“But I think just recognizing that sometimes we can’t do everything, and that doesn’t mean we’re failing as people or as activists. It just means that it is important for us to also rest to be able to come back and do more, to be able to shift the arc towards social justice in the long term we need to have energy within us to be able to do anything.”
— Vandita Morarka in conversation with co-host Sanchi Mehra, on activism fatigue and the need for leisure, in this episode of the Nurturing Radical Kindness podcast.
Rest is political. Ever since the days of the Industrial Revolution, workers have fought against draconian working hours to earn the right to rest. To sleep, to read, to unwind; rest is our time away from the capitalist zeitgeist that dictates our lives. But why is rest so radical? How does the capitalist framework suppress leisure? Can we resist by resting? How do we deal with the guilt of wasting time as we rest? In this episode, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Sanchi Mehra are accompanied by Aishwarya Srinivasan, a social psychologist and cognitive anthropologist, who works as an interdisciplinary researcher (with a focus on cultural contexts), as they untangle the web of productivity guilt, burnout, and activism fatigue, and search for answers to these questions.
***
Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!
Vandita
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the fifth episode of the Nurturing Radical Kindness Podcast, a space where we explore radical kindness as a pathway to achieving social justice. My name is Vandita and my pronouns are she and her.
Sanchi
And I’m Sanchi. And my pronouns are she/her as well. And thank you so much for tuning into another episode with us.
Vandita
Yes, definitely. It’s been a joy getting feedback from everyone and justice knowing that these conversations are important as much for you as they are for us. We couldn’t be more excited about today’s theme. It’s something that I think all of us have felt through the pandemic and before, but we’ve never really had the space to have sustained conversations on this issue. Today’s theme is ‘Rest is Radical’, and we’re exploring how rest can be a transformative aspect of our lives. Thinking about COVID, thinking about even before the pandemic, the sort of exhaustion that is seeped into so many of us, especially when we’re expected to be constantly productive all the time or be on the go 24/7, right? We started working from home. The lines between work time and home time got blurred, and even then, the work productivity required did not fall. Even at that point, there was no understanding of rest as something that you do just because you want to rest, and not as a reward for having already accomplished certain things. And under a capitalist system, rest always continues to be linked to productivity and it assigns a certain value of who deserves rest and who doesn’t. And these are all things that we’ll be discussing today, while we encourage you to think of rest as radical and to take more rest in your everyday life. So just to start us off, I have a question for you, Sanchi. I want to understand for me and for our listeners, what does productivity look like under a capitalist system?
Sanchi
Thank you so much for setting us off beautifully, Vandita. I mean, that’s so true, whatever you shared. And I’m really excited about this conversation that we’re going to have but also, I’m already so tired, right? I think you can clearly hear all the productivity fatigue in my voice. And like you said, aaj hum jis capitalist system mein hai (the capitalist system which we are in today), productivity for us I think means only the kind of output we are able to raise, right? I think hum tab tak hi sirf logo ko apne aap ko valuable maante hai (we consider ourselves valuable till then). As long as we are constantly getting work done. Jab tak kaam ho raha hai, we are productive and that’s all we need in life right now. And I think this is, apart from everything, it’s so draining for each human. Also, because productivity then becomes the default measure of accomplishment also. I think iske bohot saare roots hai (there are lots of roots for this), how productivity has come to mean what it means today for us in this capitalist system. And I think one of the studies that I remember is from Weber where he draws parallels between Protestant belief and capitalism, which again says this ki waste of time is the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. So, ab like as the capitalist system continues, we see ourselves only in what, like I said, we are able to produce. And by an extension of this, I think something very harmful that also happens is that even in our “free time”, we aren’t really free and we spend this free time trying to make our lives more profitable in the “productive hours” that we spend. And this is something that I remember from a piece by Thomas McGrath- it’s called The tyranny of the workday: how capitalism colonises your free time. And here he talks about how work actually colonises not just our productive hours, but virtually all our waking hours. Ki jaise matlab, after a draining work day, we just spend so many other hours like trying to recover from that work day as well as trying to prepare for the next draining work day that’s going to come in. And like, we have so many sleepless nights working around the work that we’re going to have. So, the truth is, like, our working hours never truly end at the end of the work day. So, going back to what you said from here Vandita, I think it’s really important that we see rest as radical and we see rest as something that we deserve and deserve not only because we are productive, not because we have to earn like one nap after four hours of working, it’s just something that we should get, right? What are your thoughts on this?
