The busy shall inherit the earth: The evolution from ‘hard work’ to ‘busyness’ in modern science and society

Summary 

Although ‘hard work’ and ‘busyness’ are somewhat similar terms, there seem to be significant differences in the way that they are used. While hard work has always been a feature of complex societies, modern society can be seen as evolving toward being dominated by jobs characterized by busyness. Busyness refers to multi-tasking – having many sequential jobs to perform and switching frequently between them on an externally-imposed schedule. Traditionally, the individual gifts of a successful scientist were mainly in terms of knowledge, theoretical or technical aptitude. But nowadays the successful scientist is often one who has been promoted from hard-work to busyness: an expert in synthesizing a sufficient degree of scientific ability with a broad range of managerial and political skills. It is psychologically tough to be busy, because busyness is a consequence of human beings being constrained by the functioning of abstract social systems. In a complex modern organization, individual psychology is subordinated to inflexible programs of being in specific places at specific times doing specific things – this is both tricky to do well and demanding to do at all. Since people are paid (mainly) to do difficult but necessary things they would prefer not to do, busyness has become a major reason why people are paid a premium salary. In the long-term, many straightforward jobs will be analyzed and routinized out of existence, with the narrowly-skilled worker being replaced by teams, machines or computers. But busy jobs are hard to eliminate because they are those in which it is optimal for a variety of disparate and unpredictable tasks to be done by a single person. Consequently, those individuals who can cope with, even thrive-upon, busyness are becoming indispensable. In future ‘the busy shall inherit the earth’ (or, at least, the most powerful and highest paid jobs), not just in science but in all major social domains.