The Status Flex Of Being Busy

Note:

Eleanor Anstruther

and I will be on a Substack Live this Monday at 9 am EST (NYC time) talking about generational wealth in the US and UK

Use this link to place it on your calendar.

This past Memorial Day Weekend, I was walking my dog Sophie on the road outside our East Hampton home when I met H., a former work colleague going for a solitary walk. We hadn’t seen each other in about a decade. He’s older than I am, 70+ to my 63, but blessed with superb “Dorian Gray” genetics. ¹

It was a crisp and sunny day, the weather more like the start of fall than the start of summer. Persistent rain has turned the leaves of the trees peak green and full, the branches a canopy to shade the road. The setting was perfect for an amble.

In the way of our world, H. and I exchanged brief bio updates. In reply to whether I was still at my firm, I said no, I’m a writer now. He said he wished he was less busy managing the details of his national real estate investment portfolio. After a few exchanges of information about kids (and in my case grandchildren), H. and I went off in separate directions.

Is writing work?

Upon hearing that I was writing instead of “working,” H. had performed the typical modern status flex of wishing he was less busy. “Less busy, like you, David” was implicit, his assumption being that writing for someone retired from finance is more leisure than work. That’s not necessarily a bad assumption. As far as H. knows, my approach to writing might be casual and intermittent. A hobby rather than a second vocation.

I seldom reveal that my pursuit of words and writing can be obsessional, that I research, wrestle with, and compulsively redraft each weekly post, or that I’ve taken on writing a novel and like to read two books at once. I’m constantly assailing myself with words.

I do find myself thinking that I’m “so busy,” followed by the thought that as far as writing is concerned my busyness is entirely self-imposed or better yet self-inflicted. Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve simply replaced one busy career that pays well with another busy career that doesn’t. Sometimes I wonder if writing is just a complicated game or puzzle with words.

I’m not immune from thinking at times that true productivity must involve making money. After all, I had a forty-year career where the making of money was the entire point. I hear the snarky whispers of the American work ethic, Calvinist in origin, accusing me of being frivolous.

I’ve found that some people who are used to thinking of me as a finance guy are confounded when I say I’m a writer. Is it threatening? Perhaps it is if they also have felt a constant tug between the life of making money and the life of the mind. Meeting me might induce regret. Or if they’re like some of the wealthy people I know and limit their reading and writing only to what’s work related, perhaps they prefer to think I’m wasting my time. Like my favorite obnoxious billionaire who said to me, dismissively, “I don’t read books.” ²

The cult of reverse Veblen

Thorsten Veblen defined status in 1900 as conspicuous leisure. To show your wealth, you refrained from work and from doing anything productive. A high-status life was one where your obligations were handled by servants. They cooked for you, served you, dressed you, took care of your children, leaving you completely free to do whatever you liked. It’s the Downton Abbey life epitomized by this 20 second clip featuring the marvelous Maggie Smith.

According to Veblen’ status theory, leisure is paramount. What about the “chore” of walking Sophie, which gives me enormous pleasure? Veblen would say I’ve missed an opportunity to hire a full-time dog walker both to show that such a pedestrian task is beneath me and to have a “servant” who in the style of the court of Louis XIV is employed to perform an ostentatiously easy task.

Today, the wealthy play a reverse Veblen status game. The more demands on your time the higher your status. The CEO, the politician, the celebrity, they all have schedules that are not their own. They need assistants or gatekeepers to curate their time. If you’re too busy to make your own schedule you are by today’s standards someone very important.

Every wealthy person I know prides themselves on their busyness. Not in the way that most people are busy–– working at a job or multiple jobs, caring for loved ones, and doing whatever needs doing. That’s necessity. In contrast, the 0.1% are busy by choice from a desire to seem relevant, to have a purpose. I’m not exempting myself from membership in this cult.

Status and Scarcity

One of the consequences of rampant inequality and the concentration of excessive wealth at the very top is that there are now more wealthy people for whom a career that pays is no longer necessary. There was a past time of greater equality in America when you could be near the top of the wealth pyramid but still have the need to work. You couldn’t live off your net worth as many more people can now. ³

For example, Manhattan private schools once had a demographic of families that included the upper middle class. Now the schools are so expensive that for the most part enrollment can feel as if it consists mostly of families in the 0.1%.

The 0.1%, tend to live and congregate in the same places. You can be in the 0.1%, live in certain neighborhoods in Manhattan, and send your children to private school, but not feel particularly special.

As a consequence, wealth by itself is often no longer sufficient to endow status. The horizon has shifted to require something else––a sense of importance and power. Busyness. How much are you needed and by how many?

If you believe that the wealthy set aspirational standards or that they are at least partially responsible for hyper-capitalism, then the wealthy are both creators and victims of the busyness cult.

