Stop telling me how to rest properly
A critical look at the Deliberate Rest Manifesto
Taking apart self help literature is kind of a hobby of mine. I recently came across the concept of deliberate rest. In his Deliberate Rest Manifesto, author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explains what we as a culture get wrong about rest, and offers insights into how we might not only take rest more seriously, but also change the way we approach it in the first place. It’s an interesting read and I found myself agreeing with a lot of the ideas he poses, but I also found myself having quite a lot to say about it.
Popular self-help and philosophy books have flooded our cultural landscape like a massive wave crashing on the shores of the growing discontents of capitalism. Whenever I read these bits of therapeutic advice, there’s a part of me that finds them genuinely useful, and another part of me that gets weirdly angry about it. I had the same feeling when reading about deliberate rest. So in an effort to rescue some genuinely helpful knowledge from the individualising grips of neoliberalism, I am going to add what I believe to be missing from the Deliberate Rest Manifesto. If any Marxist nerds are out there, think of this as a historical-materialist analysis of rest.
Pang’s manifesto starts with observing how notable creators and inventors throughout history have incorporated rest into their practice:
‘In a chapter on rest, I talk some about Charles Darwin’s long walks on a path he laid out on the edge of his property, Down House, and how important those walks were in his daily and creative life. Looking at Darwin’s life inspired me to look more closely at the lives of other noted scientists, and then the lives of writers, and then mathematicians, screenwriters, generals, and lots of other accomplished people.’
The argument here is that the people we deem particularly accomplished seem to have a way of approaching their work that takes times of rest, play, and apparently purposeless exploration very seriously. So far so good, this is an argument I have made myself, and I stand by it. But here’s my question: who gets the freedom to take that time? Who has the freedom to control their own time like that? Charles Darwin was wealthy. So were most of the people we deem “historically accomplished”. The kind of work where you can just take a rest whenever you want, and then go for a leisurely stroll around your property, is either only accessible to the wealthy, or falls victim to the frantic opportunity-chasing hell of the neoliberal gig economy.
It’s always weird to me when people try to give life advice based on examples of what wealthy people do. As if I don’t know myself that going on fun walks and having time for play and exploration is good for me, as if I have to look up to a wealthy person to show me how to do those things. I already know all of this, because it is intuitive. My body knows when I need rest, and when I need to go for a walk, and when I need to do something creative with my hands. But because I am not wealthy, I do not have full control over my time. I have to sell it for money. And once you’re employed, you can’t just decide to go for a spontaneous walk, or take an hour-long nap in the middle of the workday (although if you’re lucky enough to work from home I would certainly encourage this!). The advice itself is good, and correct. But the problem is not that I don’t know these things. The problem is that many of us have reduced access to truly implementing deliberate rest into our daily lives.
‘Books about rest or leisure, meanwhile, seem mainly interested in escaping work, not improving your ability to work.’
This section criticises our cultural conception of rest as simply the absence of work, a negative space away from the toils of necessity, rather than a positive space in which the mind is free to explore, connect to the world, and engage in creative forms of play. Again, I completely agree with this, but something is missing. We have to ask ourselves, why is our cultural conception of rest this pathological? It’s not because the masses are simply too stupid or uneducated. I would argue that it’s because the last few centuries of colonial capitalism have systematically disconnected us from our bodies and from our innate knowledge of what’s good for us.
If we’re talking about our pathological conceptions of a strict binary between work and rest, in which rest is simply the negative space away from work, we need to talk about the historical development of wage labour. When the land enclosures in Europe expelled people from the common lands on which their livelihoods depended, peasants were put to work in the new factories, where they first became wage labourers. Because they had lost access to communal forms of reproduction, they became dependent on selling the only thing they still had: their labour power. Work transformed from a largely (though, due to feudalism, not entirely) self-directed, communal arrangement among peasants, into a strictly controlled, individualised relationship of exploitation between capitalist and worker. The new regime of wage labour had no regard for the seasonal variations of work, the bodily cycles of sleep and wake, and the fluctuations of human health and productive capacity.
Today, remnants of this dominating extractive culture remain in almost everything we do, but especially at work. People regularly ignore their body’s signals in service of productivity. They drag themselves to work despite being sick, they have to keep up inhumane patterns of shift work that disrupts circadian rhythms, they are subjected to petty hierarchies and forms of social control in the workplace. These processes are what Foucault called the ‘disciplining of bodies’. Our bodies have been disciplined in the service of capital for literal centuries. And after centuries of this, is it any wonder that we don’t know how to rest? Is it any wonder that our conception of leisure is mainly about escaping work, when wage labour has been a site of coercion and alienation for several generations of workers?
‘Today we need to rethink the relationship between work and rest, acknowledge their intimate relationship, and rediscover the role that rest plays in helping us be creative and productive. Fortunately, there have been lots of discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, organizational behavior, sports medicine, sociology, and other fields that give us insight into the unsung but critical role that rest plays in strengthening the brain, enhancing learning, enabling inspiration, and making innovation sustainable.’
