I'm so tired. All the time. And I have a good job that I am "engaged" with and I don't have anyone to look after except myself. I can't imagine how bad it is for caregivers, people with truly terrible jobs, etc.
I appreciate you articulating the ways in which language is weaponized against workers to make us feel guilty for wanting to live instead of just work. The focus on productivity is the enemy of a meaningful, abundant life.
The more deeply I observe Shabbat, the more I appreciate the way my faith tradition has rest built it--not as a way of energizing yourself to make yourself more productive during the rest of the week, but as an act of deep humanity. A way of turning time holy. There's a reason it's persisted over ~3,000 years.
I haven't observed Shabbat since I was a child and belonged to a Jewish community in Miami. I kind of forgot about it, to be honest. Thanks for the reminder :)
I would like to see more of the disability angle on this. I was, more or less, stuck in bed for all of 2020 - unrelated to COVID-19, I have ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) and chronic pain from hEDS (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome). I guess I feel a little weird about (apparently?) nondisabled people making a cute/revolutionary trend out of my uncute/unrevolutionary disability. Can we let people with severe ME/CFS and other energy limiting disabilities lead the way on this?
One of many reasons I want to spend more time in the hashtag = I am positive disability Tiktokers are going to / have already made this very salient/important point, and I'd love to see the way they're doing it. Thank you for making the point here.
This. I've got chronic migraines/EDS, damaged heart and lungs, and am being tested to figure out if I have POTS or some other form of serious dystautonia. Oh, and ADHD. Despite all of this I work full time, manage my family life/home chores/etc. but there are absolutely days where I am in serious pain/sick and can barely function. It isn't 'cute' or aspirational when actual disabled people do it, it's one more data point that confirms everyone's worst biases about disability.
It must be nice to voluntarily spend a day (or a week or a month etc) "bed rotting." When I read the description about "it's watching TV, it's reading, it's staring at the wall" and saw the TikTok screencap with the thing about staring at your phone all day, I was like, "Wait, you can look at stuff? You can process information?" (Chronic migraine high five!)
I think it's great (genuinely) that disability theory is influencing the anti-work movement but I want to see a little more consideration of disabled people? Not just nondisabled people taking stuff about the radical potential of rest, that your ability to give your bodymind to corporate profit doesn't determine your value as a person, etc., and leaving disabled people behind.
My late teens and early twenties were a sleep-deprived blur due to my then-undiagnosed narcolepsy.
I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 24. By then, I failed out of college due to severe mental health issues, and struggled to stay awake while driving.
I tend to think these sorts of cutesy TikToks the same way I think about influencers. As I told my partner today, if bed rot was that one of the few options someone has access to instead of a defiant joke, it would go from quirky to tragic very quickly.
Came here to say this. On the practical side intentionally being gross can feel defiant, but for more than a day or two it has never helped my chronic illnesses or my depression. I'm also much more interested in learning to "do nothing" or be defiantly unproductive/gross/silly in community, *even for those of us stuck in bed* - which requires creativity and celebration - not alone with the shades drawn. Nothing against anyone doing this for whatever reasons, but I'm not sure I feel the same about bedrotters making anything legible except despair.
Good point about community... it seems like maybe bed rotting is thumbing it's nose at not just work but also social life...? I wonder if those who are able to stay in bed may find they eventually crave genuine connection, maybe realizing that their aloneness is missing something. Maybe that's why they feel the need to post about it on social media, which is really just a proxy for connection? Real community building is so much harder... and surface level socializing is much more common IMHO. It's all exhausting! Well, back to bed!
Wow. Bed rot? I am constantly amazed at how clueless/insensitive people can be about what it is like to be disabled, including with depression. I detest how complex issues in our society are often flattened into shallow generalities. No matter where or how authentically a take seems to start, it gets hijacked, such as the glorification of being in bed or even the insinuation that being nonproductive in bed is rotting . Because if you don't have a choice, well, this can be really painful to hear.
