"just stay busy" is the worst advice you'll ever get.

our obsession with productivity as a cure for longing is why we feel lost

i was scrolling like i do every night, half asleep, half avoiding sleep, when i landed on a reel by vaikhari. she was talking about how her blood actually boils when she sees those reels that go “if you’re missing them, you’re not busy enough.” and something about the way she said it, the specific anger in it, made me stop scrolling for the first time in maybe an hour. because i used to be that girl. i used to be the loudest advocate for exactly that kind of thinking.

i used to genuinely preach be so fucking busy that you don’t feel the need for another human in your life. be so productive and obsessed with building your own world that loneliness can’t find an opening. follow a strict enough schedule and you’ll never have to feel the ache of missing someone, you’ll just be too tired, too occupied, too forward moving to notice the gap. and i said this with conviction. i said this to friends who were going through breakups. i probably said some version of this to myself at 2am more times than i can count.

it took someone else’s anger to show me how bad that advice actually was.

nobody hands you the 5am wake up call and the cold shower and the seventeen tabs of productivity youtube with a disclaimer attached. they’re not solving your loneliness. they’re helping you outrun it for exactly as long as your schedule holds. and your schedule will not hold forever. at some point you will be lying in bed with nothing left to optimize and the missing will still be there, fully intact, waiting exactly where you left it.

we’ve started prescribing productivity to people who are actually grieving.

and not just grieving death. grieving failed dreams. breakups. loneliness. the slow realization that adulthood isn’t what you thought it would be. the gap between who you are and who you hoped you’d have become by now. instead of letting someone sit with that, instead of saying this hurts and you’re allowed to let it, we say start a side hustle. wake up at 5. go to the gym. stay busy. keep yourself occupied. we have confused distraction with healing and we did it so smoothly that most of us didn’t notice the switch.

productivity has become the only addiction that earns applause. people used to numb themselves with alcohol. now they numb themselves with calendars.

if every single hour of your day is scheduled, there is never enough silence left over for grief to introduce itself to you. and the cruel part is you're rewarded for it. being extremely busy is a “flex”

if you read long enough you'll realise we don't categorise the rich and wealthy by what brands they wear but how they spend their time.

having time for yourself, your family, to feel and live apart from the hustle to generate economic value is what sets the wealthy apart.

we also treat longing itself like it’s a productivity problem, like it’s something inefficient that needs fixing. but longing is information, not inefficiency. when you deeply miss something or someone, your own psyche is trying to hand you something important about what actually matters to you. and instead of opening that letter we respond with optimization. feeling lonely? build your career. heartbroken? lock in. questioning your entire life? start another project. we’ve stopped asking how does this feel and started asking how can i optimize this, and we did the swap so quietly that most of us never noticed we’d made a trade.

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letters from nush runs on caffeine and the life left in me after being a full time woman in tech, support my work and keep the coffee coming <3

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i want to be clear that hustle isn’t the villain here. i say this because i think my credibility on this whole thing comes from admitting i am deeply, embarrassingly ambitious. i love building. i probably work harder than most people i know and i don’t see that changing anytime soon. my entire lifestyle someday resolves around this isn’t an argument against working hard. it’s an argument against working hard as a way of running from yourself.

because there are two people who can both work fourteen hour days. one of them is building something they actually, deeply care about. the other is terrified of what will happen if they ever sit still long enough to hear their own thoughts. from the outside they look completely identical. both tired, both busy, both getting things done. internally they are living two opposite lives, and only one of them would survive a quiet sunday with nothing scheduled.

imagine driving a car at 180 km an hour. everyone on the side of the road is impressed by your speed. nobody is asking whether you’re actually headed toward where you want to go or whether you’re just driving straight into the ocean at a very committed pace. speed amplifies direction. it doesn’t replace it. and the only way to actually check your direction is to slow down, which is exactly the thing we’ve trained ourselves to be afraid of doing.

a while ago i wrote about how obsessing over someone is rarely about the person at all. it’s about an unlived version of yourself that you happen to see reflected in them. you’re not in love with them, you’re in love with the potential you glimpsed in your own reflection while looking at them. productivity runs on that exact same wiring. we aren’t actually obsessed with achievement. we’re obsessed with never having to sit still long enough to find out what we’re truly longing for underneath it. and that ties back to something i’ve been circling in my writing for months now, the practice of actually inhabiting your own life while it’s happening. tasting the coffee before it goes cold. feeling the water in the shower instead of mentally drafting a response to a text under it. productivity culture has taught us to distrust any moment that isn’t actively producing something. presence asks us to trust those moments again.

