The Social Life Of Busyness

The Social Life of Busyness engages with the assumption that busyness is taking over everyday life by exploring busyness at work, at home and during leisure time. In a world where the notion of being busy is commonly experienced, and even expected, how should we understand the reasons for busyness?

Busyness defines the lives of most Americans. For some, the focus of busyness is family. For others, it is career or social activities. Sometimes busyness results from a big event, like the catastrophic illness of a family member, but much of it builds from many seemingly inconsequential demands that collectively become overwhelming. We search for the best airline prices on the Internet, are "partners" with teachers in our children's education, and employ a battery of devices that promise to save labor if only we can learn how to use them. Busier Than Ever! follows the daily activities of fourteen American families. It explores why they are busy and what the consequences are for their lives. Busyness is not just a matter of personal time management, but of the activities we participate in and how each of us creates "the good life." While numerous books deal with efficiency and the difficulties of balancing work and family, Busier Than Ever! offers a fresh approach. Busyness is not a "problem" to be solved—it is who we are as Americans and it's redefining American families.

______________________ 'Too much to do? Stop and read this' - Guardian 'For a fresh take on an eternal dilemma, Overwhelmed is worth a few hours of any busy woman's life – if only to ensure that she doesn't drop off the bottom of her own “To Do” list' - Mail on Sunday ______________________ In her attempts to juggle work and family life, Brigid Schulte has baked cakes until 2 a.m., frantically (but surreptitiously) sent important emails during school trips and then worked long into the night after her children were in bed. Realising she had become someone who constantly burst in late, trailing shoes and schoolbooks and biscuit crumbs, she began to question, like so many of us, whether it is possible to be anything you want to be, have a family and still have time to breathe. So when Schulte met an eminent sociologist who studies time and he told her she enjoyed thirty hours of leisure each week, she thought her head was going to pop off. What followed was a trip down the rabbit hole of busy-ness, a journey to discover why so many of us find it near-impossible to press the 'pause' button on life and what got us here in the first place. Overwhelmed maps the individual, historical, biological and societal stresses that have ripped working mothers' and fathers' leisure to shreds, and asks how it might be possible for us to put the pieces back together. Seeking insights, answers and inspiration, Schulte explores everything from the wiring of the brain and why workplaces are becoming increasingly demanding, to worldwide differences in family policy, how cultural norms shape our experiences at work, our unequal division of labour at home and why it's so hard for everyone – but women especially – to feel they deserve an elusive moment of peace. ______________________ 'Every parent, every caregiver, every person who feels besieged by permanent busyness, must read this book' - Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Why Women Still Can't Have It All

‘Enthusiastic, pleasingly madcap’ Geographical Adventure – something that’s new and exhilarating, outside your comfort zone. Adventures change you and how you see the world, and all you need is an open mind, bags of enthusiasm and boundless curiosity. Recommended for viewing on a colour tablet.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then there’s Walt Whitman, in 1856: “Whoever you are, come forth! Or man or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house.” It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact, or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives? With Action versus Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by refusing to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the very opposition. The active and the contemplative can—and should—be vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich, lively texture of interplay and reference. This is not a self-help book. It won’t give you instructions on how to live your life. Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of the richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation, company and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the future. Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the answer: both.

“Startlingly original and deeply moving.... Chang here establishes herself as one of the most important of the new generation of American writers.” — George Saunders A Recommended Book From Buzzfeed * TIME * USA Today * NPR * Vanity Fair * The Washington Post * New York Magazine * O, the Oprah Magazine * Parade * Wired * Electric Literature * The Millions * San Antonio Express-News * Domino * Kirkus A wry, tender portrait of a young woman—finally free to decide her own path, but unsure if she knows herself well enough to choose wisely—from a captivating new literary voice The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why—she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run. Moving is supposed to be a grand gesture of her commitment to J and a way to reshape her sense of self. But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you? Equal parts tender and humorous, and told in spare but powerful prose, Days of Distraction is an offbeat coming-of-adulthood tale, a touching family story, and a razor-sharp appraisal of our times.

Winner of the 2014 Christian Book of the Year Award “I’M TOO BUSY!” We’ve all heard it. We’ve all said it. All too often, busyness gets the best of us. Just one look at our jam-packed schedules tells us how hard it can be to strike a well-reasoned balance between doing nothing and doing it all. That’s why award-winning author and pastor Kevin DeYoung addresses the busyness problem head on in his newest book, Crazy Busy — and not with the typical arsenal of time management tips, but rather with the biblical tools we need to get to the source of the issue and pull the problem out by the roots. Highly practical and super short, Crazy Busy will help you put an end to “busyness as usual.”

The Inuit World is a robust and holistic reference source to contemporary Inuit life from the intimate world of the household to the global stage. Organized around the themes of physical worlds, moral, spiritual and intellectual worlds, intimate and everyday worlds, and social and political worlds, this book includes ethnographically rich contributions from a range of scholars, including Inuit and other Indigenous authors. The book considers regional, social, and cultural differences as well as the shared histories and common cultural practices that allow us to recognize Inuit as a single, distinct Indigenous people. The chapters demonstrate both the historical continuity of Inuit culture and the dynamic ways that Inuit people have responded to changing social, environmental, political, and economic conditions. Chapter topics include ancestral landscapes, tourism and archaeology, resource extraction and climate change, environmental activism, and women’s leadership. This book is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in anthropology, Indigenous studies, and Arctic studies and those in related fields including geography, history, sociology, political science, and education.