Article 4: Rest Should Pay You Back

I want to talk about using rest profitably. When I say profitably, I do not mean money. I do not believe every hour of a human life should be monetized, productive, optimized, or turned into some kind of side hustle. Sometimes you should sit down and watch television. Sometimes you should play a game. Sometimes you should stare at a tree. Rest has value because it is rest.

Some time ago, I began noticing something peculiar about the way I used much of my free time. I noticed this because I wasn't actually enjoying it very much.

Imagine that you have finished your work for the day. The chores are done, dinner is over, the kitchen is clean enough that you are willing to pretend it is clean, and whatever labors you had planned have ended. You finally have free time; so what do you do with it?

For many of us, the answer is that we sit down in front of a television, computer, or phone and begin absorbing whatever happens to appear in front of us. We scroll, flip, click, watch half of one thing and half of another, look at something for thirty seconds, become bored, move to the next thing, become bored again, and repeat the process.

Two (or maybe six) hours later we are still sitting there. Were we entertained? That is the question I eventually began asking myself. Not: Did I consume entertainment? I obviously did; but: Was I entertained? Those are not the same thing.

I began noticing that much of my supposedly recreational screen time gave me very little in return. I gained little enjoyment, little relaxation, little knowledge, and very little satisfaction. Sometimes I would spend hours supposedly resting and get up feeling as if I had not rested at all.

That seemed like a terrible return on an investment of several hours of my life; so I began experimenting with something extremely simple: I planned my entertainment. If I wanted to spend two hours watching television, wonderful. I asked myself: What did I want to watch? How long was it? When was I going to begin? When would I stop?

This changed the experience far more than I expected. I discovered that I often received considerably more enjoyment from two hours of entertainment I had deliberately selected than from six hours of entertainment that had simply happened to me.

The entertainment now came with anticipation. I looked forward to it. I knew what I wanted to watch, sat down specifically to enjoy it, and then I enjoyed it. When it was finished, the activity was finished.

This sounds ridiculously obvious. Yet I had spent years doing something else. Instead of planning, I would simply turn on the television without knowing what I wanted to watch, pick up my phone without knowing what I wanted to see, or open the internet without actually looking for anything. I was not choosing entertainment. I was opening a conduit into my mind and allowing someone else to decide what flowed through it.

That matters because passive entertainment is also passive data input. If I scroll through whatever an algorithm decides to place in front of me, I am absorbing advertising, anger, jokes, fear, news, opinions, products, lifestyles, and endless demonstrations of what other people believe I should want.

None of this is inherently evil. I enjoy television. I enjoy the internet. I enjoy being entertained. The problem was that I was confusing passive consumption with rest. They are not the same thing.

Instead of allowing someone else to program me I decided to begin asking a simple question after periods of leisure: Did that pay me back? Not financially; emotionally. Did I enjoy myself? Am I calmer? Did I laugh? Did I learn something interesting? Do I feel restored? Was I genuinely entertained? If the answer was yes, excellent. The time did exactly what I wanted it to do. If the answer was no, I tried not to make the next mistake and criticize myself for having rested incorrectly. That would have been absurd. Instead I simply recognized that the activity did not give me what I expected from it, and the next time I changed something.

This applies to much more than screens. Maybe your profitable rest is gardening, woodworking, taking a bath, walking around the neighborhood, cooking something unnecessarily complicated, reading a terrible detective novel, sitting on the porch, playing with a dog, playing a video game, or watching cats get scared by cucumbers on TikTok. 

There is no moral hierarchy here. I am not proposing that reading Shakespeare is superior recreation to watching people fall over on the internet. The test is simpler: Did the time accomplish what you wanted your rest to accomplish?

If scrolling through the internet leaves you delighted, perhaps that was an excellent use of an hour. If scrolling through hundreds of supposedly entertaining things leaves you tired, irritated, vaguely envious, and unsure where three hours went, perhaps it wasn't.

Conscious programming does not mean turning life into work. Quite the opposite. It means consciously choosing rest when you want rest. I do not want every minute of my life to produce something. Some minutes should produce absolutely nothing; but I would like my rest to produce rest. I would like my entertainment to entertain me. I would like my leisure to feel like leisure.

Our time is limited. That does not mean we need to squeeze productivity from every second. It means that when we give two hours of our life to pleasure, we would like to receive some pleasure in return. Rest, like everything else in our lives, should be profitable—not financially, but in what it gives back to us. Rest should pay you back.