This. All of it. I had a conversation with my boss in which I said I was trying to look into ways I could afford to work part-time & slow down. To which she asks, "why" and I responded with, "because I don't want to work." She says "well no one wants to work, but you have to." My responding question of "but why" left her bewildered and confused.
I firmly believe some people are simply not able to conceptualize it because it is so against what they've been socialized for decades to believe. It also unfortunately isn't a reality for most people due to capitalism making it so we need to work ourselves to the bone to have our basic needs met.
I have since quit & begun working fot myself and it is fascinating to see how I have to actively try to build a self-employed culture (is it a culture if it's just me?) of not overworking.
It is actually really hard when you're self employed to create that balance. Yes, you technically have the ability to set your own hours but you're also in charge of everything and can't lean on anyone else if you need to step back for any reason. I'm struggling with this. I'm curious about others who quit in the pandemic and have hung their own shingle and how they are managing this. I sometimes wonder whether self employment is really a mirage of work life balance and control.
For me I definitely thinking collecting a paycheck is easier but I have some friends who make it work financially going freelance. The perfect mixture would be a part time job - work less hours AND don’t have to do your own job admin things. That’s the holy grail to me.
I'm an OG 'Quiet Quitter', and I'm in my late 50s. My retail workplace has been through so many cost cutting measures while still pretending they are the same company they are pre pandemic. I smile and nod and then continue doing my job (quite well! And really more than my job, because I like to maintain a certain level of presentability in my dept) but I'm not going to rah rah.
I love to fill out the Annual Survey, and just last year they finally put in print that the store manager receives copies of the survey (a previous manager had told me years ago, so I knew already) and I desc ribed being disengaged and shortly afterwards Quiet Quitting b became a catchphrase and I thought "this is me!"
I don't care if the store manager figures out which comments came from me, as m y stats show I'm still a valuable player.
Just wanted to say that disengagement doesn't have an age cutoff, and you can still b e productive but no longer make the company your priority.
I’m going to out myself as a Baby Boomer--who lived the whole “do what you love and the money will follow.” Which was fine when the economy was robust and I could manage on the money I was making. As a generation we did a real disservice to younger people expecting them to feel passionate about every job and companies took advantage of this mind-set and expected “engaged” employees no matter the work or the pay. I remember my parents and grandparents mostly thinking of their work as
J-O-B-S and not as an identity, along with trust in labour unions. Work has changed as well--trades are looked down on and everyone now needs a university education much like I needed a high school diploma. But high school was public school and didn’t mire you in debt.
I think younger generations have the right idea to push back on companies trying to make this the workers problem. Viva La Revolution!
Sister Boomer here Pamela who believes our generation has a LOT to learn from those who saw us grinding away and realized there IS a much better way. They don't take half the shit I've been conditioned to accept all my life, as it should be. They push back and any gains we enjoy now have come from them. This is the way.
The generation before us Boomers considered work a way to make money. It was hard getting work during the Great Depression but the money it got you could buy stuff you needed. No one expected to love their job, though it would be nice not to loathe it. Getting work was the big thing as in "Write if you get work." Doing it was just work as in "Why do you think they call it 'work'?"
As someone who has in the past dealt with clinical depression, my love of "bed rotting" is simply not depression. I'm sure it is for some people. But my newfound love of being a bed person (I call myself a bed person affectionately) isn't about being sad. It's actually quite the opposite. I'm in the most joyful season of my life, and spending time in bed reading and watching and talking to people (through chat, through text, through facetime) and writing (yep, I write in bed) has brought me untold amounts of joy. My peacock motif duvet cradles me and my brain is allowed to just....be. Man, I love it.
I understand why people view it askance, but as you said, there's a gross ableism at work there, besides a misconception about what's happening when we take to our beds. I am both supremely comfortable in my bed, and also rejecting hustle culture/productivity culture.