i think the deeper thing happening underneath all of this is what i’d call instrumental living. everything exists for something else now. we don’t read to enjoy reading, we read to become smarter. we don’t move our bodies because it feels good, we exercise to fix our physique. we don’t call our parents because we miss their voices, we call them because family is important, like it’s a line item on a list. vacations exist to become content. books exist to become insights. every experience has turned into a stepping stone pointing somewhere else. nothing is allowed to just be the destination. nothing gets to simply be enough on its own. and once you start noticing it, you cannot stop seeing it everywhere, in your own head most of all.

it’s not just about breakups either. it’s gotten into the start of things too, the wanting-someone-new part, which somehow nobody warns you is going to feel just as loaded. you like someone, you want to make time for them, you want to text back fast and show up and be available, and somewhere in the back of your head a voice goes why do you have that much time. like wanting a person is evidence that you’re not doing enough with your one life. like the correct response to liking someone is to get busier, not closer.

i’ve watched friends downplay an entire relationship because they were scared of looking like the kind of girl who “has time for a boyfriend.” like having a boyfriend is a personality flaw now. like being in love is something you should apologize for in front of your own ambition. nobody says maybe liking someone is allowed to rearrange your priorities for a while. we’ve made wanting someone feel like a confession instead of just a normal human thing that happens to normal human people who are also, somehow, doing fine in every other part of their life.

and i actually think this is where a lot of our anxious attachment comes from, not the other way around. we spend so long being unavailable on purpose, treating our own time like it’s too valuable to hand over to anyone, that the second we do let someone in, we don’t know how to do it calmly. we either overcorrect into needing them constantly or we stay so guarded that we sabotage it before it gets a chance to get real. you cannot build secure attachment with someone when you’ve spent years training yourself to see closeness as inefficient. you end up either starving for them or terrified of them, and both of those are just the same wound wearing different outfits. some feelings disappear because they’ve actually been understood. others disappear because you’ve successfully outrun them. those are not the same thing, and most of us have only ever practiced the second one.

one of the cruelest things we say to each other now, in a hundred different outfits, is you’re just not busy enough. someone tells you they’re heartbroken and we hand them a startup idea. someone says they’re starting to like someone and we ask if they have time for that right now, like it’s a project that needs a calendar slot. someone says they feel lost and we hand them another online course. we’ve medicalized sadness into an efficiency problem, and wanting into a scheduling conflict, in every direction, missing someone old or wanting someone new.

i was watching a samay raina stand up special a few months ago and he said something that completely rewired how i look at my weeks. he said we’ve flipped what a productive day even means. we make three powerpoints and call it a productive day, which is genuinely insane. the day you spend earning money is the day that’s spent. the day you spend with your closest people, that’s the actual productive day. and somehow we’ve all collectively decided those days don’t count. i think about that constantly now. the evening that turns into 2am because you and your closest friend just kept talking. the lunch with your parents where nothing important happens except everything important happens. those days don’t compound financially. they compound into an actual life.

work deserves optimization. that part is true, and i’ll defend it.

but relationships deserve presence, not efficiency.
grief deserves time, not a deadline.
art deserves wandering, not a five step framework.
friendship deserves wasted afternoons that produce absolutely nothing except the fact that you were there.
love deserves uncertainty, not a system to eliminate it.

your inner life deserves silence. real silence. not a podcast playing over it so you don’t have to hear yourself.

efficiency is one of the best things humans ever invented. it is also one of the worst religions we’ve ever converted to.

so here is the part where i actually ask you to do something, because i don’t think this essay means anything if it just lives in your head as a nice idea you agreed with.

i want you to go lie on the floor right now. genuinely. put your phone down after this and go lie flat on the floor, not your bed, the actual floor, and play whatever music makes you feel things you’ve been avoiding feeling. whatever song you skip because it gets too close. play that one. and let yourself cry if it comes. don’t perform it, don’t narrate it to yourself, just let your body do the thing it’s been asking to do for weeks or months or longer. you have been so busy. you have been so disciplined. you have not been still enough to let this out and it has been sitting in you this entire time, waiting, patient, not going anywhere just because you scheduled around it.

you’re allowed to miss them. you’re allowed to be sitting in your productive, organized, color coded life and still feel the specific shape of someone’s absence sitting right next to you. that doesn’t mean you failed at building a life. it means you’re a person who loved something and is still in the process of feeling what that cost.

go lie on the floor. play the song. let it out. you don’t have to optimize your way through this one.

yours lovingly,

Nush <3