‘Rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people,” barks Arnold Schwarzenegger in his new self-help book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. I am definitely not the target audience for this tome: I get exhausted just trying to type his surname. It is interesting that Schwarzenegger is viewed as a relatively benign figure whose advice you might want to hear, despite the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. At least he apologised for it and, unlike many Republican politicians, he doesn’t think the climate crisis is woke fiction, which is refreshing.
I think he’s got it very wrong with this rest thing, though. You would expect a man whose entire career was built on the burn to venerate sweating and grinding, but don’t even the biggest biceps and ropiest calves need the odd day off? The concept of rest is enjoying a low-key fight back, gently insisting that hustle culture hushes and has a little lie down with its snuggly blanket. I am seeing an encouraging amount of it: “Rest is productive” reads a widely shared post on my Instagram timeline, and the writer and illustrator Sophie Lucido Johnson’s newsletter, You’re Doing a Good Enough Job, joyfully makes the case for doing less and enjoying more.
Better still, an interviewee recently introduced me to the work of the utterly inspiring Tricia Hersey, self-proclaimed “Nap Bishop” and the author of Rest Is Resistance. Hersey has made it her life’s work to reclaim and advocate for rest as a radical act. It is a philosophy that emerged from her reading of slave testimony, and her growing realisation that pressure to work and strive to exhaustion was a tool that enables Black oppression. Still, she says her message is for everyone and I am grateful for it. “I judge success by how many naps I took in a week, and how many times I told somebody no; how many boundaries I upheld,” Hersey told the New York Times last year and that is now my mantra. Come on, Arnie: why not give the gym a miss for once?
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
