And then I decided to rest.
And it became quickly evident that I didn’t know how.
So I researched it.
Weak. Lost. Defeated.
Syphisphus at the bottom of the mountain
Hands stained with hard rock
Fingernails chipped
Toes bloody
God. Please.
Take me home. Take me home. Take me home.
I began with Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
It was helpful, but the foundational thesis of the book held venom I didn’t yet understand. The purpose of rest is to become more productive. If we ‘rest properly’ we can then ‘do more’.
This felt reassuring to me at the time. I was addicted to all things productivity: books, YouTube channels and podcasts. Despite writing books and articles, maintaining a full-time job, running podcasts and raising two children, I still felt I wasn’t achieving enough.
Pang thought I wasn’t resting enough. Humans need to take breaks. Regularly and seriously.
It turns out my definition of rest was all over the place. I thought rest roughly equated to sitting on the couch and watching television. Or sleeping. Pang hi-lights that rest can be anything that is rejuvenating. Play, socialising and exercise all count as rest.
“But I’ve also come to see our respect for overwork as, perhaps a bit paradoxically, intellectually lazy. Measuring time is literally the easiest way to assess someone’s dedication and productivity, but it’s also very unreliable.”
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Aristotle thought work was essential to a meaningful life, in balance with leisure.
The Romans - and then the Christians - took work very seriously. Manual labor and service to others was how you demonstrated your worth and glorified God. Paradoxically, hard work was also punishment for those who had sinned. St. Benedict and St. Francis saw work as the epicentre of a human life.
This was all before the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century. Karl Marx would rip this apart, pointing out capitalism’s potential to oppress, exploit and alienate workers.
Hannah Arendt theorised an essential distinction between ‘labour’ - the biological necessity of sustaining life - and ‘action’, the political participation in public affairs. From the cradle of the mid-twentieth century, she saw society’s emphasis on labour as lethal for fair societies and meaningful lives. With too much labour, she supposes, we diminish our capacity for action. We mortally damage our freedom.
I am driving in the dark, returning home after a long day at work. My commute is long and lonely.
Even though the highway is straight and boring, I am at a crossroads. I have worked tirelessly at my job for almost three years, monkey swinging from temporary contract to temporary contract. Now I can apply for my own job, permanently.
It is the right and sensible thing to do.
I will need to start my application over the weekend.
A new podcast comes on the car’s sound system. It’s an interview with a woman called Tricia Hersey.
Everything changes.
We work longer and harder hours now than medieval peasants.
Juliet Schor, an associate professor at Harvard University, found that workers in most developed nations work almost 200 hours more annually than in the dark ages.
That’s about four hours less a week. Or about eight working days less a year.
Life is easier than in the Dark Ages. We have evolved.
Right?
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey is a call to arms. Or rather, a call to lie down.
To introduce the work, I would suggest the same path I took. Listen to her interview on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast. The most essential points of her philosophy are all in that interview and is an excellent on-boarding to the book.
Hersey’s work started as part performance art. She titles herself a ‘nap bishop’ and would hold regular ‘nap ministries’ for her community. A calm, open environment where people would come, lie down, and nap. The overwhelming and emotional response stirred Hersey into expanding her work.
For Hersey, rest is sacred and beautiful. Its erasure from contemporary life is an act of violent white supremacy, misogyny and toxic capitalism. It is a hangover from the most shameful and hateful parts of our history.
What value is a life, after all, if the person living it isn’t at ease and fulfilled?
The only way to begin to deconstruct the societal violence that oppresses us all, says Hersey, is to rest. To lie down is an act of resistance.
Notes in a journal:
This isn’t working for me. I’m shortening my life. I’m dissolving my attention and energy as a parent. I am modelling something shitty for my daughters: work is more important than anything else. The only answers I have are to work harder, and all that’s ever done is dig me further into this hole. I am scared of saying no to this job, and I have no idea what’s next.
But every ounce of myself is telling me to retreat and recover. The answers will appear.
“We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.”
Tricia Hersey
Yes. Fuck. But what about money? What about the mortgage and the school fees and the bills?
In the six months after I change my approach to work, I constantly wrestle with fear. My mental health is worse than it ever was. Work was probably masking the shadows in my head. I got on medication, as I’ve talked about here before. Things became clearer.
I am extremely privileged in that the endless hard work of my 20’s gave me a long list of qualifications and experience that I could now call on as a freelancer. Work trickled in, all manageable doses.
The runway for survival is shorter. We don’t know where the next paycheck will come from some months. But we are economically sensible and restrained.
And all of this is nowhere near as stressful as my life was before.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman has become one of my favourite books of all time.
For my entire adult life, I have felt punished, oppressed and defeated by time. Burkeman cured me of that agitation in a few hundred pages.
Burkeman covers phone addiction, the historical and scientific definition of ‘time’, the practical approaches to managing rest and the spiritual questions of a meaningful life.
Most importantly, he takes the practical reality of our inevitable death seriously. He manages to make this a symbol of hope and celebration. Basically: life is short. What the fuck are you doing?
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”
Oliver Burkeman
If you’re still here, at the end of this blog, and you’re not reading it lying down, or with your toes in some grass or sand, or you haven’t felt fresh air on your shoulders today -
something’s wrong.
Soon
You will have no choice.
Your body will rest in the ground
And the earth will take you
Swallow you whole
Your bones will rest.
You will be held.
And what will you long for
In those final days
In the hospital bed
The docile pastel hum of the nursing home
The gleaming wreckage of a car
When you touch the ones you love for the last time.
Will you give a shit about
fucking email?