Create Space (By Embracing Your Inner Entitled Freerider)

Here’s a strange fact about busyness. 

Throughout most of human history, successful, high-status, people bragged about not being busy. That’s right, they flaunted their leisure time by sailing boats, playing polo, joining country clubs, or buying expensive clothes. 

But these days, we’ve flipped this old-school model on its head. To be busy in our current age is to be important, valued, needed, and in-demand.

For instance, the research of Columbia University professor Silvia Bellezza reveals that we’ve changed our perception of high-status material goods. Gone are the days when luxury items like Hermes Birkin Bags, Maseratis, or hand-tailored suits were the ultimate markers of status.

Instead, we now see products for busy people – things like the perpetual wearing of blue-tooth headsets and online grocery delivery services – as the ultimate symbols of status and self-worth. 

As a result, most busy people react to the offensively-spacious lives of the non-busy with all sorts of judgments, seeing them as flowsters, freeriders, lazy, unmotivated, social parasites, or sad souls who lack any clear sense of direction and purpose.

But here’s a hard truth that might be difficult to swallow. Your negative judgements toward that person – that guy or gal who isn’t very busy – these repeating thoughts are your biggest barrier to creating more space in your own life.

The reason? When you see others as bad for not being busy, you unconsciously avoid being bad yourself. And you do this by staying busy.

Seeing your neighbor as a dirtbag slacker for going fishing on a weekday afternoon, for instance, is really just a psychological defense mechanism to avoid seeing yourself as a dirtbag slacker. 

This is an ingenious strategy. But it’s also a trap because it basically just guarantees that you never stop being busy.

If you did – if you cancelled your afternoon meetings to see a movie or ride your bike or go to a coffee shop to read – you would become thatperson, that lazy, lollygagging, loser you view with pity and contempt. And that’s a pretty tough psychological pill to swallow.  

What’s the way out of the trap? 

Give yourself permission to be that person. 

Embrace your inner slacker. Make friends with the part of you that’s a total deadbeat. 

Here’s how.

1. Identify Your Harshest Judgment.

Every busy person has their own, idiosyncratic, way of judging the non-busy.

To identify your harshest judgment, think of someone in your life who isn’t very busy – that person who lives an annoyingly free and spacious life.

Maybe it’s your Gen Z cousin who complains about having to go to work at an actual job. Or maybe it’s that friend who hit the trust-fund jackpot and never has to work another day in his life (and so he doesn't).

With this person in mind, complete one of these two prompts (whichever best fits your judgment) with a single word:

• They’re just so____________.
• Or, they’re such a/an ___________.

2. A Permission Slip to Be That Person.

Now for the fun part. Rather than disowning this quality in yourself, embrace it – allow yourself to be that person for a day. 

To make this practical, we're here today to give you a permission slip, a free pass good for a day spent embracing this disowned part of yourself.

Be unmotivated. Be a social parasite. Be a taker instead of a maker. Be totally unproductive. Be that person with no passion or ambition.  

We’re not saying you should live this way forever (although, who knows, that might be kind of awesome). What we are proposing is that you write out an actual permission slip for yourself on a piece of paper that says:

Today, I give myself permission to be _[INSERT HARSHEST JUDGMENT HERE]_.

Put this piece of paper next to your desk. Next time you feel totally busy and overwhelmed, use it.

3. Do it With Your Partner.

The final step is to turn this into a relationship game. When you do this alone, after all, your partner may become yet another obstacle to enjoying space.

If in the midst of their own busyness, they catch you gardening or lying in the grass or crocheting a blanket, they’ll resent you. 

By doing this exercise together, however, you create what we think of as a couple counterculture – a protected space where the two of you become free to explore what it might be like to have more space, without resenting each other.