Fat or Manic?

There are some great bits of terminology evolving out there, amongst the people who think hard about the world as we know it.






Some examples are:

• The Joyless Economy
• The Overwork Culture
• The Hyperactive Workplace
• The Manic Society
• The Wage-Slave System

These terms are great.  They make neat and emotive short-hand for long, complicated concepts and arguments. I have slipped into using them, on a not irregular basis. But sometimes... I have to take a step back, and say "hold on a wee minute there!" What they describe and assume, doesn't always ring true. Sometimes I wonder if we're all playing a game, signing up to notions that tell half a story, because they excuse us from our mistakes and our failures.

Take an example, the Manic Society. This is one of Robert Holden's bits of jargon that I came across in his book Success Intelligence: Timeless Wisdom for a Manic Society (2005). But while he's responsible for the term, he's certainly not the only writer out there describing this phenomenon.  The way he tells it, we live in this 'manic society', where everyone is so busy, busy, busy all the time.  So far, sounds so true.

But it strikes me that we're also a society characterised by quite a lot of stagnancy and sloth. Now that would never be acknowledged in the writings that are focused on unpicking this 'manic society' for readers who are already interested, and identify with feeling too busy, and too pressured, and too stressed.  But come on. Look at this carefully.  We're so manically busy, that we're too busy to physically do things for ourselves:

• We're too busy to wash our own cars, we'll drive through a carwash instead.
  
  
• To busy to carry our groceries from the shop to the house, we'll get them delivered.
  
  
• Too busy to walk anywhere, we'll drive.
  
  
• Goddamit most of the time we're all too busy to move at all.

We are all so manically busy... that we're getting fat?

Is this not a contradiction? There's this trend in the media to describe ourselves as a manic society, to lament that we're all so busy, and never have enough time... Its a terrible problem, for which you deserve sympathy and maybe should demand change. And at the same time, it's a complement - there's kudos in being super-uncontrollably-busy. There isn't in being a lazy, apathetic, fat bastard.

Yet most of the time, admit it, most of us are manically sat on our bottoms.

Likewise, there's this trend to analyse how we're all so busy that our personal lives suffer, our relationships falter through neglect. The media is full of these surveys and stats around the breakdown of family life, parents spending 8 minutes per day with their kids or some such horror... But the same people do get through an awful lot of hours watching TV, and movies, or browsing online (me included)...

I'm not denying that people are busy, and stressed, and working very hard, and doing stupidly long hours, and worn out, and all the rest of it. I think we've nearly all been there, seen it, done it. But it's half a story. We're manically busy, and we're lazy sods.

Why is that? Is it the way it has to be?  And who gets to decide?

Image by herval