If you walk into almost any conversation on campus, it won’t take long before you overhear talks about people’s schedules.
Not conversations about their classes, ideas or what anyone is actually learning, just how busy everyone is. Someone says they haven’t had a free weekend in weeks. Another casually drops that they’re juggling classes, two internships, three clubs and recruiting season. Heads nod with impressed silence or even admiration. But busyness isn’t just information anymore. It’s social currency.
Somewhere along the way, being busy stopped being a circumstance and started being a performance. On many campuses, that performance carries moral weight. If you are overwhelmed, you must be driven. If you are exhausted, you must be serious. If you are resting, something must be wrong.
This shows up most clearly in the small rituals students barely question. The LinkedIn checks feel less like networking and more like surveillance. From the quiet tallying of internships, fellowships and leadership roles, to the subtle panic when someone our age announces a summer offer in October: we scroll, compare and measure.
It’s not that people are pretending to be busy when they’re not. The workload is often real. What’s new is how much value gets attached to displaying that pressure.
Research on competitive academic environments has shown that people often engage in what sociologists call “visible busyness,” where productivity is performed to showcase commitment and worth. In places where achievement is constantly measured and compared, appearing busy becomes as important as actually being productive. Effort becomes something to show, not just something to experience.
Another body of research on performance-driven institutions suggests that when environments reward measurable output, people adapt by making their work more “visible.” Education sociologist Stephen J. Ball argues that modern academic institutions operate through “performativity,” where students organize their work around what can be measured, evaluated and shown. On a college campus, that can mean stacking commitments, publicizing achievements and treating free time as something suspicious. If productivity is what earns respect, then visible productivity becomes the safest way to secure it.
That is what makes this culture feel unsettling. College is not just a place where people work hard. It is a place where people learn what hard work means. Between the ages of 18-22, students are figuring out how to define themselves. They are deciding what success looks like, what rest means, what ambition feels like and what kind of life is admirable. These years shape not just careers, but value systems. They are a rehearsal for adulthood.
So when busyness becomes a moral flex, it does more than stress people out. It quietly teaches them that strain is virtue. Worth is proven through overload.
Over time, this culture reshapes how people relate to their own time. Rest starts to feel unearned unless it follows exhaustion. Empty space in a schedule feels like a waste of opportunity. Even enjoyment can carry an undercurrent of guilt, like something that must be justified rather than simply experienced.
The problem is not ambition. The problem is when ambition becomes indistinguishable from constant self-monitoring. When productivity stops being about growth and becomes about optics. Students start feeling compelled to demonstrate how hard they are working rather than reflect on why they are working at all.
College is supposed to be a period of transformation. A time when people experiment, question and figure out who they want to become. Yet, when busyness becomes the dominant signal of value, that transformation narrows. Identity gets built around output, character gets measured through capacity and humanity gets filtered through productivity.
That raises a quieter question beneath all the noise about schedules and deadlines: if a generation learns that being overwhelmed is proof of worth, what happens when the work stops and they finally have nothing left to prove?
Shreya Bhargava is a sophomore studying legal studies. Do you agree that being busy isn't a moral flex? Send all comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com
