Rest Is Not Retreat

By mid-January, the shouting has started again.

Everywhere you look, something is telling you to fix yourself. Optimize yourself. Push harder. Do more. Be better. Be faster. Be less… whatever you apparently were last year.

It’s presented as motivation. But much of it feels like something else: pressure disguised as virtue.

We live in a culture that treats exhaustion like a personal failure and rest like a reward you must earn. A culture that benefits enormously from keeping us tired, rushed, and slightly ashamed of not doing enough.

That’s not an accident.

And this is where the mindful activist in me starts paying attention.

Because if you want people compliant, you keep them overwhelmed. If you want them docile, you keep them exhausted. If you want them too busy to notice what’s being taken from them, you fill every quiet moment with urgency.

January has become the high holy season of this ideology.

New year, new you. No excuses. No softness. No mercy.

Meanwhile, it is still winter. The world is still dark. The earth is still resting. And nature, as usual, is not impressed by our productivity culture.

Mid-January is not a starting gun. It’s a threshold. We are still metabolizing the year we just lived through. We are still tired in ways sleep alone doesn’t fix.

So what does resistance look like here?

Sometimes it looks very small.

It looks like late breakfasts and unhurried walks.

It looks like staying home because your nervous system says “enough.”

It looks like reading without turning it into “learning.”

It looks like cooking something slow, wearing the same soft sweater, listening to music that doesn’t try to turn you into a better consumer of your own life.

It looks like moving your body because it feels good, not because someone told you that you should hate it into improvement.

This is not quitting. This is refusing a lie.

The lie is that you exist primarily to produce.

The lie is that your worth is measurable in output.

The lie is that you must always be in motion to be valuable.

Rest, in a system like this, becomes quietly radical.

Not the Instagram kind. Not the commodified “self-care” that still somehow requires a purchase and a performance. But the real kind: the kind that interrupts the machine by stepping out of it, even briefly.

This doesn’t mean we stop caring. It means we care strategically.

Because burned-out people do not change the world. Numb people do not protect democracy. Exhausted people do not build anything humane or lasting.

The most extractive systems in history have always depended on keeping people too tired to think clearly.

So slowing down in January is not retreat.

It is maintenance of the instrument.

For me, this season is about tending the embers. About noticing what I no longer want to carry forward. About setting some things down without needing to announce it or justify it or turn it into a personal brand.

I don’t yet need a perfect plan for the year. I don’t need a slogan. I don’t need a reinvention.

I need clarity. And clarity requires quiet.

There will be time for action. There will be time for courage and momentum and pushing back against what is cruel, stupid, or unjust.

But action that comes from depletion is sloppy. And movements built on burnout collapse.

So if you are moving slowly right now, you are not behind.

You are reclaiming your pace (or tired from celebrating that IU win).

And in a culture that profits from your exhaustion, that is not laziness.

That is a form of resistance.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

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