Scarcity Was Always Our Excuse

It is 2031, and Megan Calloway has not been required to do anything since Thursday.

This is, by design. The Nashville logistics platform she works for runs on a four-day week now -most of them do- and Friday belongs entirely to her. The AI handles the scheduling. The coordination layer handles the rest. Her actual judgment is required for maybe six hours of the week, in focused bursts, when something genuinely needs a human to decide it.

The other hours are hers.

She has cleaned the apartment twice this morning. Not because it was dirty. The second time she noticed what she was doing and stopped, sponge in hand, standing in a bathroom that already gleamed, and felt something she didn't have a word for. Not boredom. Not sadness. Something more like the sensation of reaching for a wall that isn't there.

The Friday stretched ahead. All of it. Empty in the way that only completely free time is empty - which is to say, full of a pressure she couldn't quite name or push back against. Full of the question she'd been too busy to hear for most of her adult life, now standing in the middle of her apartment with nowhere else to be.

Who are you, it asked, when nobody needs you to be anything?

She opened her phone. Closed it. Opened it again.

Then she did what a lot of people do when the silence gets loud enough: she found something with a schedule. A screenwriting course, eight weeks online, one live session per Thursday evening with an instructor in Los Angeles she would never meet in person but whose voice she would come to recognise the way you recognise a neighbour. She signed up not because she'd always wanted to write scripts -she hadn't, particularly- but because the course had a time, and a deadline, and someone who would read what she made and tell her whether it worked. It would give the week a shape. It would give her somewhere to put herself that required something of her.

What she didn't know, pressing confirm on the payment screen, was that she was about to stumble into the thing she'd actually been avoiding. Not the silence. What lives inside it.

The Alibi We Never Noticed We Were Using

There's a study that should be more famous than it is. In 2014, Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, put people in a bare room for 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. No phones, no books, no tasks. Just their own minds.

Most of them hated it. About half rated the experience below the midpoint on an enjoyment scale. But then Wilson and his colleagues, working with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, went further. They gave participants a button that would deliver a mild electric shock -and told them that, if they wanted, they could press it instead of sitting with their thoughts. (Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind, Wilson et al., Science, 2014)

Sixty-seven percent of the men pressed it. Twenty-five percent of the women. One man pressed it 190 times.

People, given the choice between pain and stillness, chose pain.

Wilson's reading of this was generous: we simply haven't practised being alone with our minds in a distraction-saturated world. But there's a harder interpretation lurking underneath that finding, one that the philosopher Blaise Pascal identified three centuries earlier: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Pascal was gesturing at something Wilson later confirmed in a lab. The room isn't the problem. We are. The thoughts waiting in the silence are the ones we've been too busy to have. The questions we've been filling the calendar to avoid. Not because they're unanswerable, but because answering them requires something we're not sure we have -a self that exists independently of the role, the schedule, the title, the task.

Busyness, psychologists now call this pattern "existential avoidance." Keeping constantly occupied becomes a way of not stopping long enough to ask the questions that would demand a real answer. (When Busyness Shields You From Feelings, Psychology Today, 2025) And the beauty of it, as alibis go, is that it's socially rewarded. Nobody side-eyes you for being too busy. "I'm swamped" is a status symbol. "I don't know what I want from my life" is a vulnerability most people save for their therapist, if they have one, and 1am, if they don't.

So we stay swamped. And we call it ambition.

The Schedule as Identity

Megan isn't unusual. The research on how people relate to busyness is striking not for its outliers but for how consistent it is across cultures and demographics. Performance-based self-esteem, the psychological term for measuring your worth by your productivity, has become so widespread in modern Western life that it barely registers as a belief. It just feels like reality. Of course you're only as good as what you produce. What else would you be?

The problem is that productivity is a terrible proxy for meaning. You can be extremely busy doing things that matter to no one, including you. The schedule fills. The calendar turns. The sense that you're falling behind never quite goes away, because the standard you're measuring against isn't real. It's just the next thing on the list.

Work, at least, gave that treadmill a direction. There was an output, a deliverable, a performance review, an external structure that told you whether you were doing it right. The meaning might have been thin but the feedback was clear. And when the work changes, shrinks, or disappears entirely -as it is doing for millions of people right now, quietly, a job title at a time- the treadmill stops and the person on it suddenly has to figure out what they were running toward.

Most people, it turns out, were running away.

What the Silence Actually Contains

Here's the thing about the question the free Friday asks, the question the redundancy notice asks, the question the empty retirement morning asks. It isn't actually as frightening as we've been treating it.