I like "bed person" (or the "duvet days" mentioned in the article) better than "bed rot," because it gets to the difference between voluntary, pleasant time spent in bed and the feeling as a disabled person (whether that's mental illness, serious injury, energy limiting illness, etc., etc.) of being left to rot in one's bed (metaphorically and, for some people in care homes, horrifyingly, literally). As someone also stuck in bed sometimes for various disability reasons, I agree that spending time in bed on purpose, reading, writing, chatting, etc., is very relaxing! I'm planning to buy a day bed for my living room because I prefer that to a sofa.
Yes, I think my problem with the term "bed rotting" is that it feels like it glorifies the symptoms of my absolute devastating depressive episodes a bit too much. I absolutely do not oppose the trend in itself, but the name feels unfortunately chosen because "bed rot" is what I would describe what it looks like when I am stuck in bed for days or weeks on end and sometimes cannot even get out to take a shower or can hardly push myself to get up to go to the toilet. Actual refreshing rest deserves a different name, I would say.
I totally see what you're saying — but also think that we *do* have those terms (self-care day, duvet day) and they don't do what O'Sullivan argues, which is to underline how society at large conceives of expansive rest, in whatever form, for whatever reason, as abject.
To me it feels like a sick day when I was a kid. I was sick maybe 2/3 of the time, but my parents only let me have a handful of sick days, so I learned to cherish that time in bed with a book, a snack and the TV on. (Actually, the TV was in the living room, so I'd turn the couch there into my bed for the day.)
As someone who has also dealt with major depressive episodes AND loves a good lazy Saturday, I think it would be useful for the community to develop “signs that you might be tricking yourself.” Because I have done that. But they are also not the same!
I know what you mean...I have both chronic migraine and major depression and can get stuck in bed for long periods. Over the years I've had to figure out what's depression and what's "I am just sick and can't move for a long time/need extensive rest." Turns out depression is when I stop brushing my teeth ;)
That's a REALLY good point! Our brains are tricksy, and I can EASILY see how loving being a bed person could...flip over into some sort of self-protection/denial of a slide into depression.
This piece hits on so much. Most workplaces are dysfunctional— not in a haha, we’re all human amirite? kind of way. It’s extractive: how can I get the most out of you and pay, recognize, and value you the least? Years of surviving office politics, bad bosses, RIFs, passive aggressive leadership, AND not receiving the personal development, mentorship, or opportunities promised to high performers has resulted in people of all ages asking: why am I grinding this hard? If you have a critical mind and push back on unreasonable expectations— you get rebranded as disengaged, difficult to work with, or a quiet quitter. So, in order to prevent this perception from becoming a reality, you often have to silence yourself, pick your battles, and steer clear of the people who have failed up, and are (unintentionally/sometimes very intentionally) antagonizing their workforce by not leading, by being in a position of power that’s unearned and that they will weaponize should you question their standards and MBA way of thinking. We rarely center the cost of all of this on the worker and instead it’s: how much does all that of this cost the employer? It’s workers who are paying this price with compound interest— thank you for highlighting what’s at the root of these problems and who is actually struggling.
This is absolutely 1000% spot on. I lost count of the number of leaders I have worked with who refuse to acknowledge the ways in which the organization -- and their leadership (or lack thereof) -- contributes to high turnover, low morale, and general disengagement.
Totally! A lot of “people managers” (god I hate that phrase) are allergic to conflict/conflict avoidant and they create these communication problems at workplaces where no one can directly address known problems. But part of that bigger problem is that they see themselves as a Boss and they understand the psychology of power but not the psychology of the underclass. The underclass has never willingly been subjugated, no one is like: tell me what to do, treat me terribly, add more and more to my workload and I will do this forever with a smile on my face. It’s common sense, but when you yourself have never been a mere peasant lol, the empathy, self awareness, and understanding are lacking.
It's also the promise of higher productivity meaning getting more, more stuff, more free time, more recognition and so on. Instead, all the higher output went to some boss's boss's boss. It's been forty years. Suddenly, it seems, people are starting to catch on.
