How Capitalism Makes Rest Feel Unsafe
I don’t remember the last time I rested without guilt. Even when my body aches tirelessly for stillness, I feel that familiar buzz; the voice saying I’m wasting time, falling behind. But that voice isn’t mine - it’s capitalism, whispering that my worth is measured by output, not by being alive. In this system, rest is not a right, but a prize you earn for grinding hard enough. And for people like me the bar for “enough” is always impossibly high.
I grew up in a small coal town in Appalachia, where work wasn’t just expected, it was survival. In towns like my hometown, and throughout this nation built on stolen land and forced labor, rest has never been seen as a right. People are praised for how much they can endure, how much they can give, and how little they can take for themselves. To sit still is to invite suspicion, to be lazy is to be “worthless;” that belief seeps into your bones. It teaches you to push past exhaustion, to wear your own depletion like a badge of honor. Even now, I can feel it in me: a voice that says stopping, even for a breath, means I’ve already fallen behind.
I know that belief still lives in me, even though it’s a lie. I feel it every time I push past exhaustion, in the guilt I feel for even wanting to stop. It’s a belief designed to serve a system that sees us as disposable, a system that teaches us to grind ourselves down to prove we matter.
Even now, it’s stitched into the culture around us, stopping… even for a moment, feels like failure.
Capitalism thrives on our exhaustion. It needs us hustling, grinding, doubting our own enoughness. It tells us that slowing down means falling behind… but behind what? Behind a race designed to burn us out and spit us out? When I do allow myself to rest, I can feel the unease buzzing under my skin. A voice asks: who do you think you are to stop? What if you don’t get back up fast enough?
For those of us already deemed “less than,” rest feels even riskier.
As a Fat, Disabled, Queer person, I’ve spent years over performing to prove I belong in spaces that were never built for me. Rest threatens that performance. Rest says, “I am enough, even now,” which terrifies a system that wants me always producing, always apologizing for taking up space.
This isn’t just personal; it’s systemic. Capitalism was built on stolen labor. Enslaved people were denied rest entirely, their bodies treated as machines for profit. Working-class families, like the one I grew up in, were taught that exhaustion is noble and idleness is sin. Even now, rest is marketed as a luxury for the wealthy, while marginalized folks are told to grind harder just to survive. We’re told our time belongs to everyone but us… our jobs, our families, our communities… but never ourselves.
I’ve been sitting with the work of Tricia Hersey and “The Nap Ministry,” which frames rest as resistance. She reminds us that capitalism steals our rest because rest is where imagination begins. A well-rested person can dream, create, and fight for more than survival. Rest disrupts the machine. It interrupts the endless cycle of production and extraction. And that’s why this system works so hard to make us feel guilty for even wanting it.
So I’ve been asking myself: what would it mean to rest without shame? What would it look like to believe that my body is worthy of care… not because I earned it, but because I exist? Some days, I still scroll on my phone because it feels safer than lying down and breathing. But I am learning that rest is not weakness; it’s defiance.
Every time I close my eyes in the middle of the day, I reject the lie that my value depends on what I produce. I refuse to measure my worth in emails, checklists, or exhaustion.
Rest is not just an individual act… it’s collective. When we rest, we model something radical for each other: that our humanity matters more than our productivity. For me, and many others like me, rest is also survival. I want my kids to grow up knowing that they are worthy even when they’re still. I want them to see that care, joy, and slowing down are not indulgences, but sacred acts.
Capitalism wants us too tired to dream. But I believe rest is where we remember ourselves. It’s in the quiet moments when we stop moving, when we let ourselves simply exist… that we remember we were never meant to live as machines.
Rest is not laziness.
Rest is rebellion.
And every time I choose it, I am reclaiming what has always been mine.