When I was a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2016, I thought it would be a good idea to write about the appropriation of mindfulness by corporate America for my Master’s project. What I discovered during the course of my reporting was a paradox.
When I spoke to those who understood Buddhism, they referred to mindfulness as a way of life where simplicity and slowness are important. When I spoke to those who used it at their corporate jobs with multi-national companies, they felt it helped them meet their targets, respond to rude emails with courtesy, or even let go of their employees in a gentler way. Finally, there were those who built a business around it, earning their livelihood in New York City by selling mindfulness as a productivity tool to manage workplace stress.
To me, all of these stories felt inherently at odds with each other.
Chasing Rest But Still Exhausted
In 2023, John Mark Comer, a young American pastor, shot to fame when he published his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which was an instant hit even amongst secular millennials. Comer’s book is written like a really long social media post and is devoid of research, prose, or narrative depth. It’s tough to know if that was a deliberate strategy to target younger audiences, but some of his tips such as shutting off smartphone notifications, turning screen devices to grayscale display, and basically adopting a more offline life resonated with many young burnt-out Americans. Today, he is a veritable celebrity with almost 300,000 followers on Instagram.
In his book, The Burnout Society, the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han illustrates how our society today is a fundamentally “achievement-society” which prizes the object of achievement over everything else. As the pace of life increases, our sprint towards achievement becomes more frenetic. He explains, “[T]he capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving.”
In this worldview, rest is absent, yet somehow physical health becomes more important than ever before, because it is only through a healthy body that the ego can go on amassing more and more.
All the great wisdom traditions of the world emphasize stillness as the doorway to not just the divine but also rest. But rest from what?
He also makes the startling observation that it is an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer. So even when we think we are resting—travelling the world, preparing an aesthetic Buddha bowl, enjoying copious amounts of alcohol, processed food and loud music (partying, in other words), or simply scrolling through social media at the end of a hectic day—we are still only laboring under the illusion of rest. Our minds and bodies are just as much at work in this form of rest, perhaps even more than our regular routines. We keep chasing rest but never manage to feel rested enough.
All the great wisdom traditions of the world emphasize stillness as the doorway to not just the divine but also rest. But rest from what?
In the first book of the Torah, for instance, it is rest from the work of creation of the world. It is not fatigue but an intentional withdrawal from life to absorb the creation itself, which is best done in stillness rather than a raucous celebration. This is where the idea of Sabbath comes from, derived from the Hebrew Shabbat, which meant “ceased” or “came to a stop,” with the implication that intentional rest was taking place.
Comer, too, encourages his followers to practice Sabbath, including fasting, and it is in this context that his popularity becomes relevant. Millennials are not necessarily looking for a higher power but rather a near-total rest from the unceasing busyness of their lives.
But here’s another paradox: human life today is the most sedentary it has ever been, thanks to technological developments which would have seemed God-like to our ancestors only a few generations before us. So why are we so tired, and why do we seek rest?
Do We Even Understand What Rest Is?
In order to understand this better, it might be more insightful to look at a potential meaning of rest. In his book Consolations, the Irish poet David Whyte writes of rest as “the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.” He meditates on the topic further, writing:
“To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as prime motivator for endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting, and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively, from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange. We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside.”
What Whyte outlines here is life as a constant attempt at aligning our inner and outer worlds. Rest, then, is the moment where that alignment becomes manifest. The poet, who has worked with corporate America and is also a Zen practitioner, opens up a whole new possibility of what it means to be at rest when he makes the case that it may manifest at any time, be it joy or sorrow. It is rest because it takes us from being at war with reality to a reconciliation with it.
Rest is not mere ceasing of tiresome physical or mental activity, as we commonly believe today, but a sense of acceptance about who we are, what life in this world is, and our place in it.
Rest is not mere ceasing of tiresome physical or mental activity, as we commonly believe today, but a sense of acceptance about who we are, what life in this world is, and our place in it. Rest is letting go of our desire to control our lives and the world.
