Why modern life leaves us exhausted instead of restored
One of the worst swaps we’ve made in our modern context is mistaking distraction for rest.
And then we wonder why we are so tired, overwhelmed, and stressed.
So let me start by just saying it plainly: staring at your phone sending you a firehose of overwhelming information at every waking hour—its unprecedented cocktail of absurdist memes, worldwide violent altercations, shallow lifestyle content, and petty fights—is not exactly a recipe for the deep human restoration your body, mind, and spirit are begging for.
Simply stopping work does not equal rest. Rest is a productive state, where we allow ourselves to be renewed in some concrete way.
Sometimes this is a literal nap, where we press pause on the day and give our sensory systems a break from the noise of the day, allowing ourselves to collapse for a bit into the heaviness of our finite bodies.
But there is another type of critical rest we need no less than physical sleep, which we don’t speak of nearly enough.
The difference between real leisure and endless distraction
Usually, the kind of rest we really need is a kind of active rest, rather than falling into a puddle of malaise in our beds and couches, via:
- The creativity of stitching words to sound to create a song, or the glopping out of paint onto a canvas
- Time with good friends, laughing as the sun casts its miraculous colors across the sky
- A slow, quiet time of prayer and reflection on God and our deeper purpose
- Quality movement through a walk near water sparkling in the sun, or the heavy, grounding pull of a dumbbell
- Reading something either philosophically enriching, or narratively beautiful
One of the pinnacle elements of advanced civilizations is the recognized need for meaningful leisure. This is especially the case in Christian tradition, but any culture that has erupted into the bright human expression of genius via science, art, literature, law, music, infrastructure began with recognizing the brilliance that comes through time in a meaningful state of relaxation, allowing the inspirations of both the unconscious and the divine to emerge into our conscious reality.
Unfortunately, what most of us inexorably turn to is instead things that numb us out. While this state—arguably, I’ve heard a kind of “theta” brain state where we are highly impressionable, which is an interesting topic for another day—is certainly maintainable over even many years because it demands so little of us, it also perpetually forms us away from what we truly need.
Why meaningful rest requires beauty, friendship, and attention
It seems our needs are being fulfilled through the simulacra of relationships and intense meaning, but when we click away from it all, we find ourselves and our lives as hollow as when we left them, having produced little that lasts. On some level, our poor brains which were not designed for this level of input, believe we have had a deeply meaningful encounter via our phones or other screens, but in reality we have only simulated it. Disturbingly, this undercuts motivation not just through the frying of our chemical reward systems, but also because there is a certain sense of satiety.
But over time, the cognitive dissonance between this registering in the brain and the look of our real lives starts to form a kind of fragmentation that haunts us.
This is not so when we make the properly human, agentic motion toward real leisure.
Yes, there is more effort involved. There is no way around that. But most of these things, once we have started the flow of action, lead into a quiet, persistent energy that leaves us feeling joyful and peaceful.
It’s not an easy road to pushing ourselves more often into this state rather than the ease of a thumb scroll.
But we need to fight for it—because this is the fight, perhaps counterintuitively, that leads to the rest we truly crave.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 