Everywhere you go on campus, you'll likely hear someone lament, "I'm stressed." "I've got a lot going on." "Sorry, I can't. I'm busy." "I'm not free I'm having a really rough term." We throw around these phrases with reckless abandon.
In a June New York Times article that gained widespread attention on Twitter and across the blogosphere, Tim Kreider described busyness "as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness." While Kreider is writing about the busyness of workers, we at Dartmouth use busyness and stress as a stalling tactic.
We don't simply reward busyness at Dartmouth. Instead and perversely so we celebrate and sensationalize stress. We call all tests midterms, regardless of whether they fall in the second week of the term or the fifth. We tell people the time at which we went to sleep after finishing the last pages of a paper, and we share the early morning view from the 1902 Room on Facebook. We spend almost as much time assessing and talking about the amount of work we have as we do actually working.
The frequency with which we discuss our busyness and our stress turns these topics into status symbols. Discussing workloads and extracurricular involvement becomes an exercise in one-upmanship in which the individual with the hardest workload or most taxing obligations leaves with the grim satisfaction of knowing he or she "does more."
Busyness and stress have become our dominant mode of being at Dartmouth, largely because we don't know any other way to operate. As we attempt to make sense of our goals, assess our interests and figure out what we really want to be doing at college and beyond, we default to being busy and stressed as the primary modes of engaging with the people and work around us. If fulfilling expectations and joining organizations brought us to Dartmouth, we figure it can't hurt to continue down that path of overcommitment until we hone in on how we actually want to spend our time. After all, time unoccupied is time wasted, right?
Not only do we allow busyness and stress to shape our daily decisions, but we also use perceived busyness and stress as our default proxy to determine who is doing the most productive or best work. If someone is stressed and works for two days straight on a paper, then that means he did a good job. When we hear about someone's upcoming interviews and extensive preparation strategies, we assume she deserves to get the job. I experienced this type of busyness and stress-based valuation this summer when I had a job that I really enjoyed, but which didn't fit into the traditional Dartmouth model of consuming as much time as possible.
At my job this summer, I worked with great people on creative assignments at a company where my skills were valued. And yet my hours were normal. I came in around 8 or 9 a.m. every morning and left around 6 p.m., save for a few late nights. Though my job more than fulfilled my expectations, I had a nagging sensation, ignited by my Dartmouth-bred perception of busyness, that I wasn't doing enough all summer. When I spent a weekend with friends who were working 80 hours, compared to my 45, their conversations about long hours and early mornings left me feeling like my job and my work was trivial in comparison. It seemed as though their hours made them twice the worker I was.
As someone only working half as many hours, they approached my work experience as valid but totally incomparable. I hadn't worked their hours, so I just didn't "get it" I couldn't possibly understand what it took to produce the kind of work they spent their days doing.
The logical part of me knows this isn't true. However, the part of me that is caught up in Dartmouth's busyness culture questions why I wouldn't want to devote myself to the "hardest" job with the most "challenging" hours. I know the reason I don't want their jobs has nothing to do with the hours or the workload, but rather the nature of the work itself.
However, that understanding doesn't ease the sting of feeling like you've taken an easier path or opted out of a "real challenge." We've grown up valuing the hardest worker, and we've always defined that role by time and devotion, so it's hard to shed that assessment when I think critically about the work I want to do.
Perhaps our celebration of busyness and the hardest worker is part of a larger fear of outwardly lauding our peers based on the quality of content that they can produce. Perhaps we accept stress and busyness as the determinants of performance because we are afraid to actually judge someone's product rather than their process. We're comfortable with the hardest worker but not the smartest worker. We've grown up in an "everyone wins" era of American childhood, so we are more comfortable with praising the equitable and non-subjective equivalency of time spent rather than the quality produced. We struggle with scenarios in which the most devoted worker isn't the highest performer.
However, there are few scenarios in which the smartest worker isn't the highest performer. Sometimes being the smartest worker is being the busiest worker; but more often than not, working smart is not the same as working stressed. By measuring achievement by expended time and energy and the quantity rather than the quality of work, we are celebrating a poor way of working.
