Do not engage. Rest!

‘Fun: Spend a day offline’ was a suggestion from a few weeks back. Spending a day offline can indeed be considered fun, but fun can be had online as well. Fun is about activity and honestly I am not looking for activities right now, because I am exhausted. I am looking for rest. Luckily, spending a day offline translates quite well to rest. It is letting all engagements rest. In a world that is constantly engaging, rest, my friends, is resistance and it is time I stopped confusing engagement for entertainment.

Deciding to go offline I do not seek activity. I am looking for the merit of a state. In this case I am looking for rest, which is hard to find in an online world that continuously signals me I should engage. It even tries to engage me into resting activities by suggesting yoga routines and shared meditations, because my online presence assumes availability. If I weren’t available I would surely not be online, right. Going offline is beneficial for its disengaging freedom. Going offline to have fun or to engage with others means I am not actually unplugging. It just means I am keeping my availability in a non-digital environment. Going offline and disengaging means I am actually freeing myself from the constant labour I have found myself in for the past two years. Rest essentially is the discontinuation of motion or work. Whether there is a pandemic in a digital age or a digital age during a pandemic makes little difference to my claim that what is expected is a continuation of some normalcy and this included that work would continue as per regular programming, except we moved it online.
Now the freedom that comes with play is that it allows us to escape work as our minds are occupied with another engagement, an entertaining one.

Going offline to rest has become far trickier since rest does not allow you to escape. It asks you to stop and be at peace in an society that does not know how to rest. It is not designed for rest. It is designed for work and you are expected to adapt to that environment. Rest is reflective and while play or fun obscures the work ahead, rest makes you quite aware of your disengagement. Being at peace with falling behind one work is one thing, but bearing its consequences is something completely else. The prospect of not keeping up with work ends up in unrest. Rest in that sense is difficult and though I long for it, it might be easier to go out and have fun, because entertainment is an easy escape. It enforces engagement as pleasant as you can associate entertainment to it. Rest is not on that spectrum as it disengages from engagement it has no interest in entertainment. Its sole purpose is reposing for people are not meant to continuously be engaged. Rest is uncomfortable, because it confronts you with a default that is based in labour rather than rest. By resting you challenge this default setting as you resist it. It requires many to change the status quo, but just imagine how it would benefit all.


N.B. No links, sources or other pathways are placed in this article because they could lead to engaging in more activities and that would be counterproductive to my claim to rest.