It’s fascinating, and, I guess a little disheartening, that the thing I do is so widespread it has a name. Bed rotting is, indeed, a gross term, one that I don’t think I can self-apply. But ever since the pandemic started, I’ve absolutely had days where I stay in bed all day and just sleep on and off. I at first thought I was sick, but no, just deeply exhausted. It happens two or three times a year, and now I just roll with it. Clearly I need the rest at those times.
Yes, the pandemic was a game-changer energy-wise! More often than is comfortable, I feel intensely exhausted at the end of the workday, whether at the office or WFH. Like I just need to completely check out.
Okay I know this wasn’t the entire point of the piece but the paragraph about “indicators of depression” also being forms of deep rest was mind blowing to me. After my parents’ divorce and watching both my mom and sister go through deep depressive periods, I think I built an entire identity around being the child who gets shit done, who no one has to worry about, who stays productive. And reading that paragraph, I was like, wow this is a huge part of why I literally don’t know how to relax. All the things I avoided out of a deathly fear of falling into a depression also meant I was avoiding rest. All the time.
I think there is a lot to this. The people I've worked for who were the most driven to keep working both had an awkward affect when there was no work to do. One had a relationship with alcohol as a segue between the end of the work day and bed, the other would literally work to exhaustion on the regular. I would not categorize either as having a contemplative side.
I call bed rotting “pajama days.” Since I WFH, I occasionally have a day when I don’t get dressed until late afternoon (I have yet to go an entire day in my PJs). After being an elder caregiver for seven years, when I did not have the choice to be lazy, I figure I deserve these once in a while. It isn’t depression, it is recharging.
I have done away with the idea of PJs altogether. There are inside clothes and outside clothes--when I get home, I shower and put on my inside (read: comfy) clothes. I only put on outside clothes if I have a reason to leave the house. So on the scattered days when I don't have to leave at all, I stay in inside clothes all day and feel 100% fine with it!
Yes! I know a lot of people who wear their same clothes from work/errands/whatever until they are getting ready for bed and I do NOT get it! Since I was a teenager, basically, as soon as I am home and know I'm not going out again, outside clothes (AND BRA) are OFF, I have a shower (or at least wash my face) and that's it! Various sex friends over the years have found it hilarious that as soon as we get in from a date, say, or picking up food, I'm like shower/bathrobe before anything else, ha.
Yes! (though when I lived in Alaska, I did usually go outside to walk my dog in my 'inside' clothes, because it was too cold to take off the warm things I was already wearing to put on something else)
I also do the same thing, and I think it comes from wearing a uniform in highschool. I didn't want to stay in it one minute longer than necessary, but I didn't see the point in putting on clean clothes just to change into pajamas, so i just had this hybrid of things that were comfy, but that I could wear if I was made to go to the grocery store.
(#BigPajama (like Big Pharma on instagram earlier this week was hilarious)
Coming in hot (from a Time magazine article that wandered by my LinkedIn feed: RAGE APPLYING - “Feeling stuck and unappreciated at work? Want to work somewhere with a higher salary, better work-life balance and a boss you can actually stand? Maybe you’ve just had a really bad work day. Your first instinct might be to fire out applications to every relevant job listing you see—known as “rage applying”—but that might not be the smartest move.”
As you said, dissertations could be written about these phenomena. One thing we collectively continue to not name is these responses for at least some people (myself included) are a form of processing, coping, or responding to the mass trauma and upheaval of recent years, including the diffuse and anticipatory grief of the pandemic.
Maybe we should take a page from John & Yoko's Bed-ins for Peace and recast "bed rotting" as a form of work protest, a "lie-down" strike if you will :)
One of the ways I can tell that I'm pushing too far is when my sleep schedule starts coming apart. I can't always do anything about this -- when grades or report cards are due, it's time to grind; when it's summer, it's hot until late & bright early. But I can use what I've learned from wrestling with eating disorders and pay attention to my body, and do my best. I'm fascinated that someone doing what's best for them, for whatever reason, is framed as inherently abject bc it's not engaged with labor. How is my taking a day to sleep in & watch fun YouTube cooking videos hurting anyone? But apparently, I'm the bad one for not being efficient enough, well enough, rested enough, etc. I like the "rot" epithet in the same way that my queer friends & I lovingly refer to each other as "bog witches", and it reminds me of the good conversations I've had in death positivity spaces.
