Rest is a form of resistance against a world that demands your exhaustion. — Tricia Hersey
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
What's one small action this suggests?
A Reversal of What Society Rewards
Tricia Hersey’s line begins by flipping a familiar moral script: instead of praising constant output, it frames rest as a deliberate refusal. In a culture that often treats busyness as proof of worth, exhaustion becomes an unspoken entry fee for belonging. Hersey’s claim challenges the assumption that to be responsible, ambitious, or valuable, you must always be depleted. From this perspective, rest is not merely a private comfort but a public statement—an insistence that human bodies and minds are not machines built for endless extraction. By naming rest as “resistance,” she invites readers to see fatigue not as a personal failure, but as a predictable outcome of systems that normalize overwork.
The Hidden Politics of Fatigue
Once rest is framed as resistance, the next question becomes: resistance to what? Hersey points toward a world structured to “demand your exhaustion,” which implies more than individual over-scheduling. It suggests workplaces, institutions, and social norms that depend on people being too tired to question, organize, imagine alternatives, or even care for themselves consistently. History offers parallels where controlling people’s time and energy served power. For example, accounts of industrial labor in the nineteenth century describe grueling shifts that left little room for education or civic participation, reinforcing dependence on employers. In that light, reclaiming rest becomes a way to reclaim agency—time to think, heal, and choose rather than simply endure.
Rest as Care, Not Indulgence
If exhaustion is socially produced, then rest stops looking like indulgence and starts looking like care. Hersey’s wording suggests rest is an active practice—something you do on purpose—rather than what happens only after everything is finished. This matters because “everything” is never finished in a world that can always ask for more: more emails, more productivity, more availability, more emotional labor. By treating rest as care, the quote reframes boundaries as ethical rather than selfish. Saying no, taking breaks, sleeping enough, and protecting downtime become ways of honoring the self as a living being. In turn, that self-respect can ripple outward, strengthening the capacity to show up for others with steadier attention and less resentment.
The Myth of Endless Productivity
From care, the argument moves naturally into critique: why is rest so hard to defend? Much of the difficulty comes from the myth that productivity can be endless if you just try hard enough. Yet bodies have limits, and ignoring them often produces diminishing returns—mistakes, irritability, shallow thinking, and burnout. Even when people push through, the costs are merely delayed. Modern research on sleep and performance reinforces this point. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep (2017), for instance, summarizes evidence that sleep loss harms memory, mood regulation, and decision-making—precisely the capacities most prized in high-performance settings. Hersey’s resistance, then, is also a reality check: exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it is a warning light.
Imagination Requires Spaciousness
Rest also resists exhaustion because it protects something systems of overwork tend to erode: imagination. When every hour is accounted for, life narrows to survival tasks and urgent demands. In contrast, rest creates spaciousness—time to reflect, create, notice patterns, and ask whether the status quo is acceptable. That mental room can be quietly revolutionary. Consider how many breakthroughs—personal and societal—arrive after a pause: a walk that clarifies a decision, an afternoon off that reveals a neglected dream, a weekend of sleep that restores emotional resilience. Hersey’s statement implies that a rested person is harder to manipulate, because they can perceive more clearly and envision alternatives beyond the next deadline.
Practicing Resistance in Ordinary Ways
Finally, calling rest “resistance” makes it practical: resistance is something you can practice daily. This doesn’t require dramatic gestures; it can begin with small, consistent acts—protecting sleep, taking a lunch break without apology, setting a hard stop to the workday, or refusing the moral language that equates exhaustion with virtue. Each choice pushes back against the idea that your primary purpose is output. At the same time, Hersey’s framing hints that individual rest should not replace collective change. Personal boundaries matter, but so do humane policies and cultures that make rest possible for everyone. In that fuller sense, resting becomes both a personal refuge and a quiet insistence on a different world—one that does not demand your exhaustion to prove your worth.