"Busy! Busy-busy-busy. So busy!"

It used to be that the rote response to the (often insincere) question "How are you?" was "Fine. How are you?" Now the automatic answer is "Busy," and I'm as guilty of reciting it as anyone - even when I'm not particularly busy. We all seem to want everyone to think that our cups runneth over with important activities these days.

"How's it going, Sara?" I ask my upstairs neighbor, a high-school teacher, on a sultry August day. "Oooh, Michael. So busy," she sighs. It used to be that teachers took summers off, but now they're "expected" to teach summer school, she says.

"How ya doin', Steve?" I ask my auto mechanic. "OK, Mike--busy," he says, leaving out the "but." (Being OK and being busy are apparently the same thing today.) "Everybody wants their cars fixed yesterday."

I call my wife at work and ask how it's going today. "Busy!" she says. "Oh, I'll hang up, then," I say. "Oh, no, it's OK, I can talk," she says.

Today, we equate being busy with being important and appreciated, I suspect. Saying you're busy is a roundabout way to say, "I'm in demand, I'm essential, I'm valued." Think about what it means to not be busy in contemporary society: Something is wrong with you. Why aren't you working, exercising, going to classes, cleaning the bathroom or improving yourself somehow? Are you sick? Worse, are you lazy?

Every day I walk three blocks to the post office. And every day I pass of bench full of well-fed, not too shabbily dressed middle-aged men who appear to be just sitting there, doing nothing. They often ask me for spare change. They're drunks I suppose. In any case, they are perpetually unoccupied in the middle of a week day (or a "work day" as so many of us say). I can't bring myself to speak to them, not because they're drunk, but because the idea of having nothing to do makes me downright queasy.

Being self-employed, and working at home, I have a special sensitivity to this issue. People often assume that freelancers have a lot of time on their hands, that they're mostly goofing off. I know that I used to suspect that when I had an office job that involved working with freelancers. But I've found that the opposite is often true. When I'm busy, I'm often working days, nights, weekends--more than I ever worked in the office. Of course, there are down periods, when the flow of assignments dwindles to a slow drip. But during those times, I'm usually busy looking for work.

Occasionally, though, I do slack off. After I've completed a big assignment, I sometimes allow myself a slow day of reading, web surfing, walking around the neighborhood, going to get a haircut, or - and I really hate to admit this one - watching TV. And then I feel guilty.

That's because there's still so much to do: laundry, exercising, scribbling in my journal, working on creative-writing projects, and catching up on bills. So many things I could be, should be, doing. "You're a bum" that American work ethic keeps whispering in my ear. And it's wagging its finger at me at warp speed.

I'm not sure when it became so important to be busy, but I think the change came sometime in the 1990s - about the time that ours became a "24 x 7" culture, complete with 24-hour news channels, all-night supermarkets, and cell-phone- and beeper-equipped humans careening down the Interstate at 80 miles an hour. About the time that so many of us started to think of sleep as a waste of time. (I wonder if airline pilots believe that? I ask myself as the plane taxis down the runway.)

There's an interesting conception "at work" here - if you'll pardon the expression. People are valued for what they produce, the amount of work they get done, their productivity. That's a harmful enough idea for able-bodied adults, some of whom now boast that they never take a vacation ("too busy"), but what about those who aren't able-bodied? What message are they receiving? And what about children? I was in the cub scouts as a boy, and I took swimming lessons for a couple of weeks every summer, but that was about the extent of my extracurricular activities. I remember long afternoons spent drawing, reading adventure stories, riding my bike, and staring up at the clouds. I imagined a whole other world up there filled with palaces of froth.

Kids with "nothing to do" make us nervous today. They're apt to get into trouble we think, and maybe there's some truth in that. But something irreplaceable is lost when we demand that children fill up every spare moment with sports, dance and art classes, and play "dates." Childhood. And childhood is a prerequisite for true adulthood. Michael Jackson is the way he is today, so he says, because he missed out on being a kid.

We over-schedule our children today because we project our own self-doubts onto them. "Don't waste time," we're telling them, "time is precious." But we're confusing time with activity. Time spent doing "nothing" - which is how we refer to thinking - is just as precious as time spent creating spreadsheets or going to staff meetings.

So today, I'm determined to slow down and smell those roses.

Oops, those are aphids on the azaleas. Better get out the spray gun. Better get busy.

Better yet, I should exterminate the tired old bee that's still buzzing in my bonnet: "I'm busy, therefore I am!"

Michael Gates is a freelance business writer and editor who also writes short fiction, poetry and personal essays. His work has appeared in The 13th Story, Twilight Times, The Story Exchange, Cenotaph, Poems Niederngasse, Biff's Boards, Top Write Corner, Think: A Newspaper of Literary and Visual Art and Red River Review. Gates grew up in the wilds of upstate New York, then lived in New York City for several years. He currently resides in Weird, New Jersey, with his wife, Beth, and his son, Philip. You can read more of his work at his website, Dream House.