I'm not on TikTok --- how much of this is happening with femme influencers / posters? I wonder about how femininity's relationship to abjection is coming into play here.
Philosophers and marketers call it reification, making something into a thing. It lets us talk about it. For example, women all over the US were experiencing the way their lives were limited in the 1950s and 1960s, but no one really talked about it until Betty Friedan called it "the problem" in The Feminine Mystique.
My grandmother used to lionize Arthur Fiedler, longtime conductor of the Boston Pops orchestra, for saying "Who rests, rots." She had a plastic clock with his form at its center and arms-a-twirl with the time, a baton in the minute-hand. Who rests, rots. Such an obnoxious pronouncement. The man is dead now, and so is my grandmother. No one much cares that the second-stringers in the Boston Symphony Orchestra made extra bucks playing arrangements of "Yesterday" or Bing Crosby's tunes. The clock is gone, too. When I went to a memorial service for my uncle at the house where it hung, I gave a look, because I wanted to see it, rotted.
Who rests, rots, indeed. So does everyone. So did Fiedler, and Granny. The constellation of love, joy, resentment, and abuse that we all live in needs attention, care, and improvement, and we need rest to give it those things, because if we are whirling around "working" all the time, we may not notice the damage we do in our semi-permanent exhaustion.
Enjoy your days to the full extent of your ability to do so, then rest, finally, rot.
I'm so tired. All the time. And I have a good job that I am "engaged" with and I don't have anyone to look after except myself. I can't imagine how bad it is for caregivers, people with truly terrible jobs, etc.
I appreciate you articulating the ways in which language is weaponized against workers to make us feel guilty for wanting to live instead of just work. The focus on productivity is the enemy of a meaningful, abundant life.
The more deeply I observe Shabbat, the more I appreciate the way my faith tradition has rest built it--not as a way of energizing yourself to make yourself more productive during the rest of the week, but as an act of deep humanity. A way of turning time holy. There's a reason it's persisted over ~3,000 years.
I haven't observed Shabbat since I was a child and belonged to a Jewish community in Miami. I kind of forgot about it, to be honest. Thanks for the reminder :)
You're welcome! I do believe that even if they aren't religious observant, every person can benefit from some kind of Shabbat practice.
I would like to see more of the disability angle on this. I was, more or less, stuck in bed for all of 2020 - unrelated to COVID-19, I have ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) and chronic pain from hEDS (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome). I guess I feel a little weird about (apparently?) nondisabled people making a cute/revolutionary trend out of my uncute/unrevolutionary disability. Can we let people with severe ME/CFS and other energy limiting disabilities lead the way on this?
One of many reasons I want to spend more time in the hashtag = I am positive disability Tiktokers are going to / have already made this very salient/important point, and I'd love to see the way they're doing it. Thank you for making the point here.
This. I've got chronic migraines/EDS, damaged heart and lungs, and am being tested to figure out if I have POTS or some other form of serious dystautonia. Oh, and ADHD. Despite all of this I work full time, manage my family life/home chores/etc. but there are absolutely days where I am in serious pain/sick and can barely function. It isn't 'cute' or aspirational when actual disabled people do it, it's one more data point that confirms everyone's worst biases about disability.
It must be nice to voluntarily spend a day (or a week or a month etc) "bed rotting." When I read the description about "it's watching TV, it's reading, it's staring at the wall" and saw the TikTok screencap with the thing about staring at your phone all day, I was like, "Wait, you can look at stuff? You can process information?" (Chronic migraine high five!)
I think it's great (genuinely) that disability theory is influencing the anti-work movement but I want to see a little more consideration of disabled people? Not just nondisabled people taking stuff about the radical potential of rest, that your ability to give your bodymind to corporate profit doesn't determine your value as a person, etc., and leaving disabled people behind.