Vandita
Definitely, Sanchi, thank you so much for bringing up those points. I think this is a dissonance I’ve felt more and more over the past few years as work in general has just become so much more for me, and it occupies so much more of my time. I noticed within myself that I sort of started rewarding myself like you would reward good behaviour in a child, maybe with candy. Irrespective of that being wrong or right. I started doing that to myself. So I took a vacation if I managed to produce X amount of products and services. Or I took a Sunday off if I had done a certain amount of work through the week. And instead of planning work in terms of capacity of mind, I would plan how much needs to be done. I can eat away at my rest time, not seeing it as a priority at all. Using rest as reward when rest should have just been something that I’m entitled to. And as I say that, I recognize and realise that rest is not necessarily something people are entitled to across board. I’m actually going to bring up something very interesting. I’ve been noticing more and more in a couple of TV shows that I’ve been watching, where often the lever of a woman is dismissed. I was watching the show called Fresh Off the Boat, where the man tries to sneak away and take a vacation and he encourages his partner, his wife, to do the same. And she talks about how she can never really take a vacation because her job isn’t one that you can take time off from and that brings me to also my, you know, notions of our 24 hours don’t look the same for you, for me, for different people, listening in- our time isn’t the same. And we may be expected to do more in our time than others may be expected to do or we may have demands on the time that are not generally accounted for under a capitalist system, right? Because the capitalist system is only thinking of work in a certain way. It’s thinking of work that has economic value attached to it and often as a result of that, a lot of work gets invisibilized, even something as small. And I would think about it during college. I would travel to college taking a bus from my house to the railway station, taking a train and then taking another bus. There were people who drove to college, so their time to reach college was not the same as my time.
So as a student, I did not have the same hours in my day as they did. And I find because of this, under such a system, productivity, capitalism gets so interlinked with how much time you might even have to be able to give to rest because not all of us are even able to prioritise or allocate those sort of hours because to have time to rest has become a privilege. Although it definitely should not be, it should be something that each of us should have a right to, but it’s more and more like a privilege. It’s something that you can do only if you have a certain amount of resources already in place. In fact, there’s a very interesting economic phenomenon where the richer you get, the one thing you buy more and more of, is free time, leisure time. And I think that’s something we don’t talk about enough, that how under such a system, we’ve made rest a reward. And we’ve made it in such a way that a complete category of people can never really achieve this reward. Thank you for asking that, Sanchi.
Sanchi
Yeah, no Vandita, for sure. I’m like, this just got me thinking ke (that) we see only roti, kapda, makaan (food, clothes, shelter) as a necessity, right? And all of those are things that can be bought through money. But I think something that we do not account for at all is leisure time and how important, and I would say essential that is to a human’s well-being. So really, thanks for bringing that up. And going back to what you shared about like how you always take a vacation day only when you’ve had like a productive month. I think it’s so difficult to also unlearn this na? Because like I come from a corporate space and I think it’s so ingrained in my head now ki get one day of vacation for every fortnight that I work and that approach just baffles me so much ki I need to have like a ‘14-day week’ for me to get like one more addition to my leave balance. So definitely it’s a very hard thing to unlearn, but I’m also on this journey, so I hope that we can take others along here through this episode as well. And I think also the approach that we apply for ourselves also, right? Ki we have to rest just because we can be productive in the future. I mean, I always take an hour off in the afternoon because I know if I get that one hour off, then I can work for longer hours in the evening. And that is also something that’s so wrong. I need to rest only because I want to and like my body needs it or just, I feel like it. I don’t have to rest so that I become more productive in the coming hours. So yeah, that’s something that I thought about right now. And there are times, Vandita, I tell you that I feel guilty even when I have a breakdown. So, what really happens is, I don’t rest enough and that causes like, my body just reaches the point of burnout, right? And I get very anxious and I just breakdown and then I feel guilty for breaking down. And I’m not sure how to exactly navigate this space. But I think starting with this conversation today is a great place to be in and Vandita, I want to talk to you about productivity, guilt and burnout now because that’s something that a lot of the people, especially in our generation, which is in fact called the burnout generation face. So how do you think we can tackle that? Or why do you think it even happens?
