A Busy Life

I have a very busy life. You wouldn’t know it if you really looked at it, because it would not seem that busy to other people. It certainly is not as busy as a mother of four—or even of one, for that matter—or an executive of a big successful company, or even a successful used-car salesman. I can’t imagine what a life like that would be like, because mine is busy beyond control. My basement looks like a bomb has hit it. My office is equally a mess. I have things on my to-do list that have been there for years, and certainly things that have been there for months that I do not get around to doing.

I’m not quite sure what to say about this, because I don’t know what to do about it. I am too busy to think.

There it is. The confession. Or maybe the non-confession, because nothing has actually been confessed. Just a statement of fact followed by a shrug. The to-do list is a graveyard of good intentions that somehow never quite die; they just get buried under newer good intentions that also never quite die. The basement is a physical manifestation of the same problem—boxes, half-finished projects, things that were once urgent and are now simply there, taking up space, generating a low-grade guilt every time I walk past them. The office is the same, only with paper instead of boxes.

Is this a modern problem or just a me problem? I suspect both. Everyone I know who isn’t raising small children or running a company seems to be in roughly the same boat. The calendar is full. The inbox is full. The mind is full. And yet, when you step back and look at what actually got done in a week, it doesn’t feel like much. Or at least it doesn’t feel like the right things. The important things. The things that used to matter when “busy” meant something different.

I used to think busy was a sign of purpose. Now I’m not so sure. A lot of the busyness feels like motion without direction—scrolling, answering, organizing, re-organizing, looking something up, putting it down, picking it up again. Chatting with AI. The day ends, and the list is longer than when it started. Not because new things arrived, but because the old things never left.

Maybe that’s the part worth looking at. Not the mess itself, but the strange fact that the mess is stable. It doesn’t get worse in any dramatic way, and it doesn’t get better. It just sits there, demanding attention it never quite receives, while I do other things that also never quite finish. And I still call it a busy life.

It’s weird, to say the least. I embark on big life pursuits, like creating a psychotherapy practice, or, before that, making a career of writing film and TV music in Hollywood. Now I am focused more on writing and have finished several massive books, as well as about 500 Shrew Views articles. But I still don’t feel like I have enough hours in the day to do any of it justice. I also don’t feel what I have accomplished is really much of anything special. Why is that?

I think about people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump and wonder how these people can cram all that they have to do into one day. Of course, they’ve got a lot of other people around helping them. That would be useful. I obviously don’t have that, and probably most of you reading this don’t have it either. But I wonder if you have the same problem I have with all of this. Do you?

Getting older doesn’t help. For whatever reason, we old folks are told to get the clutter out of our lives, to just relax, and enjoy our last years. Clutter is not just the insurmountable piles of junk we have accumulated over decades of life, but clutter in the form of passions and continuing ambitions. Much of these things are self-limiting, though. Like I no longer think about the big house I will one day be able to afford, or even the massive photo project I have envisioned completing when I have nothing better to do. Forget it. I do still hold onto my passions and still want to accomplish something along those lines, like write a lot of books that people buy, read, and like. But that takes a lot of work. And I am not supposed to be working anymore. I am supposed to sit on the back porch with my dog and maybe a few pet ducks, eating beans out of a can.

So, why am I so busy? Most of my endless to-do-list projects are clean-up projects. Things I should be doing to prepare for my eventual and imminent death. Things like sorting through those photos, throwing out old crap I have collected for a lifetime, cleaning up the blown-up basement and the garage filled with crumbling ancient tarps, wooden birdhouses acquired over the years, and about an inch of greasy dirt on the floor. Everything should be in order and sparkly clean before shuffling off this mortal coil.

No wonder I am too busy to get anything done. It reminds me of the macabre activity I’ve read about when prisoners on death row are forced to dig their own graves. Getting old is so much fun.

All that said, I do still have a lot on my to-do list that isn’t so dark. Lots. I enjoy writing very much, promoting my books, and preparing for marketing. I love writing my Shrew Views articles for all of you to read; I enjoy doing lots of things. But still wonder why I can’t get much done in any reasonable amount of time.

Maybe the joke is that the only item I reliably finish is the one that describes how little I finish. Writing this just added another corpse to the graveyard, and I’m already too busy to bury it properly. The basement can wait. The list can wait. Apparently, so can I. At this rate I’ll die mid-sentence, mid-list, mid-mess—and someone else will finally get around to cleaning it up. Hopefully they won’t put “finish Todd’s to-do list” on their own list. That would be cruel.

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