On Rest, Ambition, and Cultural Upheaval
No big deal, right?
This started as another edition of 13 Things Thursday, but quickly morphed into something else entirely. As I started to chronicle my observations about our complicated relationship with work, rest, and ambition, I realized I needed more space to explore this than a short and sassy bullet point would provide. Always committed to following the significant threads, this is a collection of many thoughts.
(Speaking of Threads, I’m really enjoying it so far! It feels friendlier, and there’s something really refreshing about being able to post just short-form words without an accompanying photo or reel. Come follow me there @laurengrimsland if you like.)
In the spirit of rest and slowing down, you’ll be hearing from me less than usual this month. Rest assured (See what I did there?), I’ll be back at it soon enough with a fresh collection of new thoughts to share.
This bullet-point-turned-full-blown-essay was inspired by a couple recent Substack pieces I read by Holly Whitaker and Elise Loehnen, both dealing with the topics of rest, ambition, and the conflicting feelings that ensue when we try to take any meaningful time off. I love to follow patterns, so when a similar theme pops up multiple times in the same week, it feels significant. They highlighted how the hustle is so entrenched in our psyches that we feel guilty for taking time to rest. We dream of unplugging, spending more time with loved ones, or if you’re Gen Z, moving to Europe in search of a better work/life balance. And yet, we praise the hustlers as the ideal, believing that we are only worthy of rest when we earn it by working our asses off the rest of the time. Work hard, play hard.
So many of us, even if we had time off, would quickly grow restless, reflexively drawn to do something, to make our free time productive. We subconsciously fear that too much downtime would sap our ambition entirely or that we would lose our sense of purpose. In a culture that prides itself on optimization and trying to be the best at everything, it’s notable that we (Read: Americans) really suck at doing nothing.
I’ve written before about automation and pondered how it will impact our future. With how quickly technology changes, it’s interesting that there doesn’t seem to be more of an emphasis or urgency to create policies and solutions to help our people and our economy adapt to that new reality. Few seem to want to address the elephant in the room that many of us may be faced with the prospect of doing nothing sooner than we realize.
Yet, we forge ahead, bringing people back to the office for 40+ hours per week, employing the same strategies that got us to where we are today instead of finding a new way forward. That’s the nature of change. There will always be people trying to get every last drop out of the fully squeezed lemon, and they are often beneficiaries of the old systems. If they can just convince people to keep hustling, maybe everyone will be too tired to notice when it’s not necessary anymore. If politicians can keep distracting us with new culture wars that divide us and turn us against each other, maybe we won’t realize that they have no clue how to handle what’s coming.
Even if it’s not the explicit intention to exploit people, old habits die hard. The old systems, made up of a million ingrained habits, are even more complex. Like unraveling a knotted ball of yarn, you pull the thread, find a knot, then keep pulling and find even more. When living in unprecedented times without a blueprint, it’s easy to default to the old way. That’s precisely the moment we may be caught off guard, with technological advances enabling record-breaking profits, thanks to increasingly less overhead with declining human intervention.
I don’t say any of this to be alarmist, but to start a conversation. Industry leaders are starting to discuss the regulatory oversight required to keep AI and tech as a force for good. Tech is a powerful tool when wisely used, but we need to consider the impacts on people who lose work to AI and build in social safety nets to support them. There should be space for humans in the workforce for the foreseeable future, whether they are the ones building, programming, or using tech as an ally to decrease their workload or make better business decisions. The golden age of AI could create these new job categories that are more flexible. That said, these roles may be limited, or they won’t fill 40 hours a week. What will we do then? Certainly less. But if we play our cards right and take proactive measures to meet everyone’s basic needs and make sure no one is left behind, is that such a bad thing?
Of course, there’s a lot of discomfort when faced with an existential crisis, divorcing our purpose from our vocation. With the spaciousness that we’ve been craving, we’re left to fill in the margins, to decide that we’re worthy of rest simply because we exist, not because we worked hard for it. We can use that space to connect, lift each other up, support the most vulnerable, and make time for the things we never thought we could do.
It’s a slow and steady slog towards a more sustainable lifestyle, and we’ll probably have a lot of hard lessons to find the right balance. Even so, I still believe the future holds a lot of promise if we give ourselves time to adjust and cultivate awareness and flexibility to pivot quickly and continuously improve.
Let me know your thoughts! What is your relationship with rest and ambition? How do you envision a future where we all do a little bit less?