The poster child of busyness is Elon Musk, CEO of many huge companies, father of many children with many different women, and aspirational slayer of government agencies. Musk has said he works 80-100 hours a week and has noted:

“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

The New York Times has noted that Musk’s busy, busy life comes with lots and lots of drugs. ⁴

Wealthy celebrities pursuing busyness are starting to be called out for being shameless hucksters. Here’s part of

Emily Kirkpatrick

’s funny riff about Meghan Markle’s tone-deaf attempts to sell product. ⁵

“Why do the rich and famous always make their need to stay busy a problem the rest of us have to solve? Why do I have to spend my hard earned money to buy white label food stuff so someone worth $60 million can feel a sense of purpose in their life? How did I get involved in this scenario at all?”

What will be the new status flex?

I have an instinct that the status flex of being both wealthy and being busy/important/relevant will eventually be altered. This busyness for the sake of appearing important reminds me of “face time” in an office where you stay at your desk simply because you don’t want to be the first to leave. It’s like the image––thank you Martin Amis––of a group of senior Soviet apparatchiks clapping at the end of a phonograph recording of a Stalin speech, each one scared to be the first to stop clapping. So the clapping goes on and on. Busyness for its own sake can be almost as ridiculous. ⁶

There are better ways. In Italy, for example, having the free time to have an impromptu leisurely meal with friends is associated with status. Not having that freedom is considered low status. That makes so much more sense to me. As well as to

Kirsten Powers

who has written so well about her move to Italy. ⁷

I think about a poem I recently read, The Red Brocade by Naomi Shibab Nye, curated within Maya Popa’s terrific weekly poetry post.⁸ It’s about an Arab saying that when a stranger comes to your door you should feed them and take care of them for three days before even asking any questions. Essentially, the poem is an ode to the virtue of hospitality, which demands a flexible schedule in case a stranger unexpectedly shows up.

The part of the poem that stayed with me was its powerful disdain for “busyness.”

“No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.”

In that poem I see a new status flex–––the sublime freedom to be able to drop quotidian tasks, writing included, to engage in unstructured human connection.

And so that afternoon on the road near our house when I met H., I failed to seize the opportunity for an unplanned, unstructured human connection. If the poem’s opening lines about welcoming someone into your home had been more present in my mind, I could have invited him inside.

But I wanted to do writing tasks, things that certainly could have waited even if it didn’t feel that way to me and my antic brain.

Next time!

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Question for the comments: I’ve become obsessed with the word “flex",” which I define as a power move that ends in a swerve of surprise like the way a knight moves in chess.⁹ What’s your flex?

1. Dorian Gray is on my mind because everyone is raving about the one woman Broadway play starring Sarah Snook. Based on the novel by Oscar Wilde about a man whose picture ages while he does not.

2. My post “When A Billionaire Maligned My Wife And Me”

3. In fact, to qualify for the top 0.1% in terms of net worth, you now need about $46 million, almost double in constant dollar terms compared to 1989.

4. NYT article May 30th, 2025

5. From

6. From Koba The Dread, the terrific book about Stalin by Martin Amis.

“Who could end the applause for Stalin when Stalin wasn’t there?”

7. Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol by SILVIA BELLEZZA, NEERU PAHARIA, ANAT KEINAN.

Or, even better, various essays by

Kirsten Powers

, who is moving to Italy. Her great Substack newsletter is

Changing The Channel with Kirsten Powers

.

Kirsten has noted that, among other things, busyness in the Unites States is not normal. She has moved to Italy. This quote from Kirsten fits so well and is interesting, so forgive its length.

“While in Trieste, I signed up to take one-on-one Pilates classes from an Italian woman in her late 30s. As I shared my frustrations about life in America, particularly how lonely it could feel, she asked me how often I saw my friends. "About once a week," I said, even though as I said it, I realized it was much less.

She was shocked. "This is not normal," she said. "I see my friends every day." She explained that when she left that evening, she would stop to see her friends as she walked home—a glass of wine with one, perhaps dinner with another.

None of this was planned in advance.

If you showed up at someone's house in Washington, DC, unannounced, you would be considered a sociopath. I am not exaggerating. Perhaps you could do this once, but if you did it more than once, people would think you were a problem.”

8.

Maya C. Popa

’s newsletter is

Poetry Today

, great for poetry fans and for people like me who want to read more poetry but need it spoon-fed. The full poem of Red Brocade can be found here.

9. Vladimir Nabokov called a sudden shift in a narrative a “knight’s move,” in his Lectures On Literature using this example from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park :

“Fanny’s relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins’; but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and [knight’s move:] she really grieved because she could not grieve.”