Vandita
Thank you for that question, Sanchi. I’ve struggled with it quite a bit myself, to be very honest, and my opinions and thoughts come from a space of personal struggle. I think for us, I don’t even know if it’s just applicable only to our generation, right? But there’s just such a struggle to be a perfectionist all the time. There’s a constant need to be busy. I think you’re prioritised as a social individual based on how busy you are. Otherwise, your value, socially or otherwise, sort of starts calling because then you become someone who’s available and availability becomes something that is to be devalued. I remember someone actually saying that to me, saying that if you’re going to remain so available and not at least maintain a facade of busyness, people are not going to take you as seriously. And this was in my initial years of starting off One Future Collective and it came as a complete surprise to me because the leader I wanted to be was someone who’s available and is available across board, right, not only under certain hierarchies. So, I think that’s when it struck me and since then it’s only been reinforced that availability has to also be rationed. And I think that’s where these ideas of productivity, guilt, and just the constant need to be productive comes from because you over time learn, or you’re taught actually, that society values you for how productive you are, how much you produce, and how much you can keep doing. Sometimes it could just be appearances, but even just keeping up those appearances can be anxiety-inducing, can lead to, like, this constant sense of busyness. While you might not even be doing work, you know, you might not be doing deep work or work that you enjoy, but you’ve taught yourself to maintain a constant sense of busyness, and that often leads to burnout.
One, of course, that you’re being made to work beyond capacity, and second that you’re constantly expected to maintain some sort of busyness and you reach this point of complete exhaustion because in some way or the other, either you’re working all the time or you’re thinking about work all the time. There is no point where you switch off. And I say this is someone for whom work is very interlinked to my personal identity, to my personal politics and what I do, even outside of work, even say with my friends, these are the things I would talk about. But even then, not being able to tune out work or to take a step back from it in a way that is not seen as negative, just leads to this constant exhaustion, this sense of burnout. And it’s a cycle because we never fully take a break from it. We are also taught that, you know, once you go through burnout, please take one month off. Please take six months off. That might help. I’m not saying that doesn’t help, but what you need is rest to be integrated into your everyday life. You don’t need rest to be something that comes at the end of the tunnel where you can no longer produce anything. I think those are some things that we definitely need to be thinking about, about how rest can be integrated into our everyday lives, how persons in leadership positions, in educational institutions, in informal spaces, how can we encourage individuals to think about work beyond just the idea of producing in a certain way to ensure that burnout one doesn’t happen and if people are leaning towards that, there are enough support systems in place to help them.
Like for example, I think Beyoncé spoke about burnout and even cancelled shows due to exhaustion. I think around in 2011 I think Beyoncé took an entire year off for her well-being and that is indicative of how rampant burnout can be and it can be across board. In addition to this, I think that’s just the tendency to make everything into a hustle. I know so many of my friends who enjoy hobbies, who enjoy certain pursuits, but over time hustle culture means that you make that a source or a way of production as well and as a way of gaining more capital, social, financial otherwise. So, you never really have downtime, you’re never really enjoying anything.
Sanchi
That’s so true, Vandita. And I totally relate to what you said because I feel this everyday ki capitalism doesn’t just allow us to switch off at all. But I think that’s a choice that I am trying to consciously make in my life also, like setting boundaries at least or just telling myself ki I deserve this, this is what I want and this is what I’ll take. And going back to what you said, the onus to deliver something has always been so high in the environment that we live in, but I think it was also like so highlighted and heightened during the pandemic because, you know, I saw all these posts saying ki you have so much time now, if you didn’t do whatever you wanted to do, you had the time, you’re just lazy or whatever. And things like Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine or Newton discovered gravity in quarantine, what are you doing? I think social media then has a huge role to play about, like productivity in general and how we look at ourselves and what we’re producing, right? And Vandita, since we were talking about burnout and guilt, and I know you spoke of this a little, do you want to talk a bit more about activism, guilt and how maybe you face this in your life?
Vandita
Definitely. I think that’s a very interesting question. Also linking back to what you mentioned around the pandemic, right? For me, and I know for a lot of people in the civil society space and even otherwise, right, just concerned citizens, the pandemic meant that inequities that they could have ignored for really long, were things they could no longer ignore. I would not say they’re hidden because they were quite obvious. I think we were just making a choice to see them or not see them. And I think there was just such a constant need to keep doing. And I know it was urgent and important, but after a point, it also led to a lot of compassion fatigue, and a lot of just constant guilt, because we are also individuals, people who are in caregiving roles, people who do work that is of helping nature are also people who require rest, are also people who require care. And I feel like that was completely ignored by organisations, by individuals across board. There were just such high expectations. I mean, very few civil society organisations even took the time to provide that sort of support to their teams. And as we all know, right? Like if you’re an activist, you’re constantly paying attention and that means you’re constantly angry, because there’s constantly something happening that is going to grab your attention that requires addressal. But I think just recognizing that sometimes we can’t do everything, and that doesn’t mean we’re failing as people or as activists. It just means that it is important for us to also rest to be able to come back and do more, to be able to shift the arc towards social justice in the long term we need to have energy within us to be able to do anything. And again, I don’t want to link rest to future productivity, but rest in itself can be a form of resistance. It disrupts, it pushes back on capitalist ideas. Something as small as you know your NGO social media page, taking a holiday for 10 days means you are breaking away from the very capitalist idea of how content should be produced and how it is consumed and how creators are rewarded. So you should not just be rewarded because you produce every day, but you should also have the space to rest, to take time off and to just not do anything that in itself is a resistance against the system, against just general structures that continue to oppress us. And I know while I’m sharing this, we also have a very interesting guest with us today who I’m sure brings so many more insights. Today we have with us, Aishwarya Srinivasan. They’re a social psychologist and cognitive anthropologist with a background in cognitive science, evolution, social behaviour, and mental health. I’m also excited to share that they were a One Future Fellow in 2020. Hi Aishwarya. So good to have you with us.
