Chasing Stillness: Why Rest Feels Like Wasted Time

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THE SHIFT

Chasing Stillness

We live in a time where stillness feels wrong. When we rest, or simply stop, it feels like we’re falling behind or failing. We experience guilt, unease, or the nagging voice that says, “You should be doing something.”

Our uneasy relationship with rest didn’t appear out of nowhere. Before the Industrial Revolution, life moved with the rhythms of daylight, harvest, and season. Time was not yet a currency. Farmers worked when the sun rose and stopped when it set. Artisans, healers, and homemakers lived by cycles.

Then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the factory clock replaced the sun. Time became measurable, divisible, billable. The new economic religion was efficiency. A person’s worth was calculated in output per hour: how many parts they produced, how many words they typed, how many meetings they endured.

The Protestant work ethic gave this system its moral backbone. Max Weber, the German sociologist, wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) that Calvinist theology helped seed capitalism’s moral code: hard work was evidence of virtue and divine favor, while idleness was close to sin.

That theology seeped into modern culture until it became invisible. Even secular societies inherited the belief that productivity equals goodness. The “self-made man,” the tireless worker, the entrepreneur who “sleeps when he’s dead”—these became our saints and prophets. Rest, by contrast, became something you had to earn, not something you were entitled to as a living being.

When the factory gave way to the laptop, that same ethic simply rebranded itself. We call it hustle culture now, a faith that worships the grind instead of peace.

Under capitalism, time is never neutral. It’s an asset, a resource to be optimized, managed, and sold. “Time is money” is more than a metaphor. It is economic logic we internalized: if I’m not producing, I’m not worth much.

Modern psychology calls it achievement-based self-worth—the belief that our value as humans depends on what we accomplish, not who we are. And when you fuse your identity with accomplishments, rest feels like a threat to your very being.

This is especially true for those whose identities are built around service or creation—entrepreneurs, caregivers, artists, activists. When your work feels meaningful, rest can feel like betrayal.

Each time we cross off a task, reply to an email, or hit a small goal, the brain releases a pulse of dopamine, a neurotransmitter tied to motivation and reward. It’s the same system that lights up in gamblers pulling a slot machine lever or social media users refreshing for likes.

In contrast, rest offers no obvious dopamine hits. It’s quiet, uneventful, and lacks instant feedback. The neural circuitry trained to chase stimulation interprets stillness as a void. That’s why the first moments of rest can feel restless: your brain, deprived of its usual chemical currency, starts asking for another hit of doing.

Even leisure has been absorbed into the loop. We no longer play for the sake of play—we document it. Our hobbies become side hustles, our vacations become content, our downtime becomes brand maintenance. We rest publicly now, performing our “balance” for likes.

But if you watch the natural world, you’ll notice a different rhythm of energy. Boyd Varty, a South African conservationist and storyteller, recently discussed this with Tim Ferriss’ podcast: in the wild, animals rest intentionally. Predators pause after the hunt. Herbivores graze and then sleep. Even the relentless rhythm of survival includes pauses, not a constant barrage of forward motion.

Humans, for millennia, have mirrored these cycles in culture, ritual, and spirituality. In nearly every spiritual or indigenous tradition, rest is woven into the rhythm of existence itself.

Judaism and Christianity enshrined rest in the Sabbath. It wasn’t optional, it was a sacred commandment, an invitation to realign and reconnect with what matters beyond productivity: family, community, reflection, spirit.

Taoism teaches wu wei, often translated as “effortless action.” Flow is not the product of relentless striving; it is the result of attuning to natural rhythms. To push constantly is to oppose the river; to act effortlessly is to move with it.

Ayurveda and Indigenous cosmologies see life as seasonal. Dormancy, darkness, winter, night—these are active periods of restoration and preparation. Nature herself models this principle: energy accumulates in the quiet periods, replenishing the system for the work to come.

When we rest, we rediscover a truth modern culture often hides: our worth is inherent, not earned. 

Rest is return.

A return to the self: to our bodies, our breath, our minds, our emotions.

A return to the sacred: to God, to source, to the universe, to nature, to presence itself.

A return to alignment: to cycles, rhythms, and the quiet pulse that underlies life.

So how do we get back in step with the very ecosystems, both within us and around us, that evolution intended us to inhabit?

I know this is where you’d love a “5 Steps To Rest Without Feeling Guilty,” but I don’t think there is a formula. Rest is about fully inhabiting the moment, communing with the present. Really, it’s just a matter of choice. It’s choosing to live and operate in a certain way.

I’m not pretending this is easy when you work a 9-to-5 and need to put food on the table. But perhaps it starts with eliminating other things (literally stop buying things) and activities whose end goal is something other than being and enjoying. Ultimately, it begins with an intention and worldview switch: deciding that this way of being is a fundamental part of you.

For those who crave a guide, here are some practices that work for me and others:

Practices

• Establish an evening wind‑down routine (as cultural or spiritual practice).

• Use daily or weekly “untimed” moments: wake when your body is ready instead of to an alarm clock (Boyd mentions this in his book). Schedule nothing time.

• Spend time in solitude: quiet, no devices.

• Go out in nature and drop into its rhythm and breadth.

• Say “no”: protect rest time by being intentional about what you allow in. Every “yes” to something else may mean a “no” to rest.

Shift Your Environment

• Physical space: Separate spaces for work versus rest. Your bed or sofa shouldn’t be for “catching up” on work.

• Sensory cues: Dim lighting, silence, nature, or meditation music—anything that signals to your brain: this is downtime.

• Remove triggers for busyness: Turn off notifications, unsubscribe from non-essential feeds, mute messaging apps.

• Digital detox: Set days as often as possible to be off all devices.

Even now, turn away from whatever device you’re reading this on and look outside. Notice the cycles of the sun, the sway of trees, the rhythm of tides. Nature does not hurry, yet nothing is wasted. Can you learn from her? Can you let your energy rise and fall with her pulse instead of fighting it? Go meet with yourself, right now, even if just for a moment. 

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