Rest Is Not a Reward

On running two companies, burying friends, and learning that slowing down is not laziness. It's resistance.

A coworker sent me a note recently. She is also a friend, but that is not what stayed with me. The part that stayed with me is what the note said.

She was worried about me. About my health. About my well-being. About a man running two companies, trying to hold the weight of the world, trying to balance all of it and convince everyone, including himself, that it was fine. She also named something I had been moving past too quickly. I had lost multiple friends recently. Some to health issues, cancer, heart attacks. Others to bodies that simply broke down from exhaustion, from trying to produce more than a human body was ever built to give.

Here is what made the note land the way it did. It did not come from a friend of thirty years. It did not come from someone who has known me through every season. It came from a coworker. Someone whose only real vantage point was proximity to how much I had been taking on. She was close enough to the workload to see it’s impact, and close enough to care enough to say it.

The note woke me up. She helped me see something I could not see on my own.

I was tired.

Not the kind of tired a weekend fixes. The kind that settles into your body and starts making decisions for you. And the reason it took a co-worker/friend to point it out is that I had built a whole identity around never admitting it.

There is a lie I believed for most of my adult life. The lie says you earn rest. You grind, you produce, you deliver, and somewhere on the other side of all that output is permission to stop. I have chased that permission for years. It has yet to come. The truth is, it is never going to come, because the system that taught me to chase it has no finish line. That is the whole design.

Tricia Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry, named this better than I ever could. In Rest Is Resistance, she argues that rest is not a luxury, not a reward, not something you qualify for after enough labor. Rest is a right. More than that, it is a refusal. When you slow down inside a culture built to extract every ounce of your time and attention, you are not being lazy. You are pushing back against a machine that profits from your exhaustion.

I want to stay there for a minute, because it reframed something I had been feeling for a long time without language for it.

The grind was never neutral

We talk about hustle like it is a personality trait. Rise and grind. Sleep when you’re dead. No days off. We post it, we celebrate it, we hand out productivity like it is the highest measure of a person’s worth.

Hersey traces where that actually comes from. Grind culture did not appear out of nowhere. It is the descendant of systems that valued Black bodies only for what they could produce, that measured human beings by output and discarded them when the output slowed. Capitalism refined it, and white supremacy embedded it; now it lives in all of us, dressed up as ambition.

That is the part that stopped me. The exhaustion I felt was not a personal failing. It was not a time-management problem I could solve with a better calendar. It was conditioning. I had been taught to operate at machine speed and to feel guilty whenever I behaved like a human being instead. I still struggle with this daily.

Once you see it that way, rest stops being self-care. It becomes resistance.

And the stakes are not abstract. I have buried friends. I have watched bodies give out under loads they were never meant to carry. When my coworker wrote that note, she was not being dramatic. She was pointing at a pattern she had already seen end badly, and she did not want to watch it happen again.

You are not your productivity

The center of Hersey’s argument is simple, and it is heavy. Your worth is inherent. It does not rise when you ship more and it does not fall when you do nothing at all. You were worthy before you produced a single thing.

I needed to hear that, because I had quietly tied my value to my usefulness. I have done it my whole life. As a young man, I learned to overcommit, to make myself the one who shows up, the one who can be counted on. These days, hundreds of people call and ask me for something, and I pick up for every one of them, often before a single person thinks to ask how I am doing. I built a life where I am needed everywhere, and rarely do folks first ask, “how are you doing?”

If I was not building something, helping someone, moving a mission forward, I felt like I was disappearing or worse yet, failing to keep up the pace of some invisible race to do more, produce more. Stillness felt like a threat, and doing nothing felt like falling behind.

But a person is not a factory and a nap is not theft. A slow afternoon is not a debt you have to repay with a longer night. When we reclaim rest, Hersey writes, we reclaim our humanity. We remember that we are more than our labor. We were always more than our labor.

What this looks like for me

I have started practicing this, imperfectly, in real life.

For me it begins with a word I used to avoid. No. I have gotten better at saying no to things and to people that pull against my peace. Not the responsibilities I actually carry. Work is real. Family is real. There are stresses that come with the territory of a life you have chosen and a mission you believe in, and those I take on willingly.

But there is a second category of stress, and this is the one I am learning to refuse. The obligations I never agreed to. The urgency that belongs to someone else. The yes I give out of habit or guilt instead of conviction. The need to be reachable, available, productive, on, at every hour of every day.

I am making a conscious practice of just being. Not producing. Not optimizing. Not earning. Being.

Some days that looks like protecting a morning with no agenda. Some days it is closing the laptop while there is still work left, because there is always work left, and the work will never love me back. Some days it is a nap I refuse to feel guilty about. Hersey calls daydreaming and rest a portal. I am starting to understand what she means. The clearest ideas I have had in the last year did not come while I was grinding. They came in the quiet I used to feel the need to fill with noise.

Rest as a practice, not a phase

Truthfully, this is hard. The pull to produce is strong, and it does not disappear because you read a book or write a blog post about it. I still catch myself measuring my days by output. I still feel the itch when I am still for too long.

But Hersey never promised it would be easy. She framed it as a practice. Something you return to, again and again, on purpose. A discipline of slowing down in a world engineered to speed you up. And like any practice rooted in liberation, it asks you to choose it daily, especially on the days it feels indulgent, especially on the days the world tells you that you have not earned it yet.

I often think about that note now. About the fact that it took someone with no thirty-year history, no deep emotional stake, just a clear view of my workload, to tell me the truth. Sometimes the people closest to us are too close to see it. Sometimes it takes someone at the right distance to hold up a mirror. I am grateful she did.

So here is where I have landed. I am no longer waiting for permission to rest. I won’t always pick up the phone when you call. I may leave the group chat at times to protect my health. I am not going to grind my way to some imaginary moment when stillness finally becomes allowed. That moment is now. It was always now.

Rest is not the reward for the work. Rest is a refusal to be reduced to the work. Rest is a refusal to die because of the work.

And reclaiming that, quietly and stubbornly, day after day, might be one of the most radical things any of us can do.