same choices about how we spend our time – busy culture or not – and explaining it differently. You wouldn’t be part of a society, go to an event, or make plans with your favourite people just to avoid an idle evening; so why talk about them like a tute sheet with a looming deadline?
Language that puts a premium on productivity can only be unhelpful if it warps the activities meant to bring us joy. It attaches the pressure of necessity to opportunities that should excite, turning things a younger you might’ve dreamed of into another job to be done. Oxford is worse than anywhere for a pressure like that, precisely because it’s so rich with great people to meet and interesting things to do; treating it as a task can make it seem like a mountain.
Nevertheless, it’s a mountain firmly of our own making – and not one we need to climb. By reminding ourselves that we’re so busy because of the abundance of once-in-a-lifetime experiences we’re fortunate enough to have in our handful of years here, we can reframe the conversation. Without losing any of the achievement that makes university worth the sacrifice, we can cast off the ‘cult of busyness’ and start to look more lightly at how we spend our time. And a simple “how are you?” can go back to being just that – a friendly question, not an interrogation of accomplishment.
