Why “busy” has become our favorite fiction and AI our most convenient accomplice
We no longer complain about the weather. We complain about being busy, which is far more socially acceptable and just as unproductive.
There is an old Dutch saying that suddenly came to mind: the world will perish from diligence, based on the title of a book by Max Dendermonde.
You never hear it anymore. It belongs to another era, long before we in the Netherlands first embraced the Japanese and later the American work ethic.
Those foreign influences have at least taught us how to perform hard work. If our government manages to stay within a generously padded timeline, it is quickly said that civil servants “worked day and night” to achieve a result that still arrived a few weeks late.
We used to talk about the weather, something we as Dutch people could never approach with optimism. It was too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. Now we have upgraded the ritual. We ask each other how things are going.
The answer, for decades now, has been: “Busy, busy, busy.”
If we were not also so resistant to real change, we would be ideal candidates for automation. I am not supposed to say this among my compatriots, but at our core we are fundamentally lazy.
Almost everyone works a 32 hour week, and anyone stepping into public transport at 3 PM will notice that metros, trains, and highways are already close to gridlock with people heading home, even though that moment is supposed to come two hours later.
Only people with real professions truly exhaust themselves. People who have to produce something tangible, for whom an idea or a concept does not qualify as a finished product.
Which is why I struggle to understand the broad social resistance to AI. If there were a god of idle creatures, he would have had the Dutch in mind when inventing it. At last, we have slaves again, without the inconvenience of guilt, because anyone who uses AI daily knows that it is tirelessly helpful and just as tirelessly productive.
It fits us perfectly. Neural networks take care of the heavy lifting, leaving our celebrated office class free to focus on physical and mental wellbeing.
Physical wellbeing, in the hope of growing old while still looking young. Mental wellbeing, so we can keep pointing fingers at others who may or may not suffer from ADHD, ADD, PTSD, schizophrenia, autism, or megalomania, without ever taking a single moment to examine our own state of mind.