Good rest is more than "not working"
And it's rarely found on the sofa.
Hello everybody,
This week we’re looking at the philosophy of rest.
You can find the companion article here: 4 reasons to take rest more seriously
It’s Monday morning
You sit at your desk, freshly caffeinated and as ready as you’ll ever be for another working week.
You open Microsoft Teams. You flick through the most important stuff, and then a message comes in from your office best friend.
“Good weekend?” it reads.
Well, was it? You didn’t do much. In fact, you didn’t do anything. On Saturday, you went to the shops. On Sunday, you did some housework. The many hours in between were spent vegetating. It’s amazing how quickly a weekend can go by, trapped on the sofa. But, was it a good weekend?
“Meh,” you type back, “I didn’t really do anything.”
We often get leisure wrong. A weekend spent at leisure shouldn’t feel “meh.” When Cicero, Aristotle, and Epicurus talked about leisure, they meant something that made you more. It was an opportunity to grow, to learn, to improve, and to connect. For this, they used the word otium. In contrast, vegetating on the sofa, getting blindingly drunk, and idling the hours away are examples of what they called “narka.” Narka is about disconnection. It’s to become numb and detached from things, and, as you can guess, it gives us the word “narcotics.”
Otium is about growth; narka is about stagnation.
So, how can we make better use of our leisure time? How can we have better weekends? Today, we find out.
Getting out of my pajamas
Every month, I go to a board game night in the village. It’s a small village, but it didn’t take me long to gravitate toward my fellow geeks. And so, on the last Thursday of every month, I play Settlers of Catan with crisps and more wine than I remember drinking. I love it. I always come away feeling happier and more relaxed. Talking to real humans around a real table about all manner of real things makes my micro-anxieties dwindle into silliness. These board game nights are otium in the philosophical sense. I feel more connected to the world.
I know all this, and yet, when Thursday afternoon comes around, I almost always think, “I can’t be arsed with tonight.” It feels like too much effort. This is the siren’s song to narka. It’s the allure of the numb. Because leisure, in the otium sense, demands agency. It requires me to get out of my pajamas, walk half a mile, and socialize. Small efforts, of course, but more than Netflix asks of me.
We live in a world that all too easily celebrates and sells narka. Vegetating is normalized, and anything else is seen as “too much like hard work.” This week, I spoke with the bestselling author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. He thinks there are two things going on here.
First is the fact that we’re exhausted. We barely get any “free” or “leisure” time. The few hours we get in the evenings or on the two days we get off a week are either spent in the labor of getting by – eating, washing, putting the kids to bed, etc. – or they’re spent exhausted on the sofa. As Soojung-Kim Pang put it, “the global economy is geared towards demanding larger and larger shares of our time. And it makes those demands seem inevitable and inescapable.”
Second, though, is the rise of the “attention economy,” where companies have realized that “they can make enormous amounts of money by wasting our time — by capturing, commodifying, and reselling our attention.” In other words, there is a subtle, insidious push to focus only on a select few things. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière once noted that power is often manifested in forcing people to pay attention only to certain things. Where should we look? What things should we devote our time to? Today, we are often told to look only at those lucrative, profit-generating things – TV shows, influencers, and Amazon. You don’t need to leave your sofa because what could there possibly be to see that you can’t see on TV or on your phone?
The solution to both of these is to reframe how we see ourselves. It’s a root-and-branch reexamination of what we see as the point of living at all. As the saying goes, do you work to live or live to work? Living is not the temporary recuperation between bouts of working.
Soojung-Kim Pang argues we need to stop seeing “rest” as being “not-work.” In fact, otium, as the likes of Cicero used it, might even demand more “work” from you than your Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 job does. We should start to see leisure time as the work we do for its own sake. It’s the “work” we do on living fully. It’s a passion project done without reward. It’s helping a friend without any need for praise or glory. It’s writing, painting, and expressing yourself without hope or want for payment.
As Soojung-Kim Pang put it, “We're taught to think that if there's not an immediate payoff to our activities that they have no value; and in today's fast-moving, trigger-happy economy, that can seem very true. But the guiding ideas that give meaning to our lives are not things we can discover at the blackboard or keyboard; they need space, and time to grow and emerge, and make themselves known.”
Narka will always tempt us. I will probably always grumble about having to put on trousers for my board game night. But happiness and meaning are not found on the couch. We are human beings first, and economic units only relatively recently. As human beings, we need to engage with the world and keep ourselves busy. We have both emotional and intellectual needs, which cannot be met by wasting a weekend away. There is a restless energy to being human that reaches out into the world.
Taking that walk will almost always make you feel better. Planting those flowers will almost always make you feel happier. Meeting friends in your neighborhood to do absolutely anything will almost always make you feel fuller.
Rest might be hard, but a weekend well spent shouldn’t be “meh.”
Do you agree?
