Some of the most striking episodes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are simple descriptions of Winston Smith’s day. He wakes, coughing and spluttering, to the blaring of the telescreen in his decrepit flat and is immediately forced into an exhausting regime of calisthenics. After an inadequate breakfast and an equally inadequate cigarette, he has to walk down several flights of stairs, thanks to a broken lift. Lunchtime and other breaks in the working day are filled with incessant and loud propaganda. His evenings are a mixture of table tennis and hectoring lectures.
Winston’s life is one of weariness without respite. In it, Orwell captures something fundamental to the use and abuse of power: its attack on anything that smacks of rest. Whether it is within religious cults, army boot camps, torture chambers or concentration camps, the exhausted self—shorn of the energy to do anything other than comply—is a malleable self.
So does it follow that, as Tricia Hersey puts it in her new book, “rest is resistance”? Unprogrammed time may be liberating (I have always wondered whether the thing that Winston and Julia treasure most in their affair is the lying in bed after sex, rather than the sex itself). But there are limitations to rest as a form of subversion, too; all that Winston manages in the end is to carve out tiny moments of freedom before he is inevitably crushed.
Hersey is an African-American writer, artist and activist. Her perspective is heavily influenced by black feminist traditions, Afrofuturist thought and, above all, the Pentecostal church in which she was raised (her father was an assistant pastor). Indeed, Rest is Resistance, a passionate polemic for the most part, reads at times like a sermon or a prayer. The book draws on Hersey’s work as “bishop” of The Nap Ministry, the project she founded. The Ministry explores the power of rest as a communal experience, including “collective napping experiences” that turn everyday locations into “sacred nap spaces”.
Hersey proclaims in the book that “The more we rest the more we wake up”. She situates herself in opposition to the nexus of white supremacy and capitalism (which are, for her in any case, virtually the same thing). What she calls “grind culture” doesn’t just dominate our lives today; it is rooted in the exploitation and exhaustion of the black bodies upon which, Hersey argues, America itself was founded. Just as the slave’s body is not their own, so too does capitalism extend ownership over all our bodies, albeit in more insidious and disguised ways. Naps and practices of rest reclaim our bodies and also our stolen “dreamspace”, our capacity to imagine that things could be otherwise.
Hersey’s is not, therefore, a “wellness” agenda, focused on individual health alone. Rather, the experience of napping collectively is designed to build and transform community, placing care at its heart. While she celebrates the communal functions of the church she was raised in, she can’t forget how her beloved father devoted his “free” time to it on top of a succession of exhausting jobs. Just as the grind nearly broke her father, Hersey herself came close to collapse as she attempted to survive within academia while working multiple other jobs. Such crushing experiences cannot be solved through “self-care” nor, for Hersey, can the purpose of rest be to temporarily recharge our energy banks so that we can be more effective within grind culture.
This is all heady stuff, and much of it resonated with me. I have had myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), since the early 1990s. Much of my adult life has been spent in constant (and exhausting) negotiations between my need to rest and my desire to be “productive”, “sociable” and “engaged”. While I nap daily, I probably do not do it in the same way that Hersey does; I recharge in order to “contribute” to… well, to call it grind culture probably underestimates my privilege in being able to do work that I love (such as writing). But my life is certainly relentless, sometimes grindingly so.
Rest is Resistance does give voice (and Hersey’s is certainly an extraordinary, almost prophetic one) to some of the frustrations that I have long wanted to proclaim. As a person with a long-term disability, I resent the lionisation of the “productive”, as well as the merciless schedules of others that I have to work around. I interrupted this paragraph to answer a call from the joiner who is replacing some rotted window frames in our bathroom. He announced that he will be coming round at 8.30am for eight days in a row. He is certainly part of grind culture and, even though I am paying him for a service, I am being dragged into it, too. Homeworking, at least in my case, does not guarantee rest. I find myself envying Hersey for her lack of shame. I still cannot shake my embarrassment at the amount of time that I spend in bed.
At the same time, I also feel uncomfortable with some parts of Hersey’s argument. In particular, she is oddly parochial, with almost no interest in anything outside the United States. Perhaps white supremacy was foundational to the development of American capitalism, but capitalism extends both across much of the world, where white supremacy does not dominate, and back in time to its beginnings in mercantilism and trade.
Hersey’s rootedness in a particular form of Christianity is such that she appears uninterested in other traditions. While she speaks of taking a “Sabbath” for herself at one point in her life, she doesn’t even mention the Jewish Shabbat, with its radical prohibitions against most kinds of work. She doesn’t explore how some strands of Buddhism might offer a counterweight to the relentlessness of western material ambition. She also seems unaware of or uninterested in other branches of Christianity that lie outside her own. Might not Catholic and Orthodox monasticism have something valuable to teach us about resistance to grind culture, too?