Aishwarya
Hi, very excited.
Sanchi
Hello, Aishwarya.
Vandita
Aishwarya, I’m gonna jump right into the first question for you. Knowing you and knowing your work, I know that understanding rest, productivity just under the capitalist system has been something that’s really important for you. And I think my first question is just how do you even pause and rest when you’re constantly feeling like you’re running out of time or you’re just running out of like the actual time bandwidth you have to set certain benchmarks in your life?
Aishwarya
I think that’s an important question. And it’s a question I have been sort of thinking a lot about in the recent past, which is what does rest look like to me? What does it mean for me to pause, right? If you’re in the spaces we’re all into some level and the world is in at some degree, the pandemic is not switching off because we’re going to sleep. Work is not stopping because you’re going to sleep. Mental health activism is not happening when I’m sleeping, though. So, it feels like there’s this rush to get things done and there’s this rush to be switched on all the time. And you sort of feel like, ‘Ok, I’m at this particular age, I need to hit this target and make sure mental health becomes this forefront of the conversation.’ And it got a little ridiculous, I think two burnouts in I realised I couldn’t keep doing this and it’s quite tragic that it took a burnout for me to realise that, but I’ve sort of pivoted away from where the burnout left me and moved that to how I can talk to people about what rest can look like and why it’s important, and why we shouldn’t have to get to the stage of burnout to say, ‘Ok, now rest is something I can have’ because the rest is something you don’t need to earn, it is something you deserve. It is something that’s a right for you. It is something that you need to exist. It’s a biological need, it’s a sociological need and to sort of deny yourself that till you meet an arbitrary benchmark that you set for yourself that keeps moving anyway is not fruitful in the long run, I think. That’s when I decided I needed to pause. Like the goalpost was going to keep shifting and I needed to slow down and take another look at some point.
Sanchi
I love how you said that rest is something that we deserve and we don’t have to earn. And I think I’m going to like, take that back as my motto from here. But like, the more I think about it, the more I think about how do you, how do you start even coping with the guilt that comes with it, right, because of the system that we currently live in? Aishwarya, how do you think we can deal with the guilt of rest?
Aishwarya
I think this goes back to the things you folks were talking about earlier in the sections, which is the idea of rest as reward, rest as privilege that needs to be earned. Rest is something that you’re given by somebody who is in a power differential to you, right? Which is something you need to have achieved, something to be allowed to have. It’s quite dangerous. It sets off a dangerous precedent because you tell yourself I can only rest if ABC is achieved. And the moment you rest without that, you sort of look at yourself and go, but what did I achieve, what did I produce? And the danger of sort of doing that means you’re not allowing yourself your personhood. At least that’s where I looked at it from. You’re sort of telling yourself, ‘Ok, I’m a commodity or I’m a service or a good that’s producing something and my value rests in the production I can engage in’, which is dangerous to how you identify yourself. And the way I sort of moved around that was one, having to take active breaks to ask myself, am I thinking of myself as a person or a production unit? And the second being, would I be this degree of abrasive and harsh with somebody else who needed rest? And if I’m not, why am I not affording myself the same amount of care that I’m affording somebody else, right? This is something that’s even more predominant, I think in like social spaces. If you’re working with people, if you’re working with development, if you’re working against injustice, you tell yourself, anytime you pause is bad because you’re sort of, it’s time you could have spent towards the movement, right, and towards the resistance. But you sort of end up thinking about it in terms of the end goals you achieve, which is, am I gonna push it 20% for 8 hours, or do I give myself some time and then give 75% instead when I’m able to and when I’m in the space to. And which of those is more prudent and useful? If that’s how you want to sort of look at it, I think has been how I’ve started shifting. Not quite so mathematically, but I’m sort of telling myself, ‘Ok, why do I need to be a machine that produces these many units of productive output?
