Addicted to Busy: Why life has got so hectic

There's a ritual of the modern workplace - one you've heard and most likely indulged in yourself. It's the call and response we go through when you ask a workmate how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." It is pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint. And our simultaneously grim and half chuckled reply comes as a kind of congratulation: "Ha, better than the opposite." When did we start doing that?

As if he didn't have enough to do, Oliver Burkeman explores this epidemic of busyness to...