The rest revolt

Rest is of deep value; should it be a right?

Jul 17, 2024

In his book Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond writes of meeting a legal immigrant in his early twenties named Julio Payes who lived near Oakland. In order to support his meager existence–a single room he shared with family–Julio worked two jobs: one at McDonald’s and one at a temp agency. His shift at McDonald’s began at 10pm and he worked overnight until 6am. Then he turned around and worked temp positions from 8am to 4pm. This untenable schedule required massive amounts of caffeine and afforded nothing but attempts at sleep in his ‘free’ time. At some point, his body caught up with this inhumanity and he blacked out while buying groceries. Julio’s experience is humbling. Moreover, it shows how the basic human need for rest can be stripped away by the demands of survival and raises important questions about the value and accessibility of rest in our society.

Recently, I’ve been simultaneously researching two topics: rest and poverty. Though not by design, the coincidence has been revealing. The colonization of time by capitalism is a running theme of Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep in which he argues that the biological (not to mention psychological, emotional, and spiritual) need to rest interrupts the profit engine’s continual work of producing value. Certainly, the ‘internalized capitalism’ many of us suffer from generates an illusion of self-induced pressure to work more in order to be more productive, more successful, and more valuable (i.e. higher status.) Yet, the truly embodied instrument of labor in the form of those working just to survive lack the choice offered in many of the resources I share below–the choice to step back and rest.

And it is not just the demands of long working hours that depletes those experiencing poverty. As Desmond describes it, “[poverty] shrinks the mental energy you can dedicate to decisions, forcing you to focus on the latest stressor–an overdue gas bill, a lost job–at the expense of everything else…Behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this ‘the bandwidth tax.’ ‘Being poor,’ they write, ‘reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep.’ When we are preoccupied by poverty, ‘we have less mind to give to the rest of life.’” Poverty takes away time, yes, but it also strips away choice and worse, it diminishes the ability to think clearly, much less think of a better life.

Too many of us, maybe nearly all of us, are exhausted to the point of burnout. Surely, it takes a certain amount of courage, and may even be a ‘radical’ act to buck the system and assert one’s own needs in the face of so much external noise to the contrary. But I would hasten to urge that we recognize the intersection of ‘always on’ culture with the unjust requirements of poverty–an existential place where people did not choose to live and yet must embody in truly detrimental, and sometimes fatal, ways. As Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, says, “our bodies are a site of liberation” and it may require a coordinated and shared act of resistance to build a culture where rest is a right, as it should be.

Rest, it turns out, is a more complex societal issue than may appear on its face. And while it may now be a luxury for some–whether because of poverty or incessant status-seeking or internalized capitalism–it has, at other points in history, been an enforced ‘cure’. The path to true liberation is not a straight one. But it may require some thoughtful, purposefully chosen, and permitted rest.

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