I read Rest is Resistance in tandem with Georges Vigarello’s A History of Fatigue (originally published in 2020 and just released in a translation from the French by Nancy Erber). Vigarello, a French cultural historian of the body, also has limitations to his perspective (the book is basically about Europe in the last 1,000 years), but he does provide a useful reminder that modern capitalism did not invent fatigue. The book contains much discussion about medieval understandings of “fluids” and “humours” as sources of fatigue, and how those understandings gave way over time to a much broader attempt to grapple with exhaustion. We have gone from a world in which no one cared about the fatigue of peasants and labourers to one in which the fatigue of “everyone” has become an object of surveillance, explanation and (sometimes) treatment. And this is not necessarily out of compassion: an understanding of the body’s limits—and how to push beyond them—is crucial if workers and warriors are to become more productive and effective.
In fact, in Vigarello’s account, fatigue has become something of a modern-day obsession—yet the more “visibility” it has, the more it can add to our stress and existential discomfort. The corollary of the 21st-century ideal of the autonomous individual who “performs” at a high level is the alienated, mentally and physically exhausted individual who can contribute nothing. Fatigue, therefore, “is more ordinary, more trivial and more intensely felt nowadays, because it threatens us more than ever and jeopardizes our sense of self”. One of the reasons the Covid-19 pandemic has been so unsettling to so many is that it has reminded us of how fatigue is “a presence lurking inside each of us”.
While it may seem as though Vigarello’s book provides intellectual support to Hersey’s fiery critique, there are key differences that illuminate the limitations of Rest is Resistance. As a cultural historian, Vigarello isn’t really in the business of arguing whether or not the modern world is more fatiguing than previous eras. Indeed, part of the point of A History of Fatigue is to demonstrate how fatigue is not a stable category but one that has changed in its scope and definition across space and time. Seen in this light, Hersey’s book could be regarded as just another in a long line of attempts to define fatigue in ways consistent with a wider, concurrent worldview.
Vigarello reminds us to what extent our bodies’ experiences of fatigue are shaped by historical and cultural circumstances, and that it’s possible to imagine fatigue as something other than a “grind”. For example, Vigarello argues that what he calls “redemptive fatigue” played an important role in medieval Christianity, both as penance and as a way of attaining mystical communion with the divine. Pilgrims would go on long, arduous and dangerous journeys to sites such as Santiago de Compostela, often walking in bare feet to enhance the “exquisite suffering”. While such ordeals may seem alien and masochistic to most of us now, that isn’t necessarily how they were experienced at the time.
I suspect that Hersey has sometimes found her own work as the nap bishop to be exhausting and stressful—yet also immensely satisfying. I don’t think she is saying that we should never be tired and should never strain to do anything. But she does miss an opportunity to suggest how we might experience exhaustion in a less alienating way.
Here, I think, is where those with long-term energy-sapping conditions might have something important to add. As many of us will tell you, one of the most frustrating aspects of ME/CFS and other similar conditions—at least for those who are mildly to moderately affected—is that the disability is “invisible”. People, from close relatives to passing acquaintances, will often exclaim: “Well, you look OK to me!”
Other people’s expectations about how a disabled person should act can lead to anxiety, even shame. If you are someone who can only work part-time but nonetheless attends a wedding party and enjoys a few drinks and a dance, you might hear people tut: “If you have the energy to party, you have the energy to work.” If that party is followed by several days of confinement in bed, others—and, indeed, you yourself—might accuse you of having “the wrong priorities”.
While Hersey’s book may correctly diagnose these challenges as an outgrowth of grind culture, “rest” is not the answer here. The chronically ill do need to reclaim our bodies. But, for us, the right to be exhausted is as important as the right to rest. Just as napping can be subversive, it can be equally subversive for a person with ME/CFS to go wild swimming in the middle of the winter (as I did in 2020)—despite it resulting in crippling fatigue. The same is true for other kinds of activity. There is nothing wrong with working oneself into the ground, for a period at least, if that work brings joy in defiance of a world that seemingly offers only a steady diet of dreary convalescence.
If, as seems to be the case, long Covid is leading to millions of chronically exhausted people—either temporarily or permanently—then we are going to need to reassess our societal attitudes to both rest and work. That will mean allowing people to make their own decisions about how they expend energy and what they expend it on. Depending on the person and the circumstances, fatigue is both something to be resisted through rest and something to be defiantly courted through excessive activity.
Either way, we need new models for the energetics of contemporary life. That might include Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry. It might equally include chronically exhausted people partying—or working—till dawn.