Vandita
Those are some great points, Aishwarya. Thank you for bringing them up. I especially resonate with what you mentioned around if you’re in the social justice or activism space, everything seems like a disservice to the calls, right? Even few hours of sleep. And I mean, sorry, you mentioned some strategies that have helped you deal with it. But otherwise, do you think that are strategies that we can adopt individually and say social justice organisation, to ensure that rest becomes more normalised in our everyday work and that rest and work are not essentially seen as such as things separate things?
Aishwarya
I think part of that disparity comes from how we quantify what rest can look like and how much rest we allow ourselves, particularly in these spaces. You tell yourselves, ‘Ok, if I push for 16 hours, I sleep for four hours, and then there’s four hours for me to do these things and then I can go.’ But that doesn’t include any other downtime you can have. Sleep is not the only form of rest you can engage in. And I think part of our personal strategy to combat what this fatigue looks like, which I think you term activism fatigue and guilt as well, right? Part of the way I’ve sort of work to combat it is and your brain’s not gonna let you switch off. You sort of pivot something that’s more gentle. So, if you’re a person who goes out at protests on the streets every day, maybe your idea of rest is just stepping back from going on onto the streets and engaging in some poster printing instead or poster design because that’s gonna allow your brain to think about things that are similarly useful but don’t utilise your skill set in the same exhausting way. So you can nourish those parts of yourself while you’re working on something else if you find that full rest is not something you can allow yourself at that point in time. And another thing is, as individuals, we need to understand that we’re gonna tell ourselves every morning that the world is burning, and that every day is an emergency. And that’s not, I don’t think that’s gonna stop being true. That hasn’t stopped being true in a while. As much as I believe in the faith of like, believe in the world and have faith that things are gonna come together, it is going to continue burning for a while. And there are things that we’re going to want to fight about constantly. So, you can’t treat every situation like it’s a personal emergency all the time, what that does to your body is that it’s constantly switched on and it’s in fight or flight mode. Your body is not going to perform the functions it can because you’re not letting it at some level, let its guard down. And unless you do that, it’s gonna like, look like a bunch of things, which starts at fatigue but ends in like muscle degeneration, right? Like, and that’s not a road anyone should be sort of going down. Activism, to a lot of us, is a way of life, a way we organise ourselves, a way we know ourselves. So, for me, what can also be done organizationally is to sort of create spaces where people who are similarly exhausted come together and start talking about what rest can look like for them. It can just mean a bunch of activists coming together for 30 minutes and not talking about the ways in which they’re gonna improve the state of the world, but just talking about, I don’t know, a game of Pictionary or talking about the last song they heard and what meaningful experience they had in the last week and these can feel like reasons to keep pushing forward. And this is going to make you feel like you’re not alone. And I think that’s also a useful way to rest, to know that you’re not in this alone because then rest doesn’t just become personal and reinvigorating. Rest becomes resistance. And I think that’s important.
Sanchi
Thanks for sharing that, Aishwarya. And I think that’s a beautiful thought, you know? I was just thinking about it, how rest can really bind us together, how rest can help us, like, nurture ourselves and build communities. And that’s such a beautiful thought. And it actually reminds me of something that I read. It says that in a culture where we spend so much time hyping each other up and telling ourselves and our friends that we can do anything. And I think the person who wrote this is talking about a culture of love. But they say that there is perhaps no more radical message than adding, but you don’t have to, right? That you can do anything, but you don’t have to right? And I think rest then as, as something that can bind us together. It’s such a beautiful thought to have and I’m really happy with that. And moving on, Aishwarya, I think a lot of our conversations have been around workplaces, especially since the pandemic started, and the boundaries between work and home really just faded out. So how do you think in a world where overtime and extra hours are actually rewarded and incentivized to employees, or even at a school setting where children are rewarded for doing everything that they can, how do you think in such environments, how do we even deal with burnout here? And then, in the second part, how do we then deal with burnout in a work from home situation?
