Henry David Thoreau wrote the line almost two centuries ago, and today it sounds as if it was written for someone who has just looked at their own calendar: "It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is - what are we busy about?"

The second sentence is the one that stings. The ant is perfectly productive. It works all day, does not rest, does not complain, carries many times its own weight. And nobody has ever asked it why. Thoreau is not mocking effort - he is simply noting that effort on its own is proof of nothing.

Psychologist David Gomez says modern culture has put work upside down. A packed schedule has become a social status. "I have no time" is no longer a complaint but a declaration of importance. When someone says their afternoon is free, the other side's first reflex is to fill it. Free time has stopped being a goal and become an emptiness that demands justification.

Gomez points to something less comfortable too: permanent busyness is often an escape. While the schedule is full, a person has no room to ask whether they even want to be where they are. Busyness works like an anaesthetic - it does not resolve dissatisfaction, it only postpones it. Which is why it is so hard to give up. A quiet room brings all the questions back at once.

The way out, he says, is not better organisation. That is the trap everyone who ever bought a planner and a productivity app falls into: better organisation only makes it possible to fit more things into the same day. Three steps are offered instead - observe the actual routine rather than the imagined one; separate the urgent from the important; and learn to delete rather than add.

The last one is the hardest. Adding is an activity, and activity gives the feeling that something is being done. Deleting looks like doing nothing. And yet the difference between a person running all day and a person who got somewhere is usually precisely that the second one threw something out.

Would anyone around here even admit to having a free afternoon? Busyness easily turns into proof - that you are needed, that people want you, that you are holding something together. That is an understandable reflex. But Thoreau keeps asking his question, and the calendar does not answer it.