Last year, Harvard Business Review’s Adam Waytz wrote an article highlighting terms that capture our current cultural pace-of-life: “time poverty,” “effort justification,” “idleness aversion,” “go on automatic” and “quiet quitting,” which is when employees refuse to work beyond their prescribed tasks and hours.

Waytz says quotes the sociologist Jonathan Gershuny, who says, “Work, not leisure, is now the signifier of dominant social status.’” And he quotes Gordon Gekko, from the movie “Wall Street,” “‘Lunch is for wimps.’”

Waytz is exposing the impact the busyness phenomenon has had on the modern American workplace.

While I don’t work in the traditional workplace, I find the same trends characterizing my everyday life. The minute my kids leave for school, my mental clock starts ticking — so many things to do in so little time. The calendar is my taskmaster. Occasionally, when I do decide to throw it all to the wind and just sit for a minute, I either fall asleep or get lost in my phone. And then a familiar guilt washes over me for squandering something as precious as free time.