Aishwarya
I’ll answer the first section which was what it looked like in a pre-pandemic world first. And I think the second was slightly more difficult for me to arrive at an answer to, even because we sort of had to figure it out on the fly, be like, oh, these are the 20 things that are occupying my mind at any given time. Anyway, starting with workplaces, I think it’s the idea that there’s sort of strength in numbers. You, at some level, there is a, like there is always going to be a power differential between an organisation, which is the employer and the employee, but what the employee has done that the employer doesn’t is the numbers. The fact that we are a collective unit of people, which is where the idea of rest as resistance comes in. We are going to be increasingly rewarded if they figure out that the cog in the machine can continue to run if you give it rewards for overtime, and that’s the carrot, the dangle where they sort of praise you for working past your hours and not, try to normalise it. There needs to be collective pushback. I think at some level, individuals can do their best, but there’s only some degree of resistance that we can offer against large corporations, large organisations, and what it sort of needs to look like is consensus on what that rest needs to mean. You can’t have that one person go ‘Oh, but I don’t need rest’ because the idea of the “I” should not exist at that point in time. The idea that rest is only a means to an end needs to stop existing and sort of start by working towards respecting each other’s boundaries and knowing that, like Vandita said, everyone’s 24 hours are not the same. If my 24 hours and your 24 hours don’t look the same, we can’t have the same deadlines on the same deliverables. And people being understanding of that and supporting each other and creating a system where people can hold each other not just accountable, but hold each other as forms of support and hold themselves to just exist, I think would be a useful place. The solution to, like that occurred to me the moment you asked the question, was unionised, but unionising is a long and arduous process. It takes time and something like rest can’t be quantified very easily. But I can, I do think of systems that are employing something like a four-day work week and are seeing effective results, which is leading into the idea that like people talk about technological advancement as a way to have people, people as a whole, workless. But that never ends up happening. It’s always produce more, produce regardless of whether we need something or not. We keep producing and sort of hope for the best and hope something lands. But the whole point was, I think when we started work, as labour law started, you worked in industries for like 16 hours a day and now we’re supposed to be thankful that it’s eight. But I think we can do better. We don’t need six-day work weeks with like 9 to 10 hours a day. And that being the only norm that’s rewarded. We can have systems that acknowledge that people have lives outside of work and reward them in those ways so that the work that they do produce and the hours that they are there becomes meaningful. And they can do meaningful work outside of work as well because one thing that capitalism broadly tries to do is tell what creativity can look like. And they’re gonna take that away from you if you’re too tired to be creative. So I think as a system, sort of form collectives, think about what rest needs to look like and how you can address multiple people, find a least common denominator and build from there, right? You can have a common agenda that you can all stick to and then sort of work from there and have each other’s backs as a system, I think would be an important way to start dealing with this. It’s a systemic problem, so I don’t think one suggestion or one person can fix what the system can look like, but I think starting work on it would be a useful way to go about it. As for what it looks like during the pandemic, what boundaries look like, I’ve honestly tried really hard to be quite strict about when I’m available, and I’ve tried to separate my work from my leisure. It’s meant multiple things over time. Sometimes it means having my laptop and my phone in different rooms and being away from my laptop means I’m away from work and I can’t do it. Sometimes if there’s work on my phone and I’m tempted to look at it, it means switching away from that and doing something else entirely, like reading a book, engaging in art, getting a nap, and sort of regularising that. I think that’s where part of the guilt sets in, which is when it’s not a habit to allow yourself these things. Doing it on a one-off day, like you said Sanchi, once in 14 days if you’re allowed to have one extra day off, you’re gonna start thinking that’s the exception and you can’t have that and you need to do something to earn that. So tell yourself you can have pockets of that time in your everyday and to set boundaries, not just with your workplace, not just with your work devices, but with yourself. To tell yourself these are feelings I’m gonna feel, and it makes more sense for me to work through what that means and hold those feelings within me and explore what that means than to jump right back into work without that reflection, without allowing myself that space, I think would be a good. It’s been useful for me. It’s been difficult. I’m saying all this in a retrospective manner after having worked on this for months on end, but I think it’s always useful to sort of look at yourself and go, why am I not affording myself kindness? And at which point would I start doing that for myself?
Vandita
Thank you for sharing that with us, Aishwarya. I think all of it was so powerful. A couple of things that really, really stood out for me were one, of course, unionised. I know it’s long, it’s tedious, it takes forever but a lot of the labour rights that we have and recognizing that we do live and exist under a capitalist system have come from unionising, have come from labour rights movements across the world. And I think that’s always a great, it’s always a great way to start off. And I know that I find that a lot of young organisations, a lot of spaces in social justice activism don’t do that enough. Some of the other things that you mentioned that really stood out as well for me were around just understanding that showing up has to mean different things for different people and that is an understanding we have to build in. And also understanding and recognizing that rest can look so different for different people. Like, for example, it’s a really tiny thing but in the initial years of my career, I would never tell my boss that I was at a party. Like it was a weekend Saturday night, but I would never say I was at a dinner or at a party. I would always just say I have an emergency or there’s something urgent that’s come up and which is why I can’t reply to that urgent work request at like 10:00 or 11:00 PM on a holiday. It took me a long time to realise that I could just say I’m out, it’s a day off for me and I’m socialising or whatever, right? I find that I could never communicate that rest for me look different and this constant need to show up for work however the workplace demanded of me and not giving myself the space to show up in the way that I can and also just never trying to break away from these moulds. It took me a really long time to be able to do this and that was such a function of power. It was such a function of where I moved in my career graph. And I think that’s where it also like remains with me now as a question that what do young people do when they’re dealing with burnout in these places? What do people who maybe don’t have the same formal access to resources do? Like I think of mothers, I think of homemakers, I think of people from the informal economy. How do they demand rest and how do they get it?
