{"id":16333,"date":"2023-11-14T15:02:53","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T15:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/?p=16333"},"modified":"2023-11-14T15:02:54","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T15:02:54","slug":"all-play-and-no-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/all-play-and-no-work\/","title":{"rendered":"All Play And No Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Few sentences have ever made me feel so at peace as when actor Gaby Hoffman said, <\/span>\u201cI really love my job so much\u2026 but I don\u2019t want to do it that often\u201d.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

For years, I\u2019d read profiles of people working 12-hour days, or even longer in some cases, to excel in their careers. This tended to be framed as what you <\/span>had<\/span><\/i> to do to succeed, and I wondered why I felt no drive to do this in my own career, one I had to build from the ground up with no qualifications, no connections, and no financial safety net. I wanted a successful journalism career, I wanted all the bylines and the goals I\u2019d worked towards, I just didn\u2019t really want a life that involved working very much. Mainly, I wanted to go for meandering walks, crochet, weave, take little trips, drink nice coffees, huddle on the sofa under a blanket with my cat.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I felt isolated in this desire for rest<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I felt isolated in this desire for rest and \u2018pointless\u2019 activities over work, but the collective shift over the course of the past few years has demonstrated that I\u2019m not alone. It\u2019s not that hustle culture has disappeared, it\u2019s more that a counter-movement has emerged, and it\u2019s predicated on rest. The same year as Hoffman\u2019s interview, Chinese former factory worker Luo Hauzhong published a blog post <\/span>titled<\/span><\/a> \u201cLying Flat is Justice\u201d.<\/span><\/a> He\u2019d quit his job and now survived on odd jobs, one of which included <\/span>playing dead bodies<\/span><\/a> in movies. The overlap between Gaby Hoffman and Luo Hauzhong suggests people\u2019s desire to divest themselves of work isn\u2019t job, or even class, specific; it exists at every stratum of society and across countries.<\/span><\/p>\n\"\"\n

In 2016, artist and theologian Tricia Hersey founded <\/span>The Nap Ministry<\/span><\/a> in the US, a project to frame rest as a form of resistance, specifically within the lives and historical experiences of Black women and the Black community. \u201cThere is no system in our culture that supports and makes space for us to rest,\u201d Hersey <\/span>wrote, in an excerpt from her 2022 book <\/span><\/a>Rest Is Resistance<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/a> \u201cThis culture does not want you rested unless it is attached to your increased labour and productivity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hersey\u2019s framework, distilled in her book, has without a doubt fed through into most of the current discourse around rest as a political concept and its place within anti-capitalism and liberation from oppressive systems. (Nothing sums up the general outlook like <\/span>\u201cDivest from capitalism\/Lay yo ass down\u201d<\/span><\/a>). But such divestment and liberation is failing to materialise in any sort of systemic way. In China, the original <\/span>Lying Flat<\/span><\/a> post disappeared, and related discussion groups were shut down. The Tory government in the UK has promised more benefit sanctions for those not taking <\/span>\u201cactive steps\u201d<\/span><\/a> to move into work, and the US is doing its best to get <\/span>children into the workplace<\/span><\/a>. Work being presented, politically, as the lynchpin to our value within society takes a toll. \u201cIllness, health, mental health, any of those things, anything that means that you can\u2019t contribute towards capitalism right there and then, all the time, does kind of render you a failure,\u201d artist and writer <\/span>Georgina Johnson <\/span><\/a>told <\/span>The Block <\/span><\/i>earlier this year.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that context rest becomes a luxury<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The only rest we get is the rest we are willing, and able, to take; in that context rest becomes a luxury. To rest can also mean risking the illusion of failure. There are arguments against this, reinforcing that rest is <\/span>not a luxury, but a human right<\/span><\/a>, and of course it is a right, but in today\u2019s society there are nevertheless material barriers to rest. Consider the anonymous narrator from Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s 2018 novel <\/span>My Year of Rest and Relaxation<\/span><\/i>: her drug-induced \u2018sleep\u2019 takes place in a cushy Upper East Side apartment, funded by inheritance from her wealthy parents. In the real world, friends who\u2019ve had to work part-time jobs to be able to afford to keep poorly paid foot-on-the-ladder full-time jobs have missed rest to the point of becoming ill, while their parent-funded peers had free weekends and regular holidays. Access to rest isn\u2019t equal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where serviced apartments and parental incomes are lacking, some are building the structures to help their communities rest. Founded in 2015, <\/span>Rest for Resistance<\/span><\/a> is a trans-led organisation that creates both online and physical opportunities for marginalised communities to rest. Guided meditations, yoga, and their festival <\/span>\u2018Rest Fest\u2019<\/span><\/a> all offer the time and space for rest in different forms. \u201cWhen we\u2019re talking about rest in a structured, policy kind of way, [we should ask] who is being left out, whose rest still doesn\u2019t matter?\u201d says Dom Chatterjee, one of the organisation\u2019s founders. \u201cI get frustrated that a lot of the conversation about rest activism is about more vacations\u2026 instead of helping people rest in the conditions they\u2019re in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\"\"\n

Speaking from my own perspective as a freelancer, a holiday doesn\u2019t signify real rest to me. I love the experience of being somewhere new but the growing stack of emails (that I can\u2019t help but check) and the anxiety about missed opportunities takes feeling rested out of the equation. Helping myself rest meant, not a holiday, but committing to cutting down to a four-day week, and distributing my time away from work more evenly. I embarked on it in February this year, but quickly fell back into a pattern of five or six day weeks as my workload ramped up. Rather than feeling a weird sense of pride at joining the crowds of \u2018normal\u2019 people working long hours like I used to, I felt frustrated, personally and politically, that I wasn\u2019t living my life in the way I felt it should be lived. So, I doubled down and tried again in summer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How do we define \u2018rest\u2019?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A four-day week at a salaried job means working fewer days with <\/span>no loss of pay<\/span><\/a>, but a four-day work as a freelancer means either turning down work or doing longer days when you do work, and for that reason it doesn\u2019t always go to plan; I\u2019ve just pencilled in work for the next two Mondays, which are supposed to be my days off, to close a financial gap I saw coming. But on the weeks I am able, the difference in how I feel is remarkable and exemplifies that although the rest I previously imagined involved mostly sitting or lying still, my true rest \u2013 not just my allotted two day recovery from the working week \u2013 is quite active.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to perhaps the pivotal question: how do we define \u2018rest\u2019? What counts as rest and what does a life centred around rest look like?Chatterjee encourages people to ask what forms of rest they\u2019re jealous of, and build from there. You might be dying to have an hour to read a few chapters of a book or you might be sick of quiet time alone and want time to be with friends – what he calls \u2018resting in your community\u2019.\u00a0 \u201cThe way different forms of rest impact us on an individual level is so important to pay attention to,\u201d Chatterjee says. \u201cWe need to make fewer assumptions about what rest means for other people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Rest has become synonymous with low energy activities \u2013 snoozing, napping, lounging \u2013 because it\u2019s what we crave when we\u2019re exhausted from the momentum of forced productivity. If we live in a culture where we can abide by the ebb and flow of the seasons we evolved alongside, we should also be able to expand our understanding of rest to abide by the ebb and flow of our energy. Rest as a radical concept isn\u2019t a singular function or act, but a wholesale cultural transference.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read More: Summer In Crisis<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an era that can feel defined by work, Sophie Benson considers the politics of rest.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":16493,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,138],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16333"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16495,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16333\/revisions\/16495"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}