Busywork or Real Work

Relearning How To Just Stop Running in Circles

This post is in belated response to the July 24, 2025 poll. Be sure to get your votes in on this week’s poll.

Even after I left Sea Org and the Guardian’s Office, the only place I worked until after my divorce was in Scientologist owned companies. The work ethic and the entire work atmosphere is nothing like that in a non Scientologist environment. The first time I worked for a non Scientologist firm after I escaped, I was in for one of the most amazing awakenings of my life.

After my escape, I was lucky to be offered a position at what can only be described as a stuffy law firm. We had 3 entire floors of the Beneficial Life Towers downtown just for attorneys and support staff. Giant flower arrangements which covered an entire tabletop were delivered to the lobbies of the three “populated” floors every week. We were required to wear heels and dresses or dress slacks and jackets. But we had to take our heels off when exiting the elevator until we reached the carpeting so we didn’t damage the parquet flooring outside the elevators.

There was another entire floor for archived files not yet old enough to be taken to offsite storage. And one more floor for litigation support. This is where all the piles of paper produced in a lawsuit went to be sorted into submission by an army of paralegals in preparation for court cases.

Why am I describing all this in detail? So the reader can understand I wasn’t walking into a one man rinky dink operation. Although it later imploded, at the time I worked there for one of the senior partners, it was the largest law firm in the western US. It was actually fortunate for me that it was so large. I was able to observe the routines and figure things out quickly,

I had most of what I needed to do down in a couple of weeks, and I was definitely a dedicated, hard worker as are most people who escape Sea Org. Sometime in the first month, 5pm came and I was busy typing away on a brief. It was due in a couple of weeks. But I had already discovered that it would go through at least 6 more revisions before it was declared final. So, I wanted it ready for my supervising attorney to review in the morning.

At about 5:15pm, he walked out of his office. He stopped and said “what are you still doing here.” I replied “Just trying to get this brief finalized so you’ll have it in the morning.” He stopped, walked up to me, and said “find a stopping point. It will still be here tomorrow. It’s time to go see your kids.”

I didn’t cry, but my whole insides melted. I also had a really hard time walking away from that incomplete brief. But I did. And it was there in the morning. And I had finished editing it by the time he finished the morning partnership meeting. So he wouldn’t have seen it a second earlier if I’d stayed later the night before.

It will still be here tomorrow was a very hard concept to relearn. I had been in the workforce since I was 14 and didn’t join Scientology until I was 20, so I had worked jobs where we left it all behind. But, once again, Scientology programming runs deep.

And in Scientology, a person is always busy. Even when they aren’t. It’s a hard concept to grasp for someone who hasn’t been around it, but there’s no such thing as a saunter or stroll in Scientology. In Scientology, every single person who is working at any job is busy every single minute of the day. Whether or not they are supposed to be there.

I knew an attorney who, for a while, worked for Scientology. He no longer does. He couldn’t sleep at night. But, he asked me something that kind of set me back on my heels. He had already quit representing them at this point. He was describing his tour of the Celebrity Center. Everyone was bustling around as they always did. “What,” he said, “is it that you did all day? What is it that everyone is so busy with?”

I think I looked like a fish out of water for a couple of minutes as I groped around for an answer. Finally I shrugged my shoulders and said “busywork.” That was as close as I could come to an answer. We had statistics and all these things that we just had to do all day every day. We didn’t get to work normal hours. We had to work longer than normal hours just doing all the things that just had to get done in a day.

But at the end of the day, what was it that got done? What was really going on? Statistics were being met. There were very precise goals that had to be met and we were racing around doing what needed to be done to meet those goals. Every single week, those goals had to exceed the prior week’s goals. That is an impossibility in any world. No matter how superhuman a person is, there is a limit to their ability to exceed what they last did. It’s just the way life is.

Yet in Scientology, we were always rushing around, trying to get one more student to read just one more page. Get one more letter written to one more person. Get one more dollar inside the door. Get one more piece of paper filed in a file. And they called this saving the planet. Looking back, I call it insanity.