Aishwarya
I think I’ve been thinking about all of that too. I think at some level, because I’m at the age where I’m moving away from that a little bit. I’m not just starting off in my career, I’ve worked for a while now. I think part of being younger and being in these spaces also just means you tend to subsume your personal identity into your work identity or your activist identity and it’s very easy to conflate the two. You’re not just an activist and something else. You are an activist and that’s you. That’s what you do. You’re not just creative and something else, you are a creative and that’s all you do and I feel like that sort of coherence is something that’s rewarded to some degree, where people call it having a lot of clarity about what people want to be doing and engaging with life in very specific ways. But the problem with that is that you don’t allow yourself the room to be much else. So when you’re young and this was a mistake I made for a really long time, which is that I allowed a single definitive idea of myself to define what my work looked like and that was an extremely organised, on-time, research-oriented person and the problem with letting that define me and letting that be the baseline expectation of me, is that I never allowed myself the room to be anything different and to have any of those identities look any different from what they did look like when I was 18 and that’s not useful. We are people who have bodies that respond to environments in specific ways. We do age, we do change. I’m not gonna say we deteriorate. We’re not there, but our bodies are going to respond to environments of stress, particularly now in very specific ways. And if you hold on to rigid identities of sort of work and sort of trying to define yourself in those spaces, you’re never gonna let yourself see what stress can look like. And as somebody who did that and burnout pretty early in my life, like my first burnout was over a decade ago and not a sustainable way of, I think pursuing things you want to be pursuing. It is incredibly satisfying at that point in time because it feels like your anger has meaning, but over time it gives way to exhaustion. And I think sort of having some degree of concurrence where you allow yourself to be more than just and to allow, your, the version of yourself that rests to also be a part of you is a useful way to go about it. I don’t know if that’s too obtuse, abstract sort of in the air, out there, but that’s how I sort of pictured my brain. I thought I’d share that with you.
Vandita
Aishwarya, I think that makes a lot of sense and I’m just gonna link that back to something you said earlier around how systems need to change and how systems need to provide solutions because I think somehow you remember talking about rest, it becomes such an individualistic feed that has to be accomplished that it becomes quite impossible. For a lot of us who might work in formal, organised spaces, it is easier to make these demands. It is easier to exercise our rights, but in a lot of other spaces, these rights just may not exist. Like, if I think about my mother, who’s a homemaker, I don’t know when she rests. I don’t know if that is part of a right she should have or if it is a right she can exercise and if yes, how? These are just questions that have always stayed and we don’t seem to have answers, but it is something that we need to start encouraging and how do we do that? Is it really possible only at the individual level and how do we integrate individuals and systems to provide change efforts that are truly sustainable? I think that is something that’s really stood out for me from everything that you shared and even the point that you raised about burning out quite early, because we often also set unrealistic targets for ourselves. But that, again, is not an individual concern. It is because we are responding to a system that places a high degree of reward on beating the odds, on achieving something at 18 that is meant to be achieved according to some arbitrary calendar at 19 or at 20 and we’re responding to that. It’s not an individual concern, but somehow we have no support for that. Thank you for bringing those points up. I think they were amazing and I learned so much from all of it. I know even now that rest is something that I’m not fully able to give to myself, even in spaces where I might have opportunity, but there are also some spaces in which I may not have the opportunity right? I might be working in spaces that are quite rigid, that do not provide for rest or do not provide any such opportunities. In those cases, how do you think employees or individuals, if it’s like an educational institution, how can they navigate such spaces to ensure that they are getting rest?