We've been so practised at avoiding it that we've built it up into something monstrous. A void. A judgment. An exposure. As if stopping long enough to ask "what do I actually want?" will confirm some deep suspicion that the answer is nothing, and everything we've been busy with has been a construction to avoid finding that out.

But the research on people who do stop -who go through the disorientation of job loss or retirement or a forced break and come out the other side- doesn't support that story. What most people find, underneath the initial flatness and the compulsive apartment cleaning, is something quieter and more specific than an existential void. They find preferences. Actual ones, not socially approved ones. Things they're curious about. Things they've been meaning to try for years. A direction that isn't borrowed from a job description or a LinkedIn profile.

Megan's screenwriting course was, by her own admission, a placeholder. She picked it because it had a schedule and an instructor and a defined outcome. Classic existential avoidance, one step removed. But something happened in the third week that she didn't expect. She wrote a scene she knew wasn't working -could feel it wasn't working- and instead of routing it through an AI rewriter, she sat with it for two hours on a Thursday evening until she found her way through it herself.

The feeling when it clicked wasn't relief. It was something she'd forgotten the name of.

"I couldn't remember the last time I'd done something I was actually bad at," she says. "At work you don't do things you're bad at. You route around them. Or you just... don't."

She saved the finished scene in a separate folder. Not because it was good. Because it was entirely, uncomplicatedly hers.

Abundance Removes the Last Good Excuse

So here is where all of this lands in 2025, in a world where AI is steadily taking over the tasks that kept most of us too busy to think.

For most of human history, people didn't need an alibi for not examining their lives. Survival provided one. When you're worried about feeding your family or keeping your job or making rent, the big questions can wait. They have to. And there is a real dignity in that kind of necessity-in the person who works hard and loves their family and doesn't have the luxury of existential introspection, and is living a meaningful life anyway.

But for a growing number of people in wealthy countries, that necessity is being lifted. Automation is doing more. Working hours, in aggregate, are shortening. AI tools are handling the cognitive labour that once consumed entire careers. And what's being uncovered, underneath all that necessary busyness, is not a void. It's a question that was always there, waiting politely, that we've been too busy to answer.

Poverty and overwork were not only economic problems. They were also very effective excuses for not knowing yourself. And when the excuse disappears, only the question remains.

Megan finished the screenwriting course. She's enrolled in the next one -not the same subject, something different, a documentary module she found while looking for something else entirely. She writes for an hour on Friday mornings now, before the week gets its hands on her. Not because she's going to be a screenwriter. Because the hour is hers, the problem is real, and nobody can tell her by algorithm whether what she made was worth making.

"I think what happened," she says, clicking open a new document on a Friday morning with nowhere to be, "is that I ran out of reasons not to try something."

That's it. That's the whole thing. She ran out of excuses.

The lucky ones do.

Maurice Joseph writes about the future of human life at inthacity.com/blog. Article 4 in this series looks at the people who are choosing difficulty on purpose -and why a Leeds plumber might be the most philosophically serious person in the room.

She ran out of reasons not to try. Most of us have more of those than we think.

Sources & Further Reading

Wilson, T.D. et al. (2014). Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind. Science, 345(6192). Read the paper →
When Busyness Shields You From Feelings. Psychology Today, October 2025. Read the article →

Your Questions, Answered Plainly

Is this saying that people who are busy are all secretly avoiding something? No, and that's an important distinction. There's a real difference between busyness that serves genuine goals and busyness as avoidance. The research points to a pattern, not a rule. The tell is usually whether the busyness feels chosen or compulsive -whether slowing down feels like relief or terror.

What if I genuinely don't know what I want? That's probably more common than anyone admits publicly. The research on people who've been forced to stop -through redundancy, illness, or major life change- suggests that preferences tend to surface gradually once the noise quiets. You don't find what you want by thinking harder about it. You find it by trying things badly and noticing which ones you want to try again.

Isn't self-reflection a luxury? Some people are genuinely too busy to stop. That's fair and true. Real necessity-financial precarity, caregiving demands, survival pressure -isn't an alibi, it's a real constraint. This article is written for people who have the option to slow down but keep choosing not to. Not everyone has that option, and it's worth saying so clearly.

I tried having free time and felt awful. Is something wrong with me? According to Wilson's research, you're in the majority. The initial discomfort of unstructured time is normal, consistent across ages and demographics, and doesn't mean the quiet has nothing good in it. It means you're out of practice. That's different from there being nothing there.

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