What Tricia Hersey Gets Right About Rest

I've said for years that capitalism is at the root of many of America's deepest problems — the way it commodifies people, prioritizes profit over wellbeing, and keeps us too exhausted to imagine anything different. Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance is a clear articulation of that argument, applied specifically to our relationship with rest and work.

Her case: grind culture isn't just a productivity trend. It's a system with roots in slavery and capitalism that was designed to extract maximum labor from Black and brown bodies. The pressure to stay busy, to hustle, to prove your worth through output — that didn't come from nowhere. It was constructed, and it continues to serve the people who benefit from our exhaustion. Rest, in that framework, is not laziness. It's a refusal to cooperate.

The lesson I keep coming back to: rest isn't the opposite of productivity. It's the condition for it. Hersey frames rest as imagination — you cannot dream a different future or organize toward one if you're too depleted to think. That's a political argument, not just a wellness one, and it's the part that most people gloss over.

One practical distinction worth noting: she separates performative rest (scrolling, zoning out) from restorative rest. Actual rest requires intentional disengagement. That's harder than it sounds if you've been conditioned to equate stillness with falling behind — which, by design, many of us have been.

Pick up Rest Is Resistance →