So now it’s the psychologists and neuroscientists and sociologists that are telling us how to rest properly. Obviously the scientific exploration of the function of rest is fascinating and worthwhile, but sometimes these people make it sound like they have discovered some sort of secret new knowledge. First it is the historically accomplished people I need to look to to teach me how to rest, now it’s the scientists who know better than me. Again, this is not to discredit any scientists working in this field, but an observation of how we are systemically conditioned to ignore our own innate knowledge and bodily intuition in favour of looking up to wealthy people and institutionally sanctioned knowledge production to tell us how to live our lives.
It’s not only who gets to rest that’s the problem, but how people and their resting activities are perceived differently based on class. When Charles Darwin goes for a random walk, it’s his innate genius telling him to engage in deliberate rest so he can do his brilliant science. When working class kids, particularly if they are not white, hang out listening to music on the street, they’re chased away by cops enforcing “anti-loitering” laws, which are really just a form of racist class warfare. These are the ways in which rest is politicised, and treated differently on different bodies.
I think that good sociology, and good science, incorporates these power dynamics into every form of knowledge production. When we think about why there is such a pathology around rest in our culture, we need to take into account how working class people have been disciplined into docile and obedient bodies, which by necessity divorces us from our bodies’ innate way of knowing how to rest, when to rest, and for how long. Deliberate rest is not some kind of new knowledge that scientists discovered or that has somehow only been accessible to historically wealthy people, whom we then call “special” because they were luckier than us and could pursue their dreams while the rest of the world suffered for them. We ALL possess the knowledge of deliberate rest, we were born with it. It’s just that some people were allowed to hold on to it, while many others were forcefully conditioned out of it by the rampant destruction that capitalism wreaked on their lives.
I’m currently reading Rupa Marya’s and Raj Patel’s brilliant book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy and Injustice. In the book, they talk about how colonialism systematically wiped out and discredited indigenous medical knowledge, and replaced it with the new colonial institutions of medicine, institutions that were and are based on white supremacy, domination, and a monopoly on knowledge production. I can’t help but see the parallels between the way colonial institutions discredited indigenous knowledge and the way the self-help industry tells increasingly stressed and unhealthy workers to just learn how to rest better. As if we don’t already know how to rest. As if we haven’t known for centuries, as if people haven’t been fighting for their right to rest throughout the entire history of capitalism.
‘But we also need to recognize that we can learn to rest better. Some of history’s most creative people, people whose achievements in art and science and literature are legendary, took rest very seriously. They found that in order to realise their ambitions, to do the kind of work they wanted to, that the right kinds of rest would restore their energy, while allowing their muse, that mysterious part of their minds that help drive the creative process, to keep going.’
Learning how to rest better is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, but its power is greatly diminished without taking into account its political dimension. Self-help literature often focuses on individual solutions to systemic problems. We just need to learn how to rest better, so we can be happier (read: more productive) workers. Conversations about deliberate rest often happen in tandem with a critique of social media use, emphasising how scrolling on social media is a treacherous illusion of rest that actually makes you addicted to more and more easy dopamine hits. Deliberate rest is then offered as a healthier alternative to the mindless scrolling we all fall victim to. While this is certainly true, it is still an individualised solution to a systemic issue.
These conversations also easily fall into this friendly paternalistic, slightly condescending tone that subtly shames people for their addictive habits, without asking what created those habits in the first place. Kind of like, ‘look at those stupid proles always on their phones, they should take up hiking instead’. Well, who created those addictive platforms and profits from them? And who upholds the labour structures that make easy dopamine hits the most readily available form of rest? Without this political analysis, deliberate rest can quickly become another individualised imperative to self-optimisation, so that we can function as efficiently as possible in a system that is slowly destroying us.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Deliberate rest is, at the end of the day, a form of deep knowledge that we all possess. We just have to reconnect to it, and fight for the conditions in which deliberate rest is a collective right, not just a mental health instruction manual. I would go even further and say that time for deliberate rest, play, and exploration should be something sacred. Rest needs to become holy. Not necessarily in a religious sense, but in the sense that rather than being a means to an end, rest becomes an end in itself.
The fight for rest is ultimately a fight for autonomy. Autonomy over how we spend our time, over how we allocate work and resources, over what we value as a society and what we don’t. The fight for rest is the fight for control over our time and our bodies. It is synonymous with labour struggles, anti-racism, queer and indigenous liberation, neurodivergent and disability justice, and many more emancipatory movements.
Given that we still have to live in the world as it is right now, I still find it useful to incorporate deliberate rest into our daily lives. The question is just about how you approach it. Therapeutic advice can be helpful, but again, this is not a mental health instruction manual. It’s about reconsidering our relationship to our bodies and to the world around us. It’s both inner and outer work, both personal and political. I really love the idea of deliberate rest, and I appreciate those sharing knowledge about it. But we have to connect it to history, politics, and class struggle. This is what I have tried to do, and I hope it may be a helpful contribution towards a different kind of world.