Aishwarya
So, think about this, I think I go back to, I think, the work that my mother does. So, she’s been a teacher for over a decade now, and more crucially, I’ve seen her be a teacher during the pandemic where it’s been, I think, so she starts her work day these days at 7:00 in the morning and finishes at about 10:30-11:00 in the night, which is ridiculous to me because if she was doing this in-person she wouldn’t be doing these hours. In addition to this, she runs the household in specific ways and takes responsibility for specific things. And I’m lucky to have a family that at some level splits some of the responsibilities, but the onus can’t be on her to have to figure any of this out. I think ways in which she and I have sort of worked through this and I can speak for us and hope sort of some degree of the system extrapolates, is that talk to her about what rest looks like to her. I think for a lot of people, the idea of just asking that question, which is what is rest? What is rest to you? Yes, there’s a nap. Yes, there’s eight hours of sleep that you’re supposed to get at night for, like healthy living and all of that. But when do you feel rested? At the end of what activity? You don’t have to not do a thing. It doesn’t have to be the absence of a thing. It can be the presence of some form of comfort. It can be just being in the same room as somebody else. So, what looks comforting to you and what looks stressful to you? And how do we navigate the immediate environment around you to meet that? I think one of the problems with capitalism broadly has been the idea that everyone works at the same pace, but also the reverse has somehow become true, assumed to become true to some level where they think rest looks the same for everyone. And maybe it doesn’t and it’s okay. And how do we account for that? Is for me, by having conversations about what their needs look like in that current environment and what people in the immediate surroundings can do to respond to that. And if it’s in an educational space, have the teachers have that conversation. This is something I spoke to her about, like, talk to your fellow colleagues in the same department. They’re going through the same things as you. What would they feel sort of motivated by, supported by, encouraged by, and what kind of room do you want to hold for them? And now, because she’s being asked to sort of head back to school on some days, they do have pockets of time where they sort of sit socially distant from each other and engage in what one might arguably call some degree of free time. That’s incredible. Or they have these calls that they get on sometimes where they talk about work, but once they’re done talking about work, they just talk about what frustrated them in that particular day. And that for some people is good enough. You’re getting something out of your system. Something else can exist in its place and you can hold the weight and it feels a little lighter. So, I think, yeah, talk to the person, ask them the question they haven’t been asked before, which is what is rest to you and how can I help you have that space and take it forward from there, I think.
Sanchi
Thank you so much for sharing that, Aishwarya. And I think that’s such a great question to ask someone and of course, ask yourself as well. I think it took me a lot of time to also realise that our journaling, just like doodling or making flowers in my notebooks is something that brings lot of comfort and rest to me. So yeah, I think that’s a beautiful place to start and I have learnt so much through this episode with you. So really thanks for all your inputs. It was such a treat talking to you.
Aishwarya
Thank you so much for having me. This was, this was really nice. I like that you allowed for me to have a structured rant session about what I felt about rest.
Vandita
Thank you, Aishwarya. This was wonderful and I learned so much and I know that we have a lot of listeners listening and who must be facing this because it just seems to be the state of the world. We also have a couple of Instagram page suggestions. We find Abolish Time and The Nap Ministry some great pages to just understand rest as radical, to understand rest as resistance against the system and also something that you must do for yourself. So, we encourage you to follow them.
Vandita
Until next time then, please take care of yourselves, think about what rest means to you and try to build a practice of resting in your everyday life. If you are someone that you, that can support another person in being able to get more rest, try doing that. That could be for anyone. It could be for a student, it could be for a coworker, it could be for someone that reports to you. Till then, stay with us on our journey towards a radically kinder world.
***
For more delightful discussions on practicing feminism and fostering communities of care, check out the other episodes of the Nurturing Radical Kindness podcast! Until then, here’s a reflection activity for you to mull over.
| Reflection Activity – Rest is Radical What does rest mean to you? What is it that makes you feel rested? What makes it restful? Find some time in the coming week to just do what makes you feel rested, whatever that may mean for you. |
About the Nurturing Radical Kindness Podcast
Radical Kindness is the ethos and practice that forms and informs One Future Collective. It guides our constitution as an organisation and is the core value that guides our work. It is a politics of love, fighting against apathy and hopelessness. Often being ‘hard’, ‘stoic’ or ‘rigid’, is considered crucial for social change, and it is this very notion that radical kindness challenges. It espouses that being kind, compassionate and loving in our activism can still pave the way for dissent, defiance, growth and rebuilding. It is a tool we seek to use to rebuild our systems with care, nurturance and justice at their core. It allows us to hold various stakeholders, including ourselves, accountable in how we interact with ourselves and our communities and to build towards a lived reality of social justice collaboratively.
Hosted by Sanchi Mehra and Vandita Morarka of One Future Collective, this podcast attempts to unpack what it means to be radically kind and how we can practice it through conversations with members of the One Future Collective community.