Busy, busy, busy. But what's the reward?

But for those fortunate to have work, particularly Americans, the chief complaint is that they are too darn busy.

"It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: 'Busy!' 'So busy.' 'Crazy busy,'" Tim Kreider wrote in The Times. All of this activity is self-imposed, he points out, as people toil long hours and pack their schedules outside work, then push their children to take part in after-school activities and sports programs.

Mr. Kreider calls himself the "laziest ambitious person I know," and says that this idleness serves him well. Downtime allows for the unexpected connections and inspiration that let real work get done, he writes, like Archimedes' "Eureka" moment in the bath, or Newton's apple.

But Americans are hard-wired to keep their wheels spinning, and for this Mr. Kreider blames the Puritans: "The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment."

Findings from a series of experiments that were published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology confirmed this link, nearly four centuries after those austere English Protestants first came to the shores of the New World, Matthew Hutson wrote in The Times.

One study of American and Canadian students who deciphered word puzzles involving anagrams found that Americans solved more of them with salvation on the mind. "They worked harder," Mr. Hutson wrote.

Their mindset follows the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, who believed success was a sign of salvation, and that hard work and good deeds would bring rewards, on earth and in the afterlife.

"Protestant attitudes about work may influence how Americans treat their co-workers," Mr. Hutson wrote. "Protestants - but not Catholics - become less sensitive to others' emotions when reminded of work, possibly indicating a tendency to judge fraternizing as unproductive and unprofessional."

But the reality is that though Americans tend to admire those with a strong work ethic, many of them are ambivalent about work, and their chief motivation for holding a job is the paycheck that allows them to survive.

"Most of us inevitably see our work as a means to something else," Gary Gutting wrote in The Times. "It makes a living, but it doesn't make a life."

The point of work, Mr. Gutting says, quoting Aristotle, "is to have leisure, on which happiness depends." The trick to spending that leisure time well, again according to Aristotle, "is productive activity for its own sake."

It's up to us in how we fulfill that goal: kicking a soccer ball, swinging in a hammock or sketching a landscape.

"The point is that engaging in such activities - and sharing them with others - is what makes a good life," Mr. Gutting wrote. "Leisure, not work, should be our primary goal."

Mr. Kreider, who senses futility in the activities people cram into their lives, would probably agree.

"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day," he writes. "I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter."

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