The Cult of Busy

What if your busyness isn’t productivity, but a defense?

What if the full calendar, the “just one more thing,” and the white-knuckled push through illness aren’t signs of dedication, but the psyche’s armor against feeling? Depth psychology treats symptoms as messages. In this lens, busyness can operate like a psychic defense, anxiously organized activity that keeps us in the bright, upward drive of ascent so we can avoid the necessary, meaning-making work of descent.

Descent is where soul metabolizes life. It is slow, cyclical, messy, closer to seasons than sprints. When we outrun it, we don’t get more alive; we get more brittle. Anxiety spikes, bodies revolt, relationships go numb. The “cult of busy” promises worth through output, but soul doesn’t speak in billable hours; it speaks in images, sensations, synchronicities, signals we only notice when we become still.

If this theme resonates, it’s part of a larger conversation in my new book, The Motherhood Myth, about how we inherited burnout, busyness, and the belief that our worth is earned.

Depth psychology also asks, “Whose story are you living?”

In dominator cultures, we inherit heroic scripts: climb, conquer, optimize. Internalized, they become an unconscious law that equates rest with failure.