While I don’t know if most people would agree with this definition of rest, it does make you wonder if our inability to find true rest today goes beyond the training of the mind. Meaning: Is it really a spiritual and existential crisis in disguise? We are so accustomed to turning to consumerism as the one-stop solution to our problems that it seems almost gob-smacking that our answers may lie in not just our ability to turn away from consumerism, but in developing the ability to converse meaningfully with our inner and outer spheres of reality.
Taking It Slow
When I started researching for my long-form story about mindfulness as a grad student, the first relevant material I came across was the idea of Slow movement. As someone who enjoys slowness in life, it seemed perfect. But the more I dug into it, the more the paradox emerged.
The movement began as a sort of a protest in none other than Italy, the land of la dolce vita, or the sweet life. As one of the countries with the best life expectancy, there are things older Italians do differently than their counterparts in the Western world. They take longer to finish their meals, spend time with their friends and family members daily, eat lots of fat and drink as much wine, and perhaps most importantly, do not chase consumerism as an end goal of life.
They also take immense pride in their cultural inheritance and are not distracted by foreign influences. Which is why it is little wonder that Carlo Petrini protested against the opening of a McDonald’s outlet in Rome in 1986. It was the birth of Slow Food movement which eventually gave way to many other Slow movements such as art, fashion, education, media, economy, parenting, and even travel.
Many of these movements had their heart in the right place, but in some cases the mind took over quickly enough. The movements often turn into books, podcasts, courses, and businesses where the core message of slowness slowly becomes lost on their progenitors. When I tried to get in touch with a prominent American journalist who had written a book about mindful work, I had a hard time fixing an interview appointment with him as he was busy traveling, delivering talks, and giving interviews. Eventually we could not schedule an interview at all. I was amused but also perplexed as to why he wasn’t taking his own advice.
The Modern Aversion to Stillness
The question remains: Why can’t we truly slow down to the point of stillness?
For one, it is because the world around us is accelerating at an increasing speed. To not keep up would be to fall behind.
What the wisdom traditions define as stillness is a reservoir for receiving the life that is meant for us. But too often, we think of that stillness as emptiness that must be filled up with anything and everything until it quiets our inner discomfort.
But if we probe deeper, something slightly more disturbing reveals itself. What the wisdom traditions define as stillness is a reservoir for receiving the life that is meant for us. But too often, we think of that stillness as emptiness that must be filled up with anything and everything until it quiets our inner discomfort.
The result is a constant state of panic and dissatisfaction at not being able to achieve the imagined life. In this scenario, rest not only becomes impossible but in fact, it becomes an affront to the personal ego. To rest would be to allow the ego to be defeated, and modern culture does not make space for that kind of an experience. When this becomes the pathology of a global collective, it becomes an acute existential crisis for the entire world.
This collective pathology ensnares all of us in its desire for speedy accumulation, which can only lead to increasingly intense conflicts amongst each other.
As distressing as this is, is there a remedy?
A Rest That Goes Deeper
For Byung-Chul Han, the insight lies in the observation that the “late-modern ego has no character” and is extremely flexible. This flexibility makes it suitable for rapid technological and economic changes, because it makes us all more efficient cogs in the wheel. But what this means is that this ego rejects conflict resolution, whether internally or externally, due to modern emphasis on ideas of freedom, deregulation, and self-absorption. It either tends towards extreme expression or extreme repression, neither of which facilitate in us that “living conversation” that Whyte nudges us towards.
Conventional advice around rest tends to follow predictable narratives. It asks us to limit our exposure to screens, reduce our social media usage, spend time in nature, share meals with loved ones, sleep better, or pursue a hobby. While all of this is good advice, it only helps our minds and bodies feel rested.
For the deepest parts of us—what so many writers, thinkers, poets, and teachers might call our souls—to experience genuine restoration, we might benefit from heeding the higher call for rest. In fostering stillness within, we might even find it in ourselves to extend that rest to the world outside of us.
