"Stop working so much! Slow down and enjoy life! Stop working overtime and play baseball with your kid!"
From Hollywood family films to hippie-dippy blog posts, from productivity books authored in Silicon Valley to white-suburban-mom influencer pages on social media, one cultural narrative pops up again and again: Stop thinking that money will buy you happiness, slow down, and learn to actually rest.
Every time I run across this rhetoric, I flinch.
Anyone who's followed my blog for a while might be surprised at this, as I have written extensively about simplicity, contentment, rest, and slowing down. Rest is enormously important to me. When I tried a journalling exercise that helped me pinpoint what matters most to me in life, the phrase "free time" came up so much it was almost embarrassing. And I'm happy to say that I do have a lot of free time, which I jealously guard, because without it, I feel so overwhelmed that it's hard to function as a human being.
The actual practice of rest is certainly countercultural, and is important— essential— to human flourishing.
So why do these platitudes grate against me? But as I've pondered these ideas (and, more importantly, listened to people of various backgrounds ponder them) I've begun to see the way that this kind of rhetoric hits very differently depending on someone's privilege, age, and especially social class.
For instance, for a person with a secure income, the consequences of taking time to rest are very different from someone who has an unstable job. Perhaps a boss in an office will be upset if you take a sick day, but in many retail jobs, sick days can quickly get you fired. There is very little margin for error in an unstable and/or low-income situation— a situation that many people, and often especially young people, find themselves in. The situation is further complicated by a thousand factors such as disability, race, family support (or lack thereof), housing situation, childcare availability, and more.
Many admonishments to rest are assuming that the reader is hustling hard because they want all the trappings of the "American dream:" a house, a car, a family, status, promotion, a nice watch. Yet for many people (and especially Millennials and Gen Z), the urge to hustle is simply to avoid poverty. As one freelancing/entrepreneurial Millennial friend told me, "I constantly have a voice in the back of my head yelling at me, 'If you stop working for an instant, you'll be poor.'" For many, it's a literal reality. Student debt, health insurance, and skyrocketing rent turn a fairly decent paycheck into poverty wages. People react in different ways: some hustle harder and ignore rest through busyness, and others go to their job and numb out everything else because facing reality is too painful— and numbing is not the same as rest.
This isn't even to go into the glaring differences in class that Covid-19 exposed: while office workers tweeted from their homes about how "we're all in this together," retail workers making minimum wage put their lives on the line day after day not because they wanted to but because they had to.
In short, the admonishment to rest (and all the baggage, such as rejecting hustle culture, not straining to get ahead, and not seeking happiness through money) has been co-opted by a culture that hyper-fixates on individuals— specifically, those rich and privileged enough to afford to slow down.
Or, in other words, telling a fast-food employee who's been coughed on for two years straight during a pandemic that they should value rest more simply falls flat.
So if rest is important, but inaccessible to so many people, how can we truly value rest?
I think the first step is breaking free from individualism and focusing on rest as a community act. If we're serious about rest, we have to make it a cultural, not just personal, priority.
As a Christian, it's instructive to me to look at the concept of "Sabbath" as it appears in the Hebrew Bible, and think about how it sets the tone for a theology of rest that I should aim for. Although we don't follow these rules literally anymore, there is much to be learned here.
First of all, rest was mandatory. Sabbath was one of the Ten Commandments, and breaking it was akin to committing adultery or murdering someone. That's how important it was to community life.
Second, rest was communal, not individual. The Sabbath commandment is the longest out of the Ten, using a lot of clarifying phrases to emphasize that it is for literally everyone in the community— not just citizens but servants/slaves, immigrants, and even farm animals. Rest was never supposed to be the privilege of a few at the expense of others.
Third, rest was supposed to last for an entire year on a regular basis. Although there is little evidence that the Israelite nation ever obeyed these laws, the Old Testament books outline a rhythm of communal life that involves taking an entire year off of work every seventh year— in addition to debt forgiveness and freeing all Hebrew slaves (a process which entailed sending them on their way with a livable wage in the form of agrarian currency: flocks and herds).
Fourth, care for the poor was built into the framework of community life. God commanded the people to care for the poor, the widowed, and the orphan, and also to leave part of their wealth easily available to the marginalized— which in an agrarian society meant not harvesting the edges of the barley and wheat fields so the poor could gather the sheaves, and allowing anyone to snack on grapes while walking through your vineyard.
Whether or not these rules were ever followed literally, these ancient writings paint a vision of communal life that revolves around rest, one that we would do well to learn from.
Too often, rest gets whittled down into a personal affair, something that you need to carve out for yourself for the benefit of you. This not only encourages a narrow, self-centered, and easily-capitalized-upon version of "self care," but it also by its nature excludes people who are fighting to keep the bills paid.
If we truly value rest in our lives, we must value it in other people's lives, too. We must support and celebrate rest and focus on ways to allow more people to engage in this basic human right. I don't have all the answers, but I'm asking lots of questions. What do I and others need in order to rest? What might this look like in community life? If I am resting well, how can I use my money, time, resources and privilege to help others rest as well?
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