“I have plenty of time,” said no one, ever. It’s a modern epidemic—feeling relentlessly busy and overwhelmed. What is causing our drive to run in overdrive?

We feel inundated by pressure and responsibilities, by everything, everywhere, all at once, at home, school and work. In the extreme, we have the poster child of overwork—the investment banker. According to a Goldman Sachs survey, first-year investment banking analysts worked more than 95 hours per week, sleeping an average of five hours per night.  (No surprise: a cool 100% of respondents reported a negative impact on their relationships. ) But this work ethic pervades nearly every challenging career. I have known more than one young professional who chose to forego renting an apartment and simply lived at the office. As for those whose primary work involves raising a family, their schedules can rival investment banking hours. Anyone who has ever stood in the kitchen holding a newborn while eating a Lean Cuisine with one bare hand knows about feeling overstretched.

Researchers applying the so-called Perceived Time Pressure Survey love to evaluate people that report “feeling persistently ‘time poor’—like they have too many things to do and not enough time to do them.” According to three unrelated studies, 60% of adults believe there are not enough hours in the day and feel “too busy to enjoy life,” and 80% feel they never have enough time.   And feeling time deprived can kill you. Karoshi syndrome (“death by overwork”) is fairly rare, but feeling constantly inundated can contribute to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and perhaps most chilling, impaired fertility. As researchers put it in a 2025 paper, “the urgent need to tackle time poverty is a public health issue. ”

You would think we could relax, with all this century’s gadgets. We have big data and microchips, large language models and nanobots. And, we’re faster at life. We order groceries from our phones. We swipe right to find a spouse. We text instead of calling, and when we text, we use emojis.  (No need to bother typing actual words!) Modernization has given us a faster pace of life, and we’re not unlike Lucille Ball in the candy factory episode—frantically trying to keep up with an accelerating conveyor belt.  

Feeling time constrained is so pervasive in our culture that to question it would be like a fish asking, “What’s water?” Imagine, then, that you are part of this time-deprived cohort: you spend your day drinking from a fire hose.  Swamped.  Drowning.  What, then, is the worst thing someone could say to you?

“You are really not that busy. ”

You are really not that busy, researchers do in fact say. Our working hours have steadily declined in the last 150 years, and that trend is continuing.  A 2025 paper challenging the myth of relentless overbusyness revealed decreases in the primary contributors to our time deprivation.  Likewise, our leisure time has increased steadily, by up to eight hours per week since 1965 (akin to gaining a full work day).  

But here’s the twist. Our sense of time debt varies across population groups, and, counterintuitively, is actually highest among the privileged. The more education and money we have, the more time poor we feel.  And research shows that when people gain affluence, they feel even more strained. Even just feeling rich (when you can check the box on a form indicating a higher net worth than others, as one study’s participants could) can make you feel more pressed for time.  

These observations are surprising in part because they make no sense. We all know that many of us are “actually busy” (the working poor, those working two jobs, those with horrific commutes). Yet those groups are less likely to express a sense of time pressure.  Why would an abundance of resources trigger a scarcity of time?

The disconnect can be explained by the distinction between subjective and objective experiences of time.

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