If you’re old enough, you might remember the old cigarette ads. They showed good-looking people having fun together, looking glamorous and wealthy and carefree. Sometimes they showed rugged men doing slightly dangerous things, like riding horseback alone through the desert or wrangling large cattle. A few decades ago, there were even still cigarette ads on television (you can see a roundup of some of them here).

The message was clear: smoking is cool. If you want to be cool, you should smoke, too.

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then. There’s very little visual advertisement for cigarettes nowadays, and public health campaigns have led to sharply decreased rates of cigarette smoking (though with the rise of flavored tobacco and e-cigarettes, there are some concerns about recently increased rates of tobacco use among young people). In a lot of places and among a lot of people, smoking just isn’t cool anymore.

But humans are humans, and we’ve replaced one problematic activity with another. Nowadays, instead of smoking to convey our coolness, we talk about how busy we are.

Try eavesdropping on people in a coffee shop someday. You’ll hear a lot of the following: “Oh, I’m just so busy, I don’t have time to do anything.” “Well, who can really get to all the stuff on their to-do list, anyway?” “I’m so stressed and haven’t slept in three days because work and stuff are so chaotic.”

And sure, modern life is busy. There’s a lot of pressure on people thanks to stagnant wages, rising costs of housing and healthcare, student loan debt, raising kids, and caring for elderly family members. To a certain extent, some level of busyness is unavoidable.

But there’s necessary busy, and there’s excessive busy, and the latter type is what we’re talking about today. It’s the kind of busy beyond what we need to live our lives, the kind that results from taking on too many unnecessary commitments, managing our time badly, and exaggerating for the sake of impressing others. It’s what we feel when a manageably full life crosses that threshold and becomes unmanageable, where we no longer feel like we’re the ones in control anymore.

It’s not cool. It’s as bad as smoking was. Here’s why.

1. It’s addictive. We all know tobacco is pretty intensely addictive for a lot of people. It’s one of the things kids are always warned about: once you start, it’s hard to stop. The same is true for busyness. We can get locked in a cycle of being overwhelmed at work, overcommitted in extracurriculars, and overburdened with family obligations that aren’t evenly shared among everybody in the household or extended family. Once we’re there, it’s hard to break out. We need to talk to each other more about that. 

2. We think it makes us look cool, but it doesn’t really. People used to think that cigarette smoking made them look cool, but that was in large part because they had been told, over and over for years and years, that it made them look cool. The same thing happens with busyness. We’ve somehow gotten the idea that being busy makes us look important, productive, driven, disciplined, ambitious. In reality, being too busy can make us seem flighty, scattered, unreliable, and unconcerned with the people in our lives. It’s not making us look cool at all.

3. It’s hurting your body. We know how smoking hurts your body - lung, throat, and mouth cancers; heart disease; blood clots; even cosmetic things, like facial wrinkles and yellowed fingers. Did you know being overly busy can cause you physical harm, too? It leads to prolonged emotional stress, which can cause high blood pressure and heart disease, among other issues.

Have you ever found yourself caught in a swirl of being busy for the sake of being busy? How did you break out of it? Let us know in the comments below.