You’re too busy, too tired, and too distracted. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story.
By Brian Brown
Writers: imagine that proverbial blank page.
You know filling it is hard—sometimes just starting is hard. But it’s much harder than just the writing, isn’t it? We live lives that are so full of relatively unimportant things that we tend to be constantly separated by default from not only writing, but also God, the world, and others—thereby ensuring we have inadequate time, energy, and attention for them.
Let’s take a hard look at you, with your default settings. This is the You that you’ll be if you simply do what normal life asks of you, without ever pushing back much.
Don’t Engage: Noise
First, you’re conditioned to not pay attention. In Matthew Crawford’s book, The World Beyond Your Head, he describes a world in which “silence is a luxury good.”[i] There’s noise all the time, both audible and visual; there’s music in the background, bright colors and advertisements everywhere, the soul-deadening muddle of cars and strangers buzzing around you. . . and the phone in your pocket adding a layer of robocalls, spam texts, and push notifications. All of it deadens you to the world.
Don’t Stop: Busyness
Then, you’re conditioned to not have time for the most important things. The promise of meaning and fulfillment are attached to a careerist mindset, so you spend most of your time at your job or driving to it (even though you know what you’d rather be doing). If you have children, you put them on the same early stages of the same treadmill, and add more driving (you hate that driving!). Then you squeeze in chores, errands, etc. (more busy work) around the edges.
Don’t Rest: Idleness
Finally, you’re conditioned to withdraw still further as a coping mechanism for the first two things. You cope with the noise pollution by retreating behind headphones and the like. You cope with the busyness by filling what time remains with what you call “vegging”—scrolling social media, binge-watching a show you don’t even particularly like. The tiny dopamine hits trick your brain into thinking the next one will leave you feeling better. As Crawford puts it, “distractibility is the mental equivalent of obesity.”[ii]
Result: You’re Not a Writer
What about God, community, active parenting, inspiring inputs, fulfilling rest, and generative work? Oh yeah; mostly: “Too busy. Too tired.” More of it is a choice than you realize, but it all feels inescapable.
Sound familiar?
Josef Pieper calls this twofold dynamic—between busyness and idleness—“Total Work.”[iii] It doesn’t give you meaningful, generative work, nor meaningful rest; it keeps you from them. So you’re supposed to be writing, but find yourself cleaning the house (“procrastination, ha ha ha,” you say; your ancestors called it sloth). You sit down to write, but keep checking Instagram. You tuck in the kids, and between writing and Netflix, Netflix wins. You tell yourself you’re a creative person, a generative person, a writer, but your daily routines not only say otherwise, they almost ensure otherwise.
And yet you nurse the forlorn hope that when you sit down in front of a screen and open up Microsoft Word, all of that will disappear, and your real self will emerge. Once in a while it does—but you usually have to claw for it.
That’s not the end of the story
The lifestyle I’ve just described is more like the lifestyle of an ant than a human. Even in contexts where life gives us great difficulty and forces us to work very hard, we were made to pay attention; to order our lives around the most important things; and to learn Sabbath rest (which is more than just pausing). Yet even in the face of everything I’ve described, these are skills we can learn. We must. It’s hard—but it’s what we were made for.
The Anselm Society exists to help Christians do that—to see and engage the world like they were created to do, to build lives of meaning and richness, and to create out of a posture of gratitude and rest.
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Keep going!
This piece is adapted from the introduction to Brian Brown’s 2024 presentation, “Writing and the Problem of Christianity,” created for the C.S. Lewis Foundation’s 2024 Writer’s Conference. The rest of the presentation deals with how the Total Work dynamic infests the actual writing process and writer’s identity, and how to build habits and an identity in which Christianity is the centerpiece, rather than the complicating factor. You can sign up to participate in the webinar here.
[i] Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2015), p.12.
[ii] Crawford p. 16.
[iii] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), p. 2.