Moving to San Francisco a decade ago, I noticed something: everyone seemed to be *really* busy. They were busy at work, and they were busy in personal life. Not only that they were really busy, but they complained a lot about it. It took maybe a year or so for me to figure out that "I'm busy" is proxy for "I'm important". Contrasting the feudal world where leisure was the status symbol, this is probably net-better for the world. At least your status is tied to what you're ostensibly contributing to society! The ideal is embedding yourself in environments where status-projecting is minimal, but this is relatively harmless. But it still has [[Failure modes]]: getting busy needlessly, or [[Batesian Mimicry|over-projecting]] business. #published 2025-06-22