Busyness feels like proof of something. It rarely is.
I've spent enough years in a classroom and on a tennis court to notice the pattern up close: the student who looks busiest is often the one avoiding the one hard thing that would actually move them forward. Fill the hour with motion, and you never have to sit with the harder question of whether the hour was pointed anywhere.
It's not laziness. It's often the opposite — a genuine, earnest exhaustion, chosen daily, that quietly substitutes for direction. Busy is measurable. You can point to it, screenshot it, report it in a status update. Productive, in the sense that actually matters, is much harder to prove, because it usually means doing less, more slowly, on purpose.
Beyond Systems, the novel, spends a lot of time in boardrooms and on factory floors precisely because both places are full of this confusion — people working extremely hard inside a system without ever asking whether the system itself is aimed at anything worth reaching. Pieter and Ben argue about capitalism and Marxism for two decades, but underneath the economics, they're really arguing about the same thing: does effort automatically mean progress, or can you be enormously busy and going nowhere?
I don't think the answer is to work less, exactly. I think the answer is to ask, more often than we're comfortable with, what the work is actually for — and to be willing to sit in the discomfort of not immediately knowing, rather than filling that silence with one more task.
A full calendar is not the same thing as a full life. It's just louder.