At 29, we’re just pretending to be busy. Then the real work begins...

No kids, no aged parents, no tax return: you don’t know you’re born

Rosie Millard
Friday 29 January 2016 18:23 GMT
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Our twenties have been referred to as our 'defining decade'
Our twenties have been referred to as our 'defining decade'

According to a “survey”, we are likely to be at our busiest when we reach the golden age of... 29. Apparently that is when the “peak of busyness” is achieved. It’s all downhill towards the sofa from then on, it seems. Right now, people born in – wow – 1986, are the busiest of us all thanks to a blizzard of “work, family commitments and social life”. What?

The survey – a loose application of the term – was carried out by a delivery company which does things like send RayBans to wealthy people in restaurants who find they have the sun in their eyes but can’t be bothered to move their chair. Those sort of people. No, I don’t know anyone like that either.

Anyway, a bit of personal calibration. What was I doing when I was 29? I was quite busy, but it was ego-busy, since I didn’t have any responsibilities. No house, no children, no ties. I had time to learn how to ride horses. And play the piano. Hobbies – remember them?

Cue hollow laughter from anyone aged over 40. I feel like ringing up the firm responsible for this spurious study, and setting its chief executive straight on a few key things. Namely: people aged 29 probably don’t have a passel of brats (sorry, several needy/spoilt children); at the other end of the spectrum, they might not have elderly parents whom they like to see regularly; they are unlikely to be homeowners and so do not yet have a colossal mortgage and a biggish tax bill (to pay, er, tomorrow); because they have just started, they don’t yet have the pressure of achieving an ever-climbing career trajectory; they will not yet know the pressure of looking utterly line-free like Catherine Zeta-Jones (who credits it all to some sort of nightly organic oil fix), because they are only 29; while not fitting in appointments for emergency Botox they also won’t need to bother with spending hours in the gym, because they are still lithe and skinny. And, frankly, in summary, these 29-year-olds don’t have any idea what busy actually is.

Of course, the sneaking truth is that we all like to say we are “busy”. Busy means successful; busy means capable; busy means we might not have our work-life balance in perfect harmony yet but, boy, are we going at it with all our energies.

Busy means we are wanted. It means saying yes. To everything. It means grabbing life with both hands, being in the moment, and all the other lifestyle commandments we adhere to. It means crashing out at night, and getting up early, with all your clothes laid out so you don’t waste a second in deliberating what to wear. It means working on family holidays.

We don’t want to acknowledge that 29-year-olds might be leading genuinely busy lives, because if they are, where does that leave the rest of us? On the crepuscular scrapheap – and that is not a holiday. We may be traditionally busy, what with the children and the job and the parents and the need to sew on nametapes. But as fast as work-alleviating inventions such as stick-on nametapes come along, we invent new, urgent tasks we can occupy ourselves with in our busyness.

I may have scythed my food shopping time in half thanks to online supermarket orders, but the time I save not marching around Tesco is consumed by online banking, checking Twitter, digital password resetting and viewing all those “improving” television documentaries I have carefully stored on my box. And baking bread.

Non-busy moments have to be orchestrated. For me, this means reading to my children, playing Scrabble, eating Fifties-style food with my parents or going running. But then, even when you’re running, you want to have goals, so you sign up for an Iron Man course.

Being busy is desirable because it shows you are indispensable and puts a stop to the terrifying possibility of considered introspection. One of the most awful weekends I ever had was at a religious retreat. I wasn’t allowed to speak for two days. Barring mealtimes, I sat in my room and was supposed to meditate. It was horrendous. After about 36 hours, I sneaked out and bought all the Sunday papers. I simply couldn’t cope without being linked to life, and the busy world. I was 29 at the time.

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