Kotsko's Index of Forbidden Words -- Part 6

Adam Robinson, who is selling out and moving away from the Kank, has the honor of being the first person to inspire an entry in the Index of Forbidden Words on purpose. Here's the message:

Adam,

Please ban the word "busy" from any further usage in the English language.

Thank you.

Adam

I guess all the rest of you could send in words, too. Be warned, though: I cannot do anything that someone simply tells me to do. I have to be able to reasonably convince myself that it was already my idea before you mentioned it. I'm getting pretty good at that, but there is always the possibility that I won't be able to work myself into the kind of outrage necessary to write one of these things on your word.

Busy: Thankfully for everyone, I'm working back at the chiropractor's again for the time being, and I've noticed that literally every person, when asked how they're doing, says in a strange tone of voice, "Oh, keeping busy!" They do this as they write their check, half-distractedly, realizing that no one really gives a crap how busy they are because according to the conventional wisdom, "we're all busy." Well, guess what: we're not all busy. I'm very rarely busy, because I have planned my entire life around not being busy. It is possible not to do a million stupid things at once, and it doesn't make you a worthless or unproductive person to attempt to reach that. And why do you want to be busy, anyway? Let's say I kill myself working sixty hours at my stupid office-drone job. I might get a promotion and thus have to work even more hours, but the majority of the benefits will go to a bunch of clueless stockholders. And here's the bad part about that: those benefits won't even directly come from the company I'm working for, but rather from the fact that my ridiculously hard work will make people more willing to buy those stockholder's stocks. Stocks might as well be Beany Babies. So I'm working incredibly hard so that I can get maybe a 2% raise each year and a bunch of people can keep trading their Beany Babies and making more money than you could ever imagine.

Then once I have all my precious money, I get to buy a bunch of stupid, meaningless crap to fill up my time. I get to buy a super-fast computer so that I can read the weblogs of right-wing fanatics or look at porn; I get to buy a video game system so that I can fritter away my time pretending to play football; I get to buy a bunch of stupid CDs so that I never really get around to listening and enjoying any of them. I get to buy a big house that I'll have to maintain, so that I can be proud of how I own my own property and am making my own way when probably the benefits of renting come pretty close to outweighing the fact that I get no direct financial return on my investment. I get to become involved in some stupid organization like a trendy evangelical church so that I can get myself worked into a lather over what songs we sing on Sunday morning and I can help others to feel unrighteous and, more importantly, left out if they do not join the Social Club of the Saved Souls. And who does this help? No one -- unless you count all the Republicans who just got elected and all the ultra-rich people who will get even richer and whose wealth does no one else in the world any good at all. Oh, and by the way, about all your purchases of consumer goods that hollow out your soul and fill your time with nothingness -- those actions also help absolutely no one except that small clique of ultra-rich people. Sure, you get your pittance of pleasure out of the deal, but you're still getting ripped off in a major way.

Oh, and all you people who don't want to hang out with people because "you're busy"? You suck. That's just ridiculous. You've chosen to fill your life with frenetic activity, and you think that frenetic activity is more important than the person who wants to hang out with you or the nice guy who's asking you out, so take some responsibility for your actions. Say to that person who wants some of your precious time, "You're not important enough to me to take any of my finite time with you." Don't claim that you'd "really love to, but..." or some idiotic euphemism like that. If you don't have time for the person, you wouldn't "love to," any more than I'd "love to" learn Japanese if I only have the time. I do have the time to learn Japanese, and you do have time to hang out with that poor person, but we both have other priorities, don't we? So why not just come out and say, "Money or grades are a higher priority for me than relationships right now." Why not just say you're a shallow piece of crap?

The next time I see a local news broadcast that talks about how busy everyone is, I'm going to kick in the screen. So take note of that, Richard. You might need to call the cable company to make sure we don't get any programs like that. Of course, I'm much too busy for TV most of the time, anyway.

"In denial": I'm sorry to disappoint all you pop-Freudians, but sometimes when someone says that he doesn't have a particular problem, it means he doesn't have a particular problem. What has happened to our society that makes people think that a denial of a certain behavior is tantamount to a confession that said behavior dominates one's entire life? If I were to say, "I don't have a drinking problem," for example, every one of you would start praying for me. Ridiculous.

Ambition: If I said that I had an ambition to read the complete works of Hans Urs von Balthasar, people would say, "Okay" in a bemused voice. If I said that I had an ambition to be able to play through all of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, I would get the same reaction. If I said that I had an ambition to make a lot of money, everyone would love me, because we'd be on the same page. There is only one acceptable ambition, one ambition par excellence, and that is to build up as big a reserve as possible to insulate oneself from life. It's the American Dream. The biggest problem is that I still feel guilty for not having that dream, even though there's not really a concrete person who's trying to make me feel that way.