IN YOUR OPINION
As you can see from the poll above, it turns out that most people have similar ideas about what makes a good rest day: a long sleep, a good walk, and a meal with company. But I did get one answer that stood out and made me sit up. It’s not so much about a rest day as a reset day. Here’s what they wrote:
I get up at 8 in the morning, have a big breakfast, and then play a JRPG I like for as long as I can or want to. In between, I only eat old dry rolls and drink tap water. Sometimes I fall asleep on the couch. I don’t shower, but I do brush my teeth. My sleep schedule is totally messed up. I play when people are asleep and sleep when the world around me is waking up. After two to a maximum of three days, I either finish the game or lose interest in playing for that long. I've lost weight and feel detoxed. I barely focused on anything other than the game, and now my thoughts feel refreshed. I'm motivated to do things—to go to the studio, paint, work. I feel strong and much more focused on my surroundings. I think it’s because, even though a part of me regrets “wasting” three days doing nothing, I don’t actually feel guilty about it. I did something I enjoy, and now I feel recovered and clear-headed. I only do this about three times a year, though—not more.
- JB, Instagram
What to make of this? At first, I found it a bit odd. I can’t imagine spending a weekend in such an extreme degree of JRPG commitment. But then I got thinking about partying. I got thinking about binging and revelling until dawn, drunk beyond any doctor’s recommendation. A lot of humans tend to enjoy — need, perhaps — an occasional bout of excess. We need to blow off steam or turn off the brakes for just a bit. What JB is talking about here is something similar.
So, do you think humans need to occasionally dive full-on into a temporary Dionysian frenzy? Or do you think this is a sign of something unhealthy? (I certainly like a frenzy now and again—but that doesn’t answer the question either way.)
Send me your thoughts via email or comment below.
Next Week:
Next week, we’re exploring the “monsters” behind great art with Claire Dederer. And so I’m asking:
Do you enjoy reading, watching, or listening to anything made by someone who has done immoral or monstrous things?
Send me your thoughts via email or comment below.
MINI READING LIST
RESOURCES
This newsletter contains my reflection on the topic at hand. Here is a list of the material shared in this email, as well as extra content about the topic that I've shared on my other social platforms:
The companion article inspired by my conversation with Soojung-Kim Pang
My short video exploring the difference between Theory X and Theory Y bosses, featured on Mini Philosophy’s Instagram page
Unfortunately, I forgot to record this week’s interview. But Alex was kind enough to send some extra comments via email afterward. Most of these can be found in this week’s article.
Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
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Being retired, I sometimes feel I should show more for what I do on a daily basis, as I could do while working, but then I remember how, when working, I longed for a lazy day of doing nothing, to taking a walk in the park in the middle of the week, or just lounge in my pajamas to read a book. When I remember I've earned these moments, I can then luxuriate in them!
A lot of it seems to come back to meditative engagement. Focused, yet unpressured and without a sense of burden or obligation. I tend to think of the meditative focus on one point or one train of one sort or another (an image, breathe, etc.) as an opportunity for our fragmented selves to have a momentary stand-in of an anchor—becoming a sort of organizing principle where we can reorient ourselves away from other things we have to force ourselves to organize around (work and other obligations, while we may even willingly embrace these). Then we have the opportunity to return to a more pliable state and regain a fluidity in ourselves that allows for more flow—creativity and responsiveness in all areas of our lives. And along the way, the opportunity to choose our more authentic organizing principles for our selves and our lives. In the case of JB above, it almost sounds more like a meditation and a period of fasting than a Dionysian frenzy. Only eating old dry bread and a little water along the way, eliminating other distractions by just being focused on the game, only being awake when others are asleep, creating solitude and further less distractions or detours. Incidentally—looking up JRPG’s to find out what they are, I see what look like samurais and sounds like there’s a distinct aesthetic to these games. If they do revolve around samurai existence, I’d say that highlights that quality of asceticism in preparation for battle that my gut tells me was the tradition for many forms and bands of warriors across cultures and throughout time—it seems that JB is playing the role even in the real world. By the end of the journey JB’s lost weight and feels detoxed and mentally refreshed. All of this—the process and the results—feels like a period of meditation and fasting to me, albeit certainly non-traditional and nothing one would normally brag to the yogis about. It’s fascinating though, because it works for JB and that’s what matters. Thinking about it I’ve had somewhat similar experiences, and I have less dramatic versions of my own. It points to what the real efficacious mechanisms of meditation and fasting are—separated from acquired rituals and expectations that might be helpful for some but may in fact be unnecessary. Still, there is an interesting similarity between the asceticism of JB’s practice and a Dionysian frenzy. Perhaps it’s that JB’s practice looks hedonistic or gluttonous on the surface until you look at it more closely. Then at the same time, Dionysian frenzy can have a powerful effect—perhaps reorienting one’s organizing principles in it’s own ways. There’s something to be said for how inebriation let alone a sip of wine can set one’s interior spinning, unmooring us and setting us free to reorient and land in ourselves in a new way. Perhaps this has more in common with meditating as a whirling dervish (though it only sparks the thought for me—I don’t know all that much about the practice.) Seems like there are interesting ways that all three of these practices relate.