My late teens and early twenties were a sleep-deprived blur due to my then-undiagnosed narcolepsy.
I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 24. By then, I failed out of college due to severe mental health issues, and struggled to stay awake while driving.
I tend to think these sorts of cutesy TikToks the same way I think about influencers. As I told my partner today, if bed rot was that one of the few options someone has access to instead of a defiant joke, it would go from quirky to tragic very quickly.
Came here to say this. On the practical side intentionally being gross can feel defiant, but for more than a day or two it has never helped my chronic illnesses or my depression. I'm also much more interested in learning to "do nothing" or be defiantly unproductive/gross/silly in community, *even for those of us stuck in bed* - which requires creativity and celebration - not alone with the shades drawn. Nothing against anyone doing this for whatever reasons, but I'm not sure I feel the same about bedrotters making anything legible except despair.
Good point about community... it seems like maybe bed rotting is thumbing it's nose at not just work but also social life...? I wonder if those who are able to stay in bed may find they eventually crave genuine connection, maybe realizing that their aloneness is missing something. Maybe that's why they feel the need to post about it on social media, which is really just a proxy for connection? Real community building is so much harder... and surface level socializing is much more common IMHO. It's all exhausting! Well, back to bed!
Wow. Bed rot? I am constantly amazed at how clueless/insensitive people can be about what it is like to be disabled, including with depression. I detest how complex issues in our society are often flattened into shallow generalities. No matter where or how authentically a take seems to start, it gets hijacked, such as the glorification of being in bed or even the insinuation that being nonproductive in bed is rotting . Because if you don't have a choice, well, this can be really painful to hear.
This. All of it. I had a conversation with my boss in which I said I was trying to look into ways I could afford to work part-time & slow down. To which she asks, "why" and I responded with, "because I don't want to work." She says "well no one wants to work, but you have to." My responding question of "but why" left her bewildered and confused.
I firmly believe some people are simply not able to conceptualize it because it is so against what they've been socialized for decades to believe. It also unfortunately isn't a reality for most people due to capitalism making it so we need to work ourselves to the bone to have our basic needs met.
I have since quit & begun working fot myself and it is fascinating to see how I have to actively try to build a self-employed culture (is it a culture if it's just me?) of not overworking.
It is actually really hard when you're self employed to create that balance. Yes, you technically have the ability to set your own hours but you're also in charge of everything and can't lean on anyone else if you need to step back for any reason. I'm struggling with this. I'm curious about others who quit in the pandemic and have hung their own shingle and how they are managing this. I sometimes wonder whether self employment is really a mirage of work life balance and control.
For me I definitely thinking collecting a paycheck is easier but I have some friends who make it work financially going freelance. The perfect mixture would be a part time job - work less hours AND don’t have to do your own job admin things. That’s the holy grail to me.
I'm an OG 'Quiet Quitter', and I'm in my late 50s. My retail workplace has been through so many cost cutting measures while still pretending they are the same company they are pre pandemic. I smile and nod and then continue doing my job (quite well! And really more than my job, because I like to maintain a certain level of presentability in my dept) but I'm not going to rah rah.
I love to fill out the Annual Survey, and just last year they finally put in print that the store manager receives copies of the survey (a previous manager had told me years ago, so I knew already) and I desc ribed being disengaged and shortly afterwards Quiet Quitting b became a catchphrase and I thought "this is me!"
I don't care if the store manager figures out which comments came from me, as m y stats show I'm still a valuable player.
Just wanted to say that disengagement doesn't have an age cutoff, and you can still b e productive but no longer make the company your priority.
Good for you! Really love this comment. This represents tens of millions of American workers.
I’m going to out myself as a Baby Boomer--who lived the whole “do what you love and the money will follow.” Which was fine when the economy was robust and I could manage on the money I was making. As a generation we did a real disservice to younger people expecting them to feel passionate about every job and companies took advantage of this mind-set and expected “engaged” employees no matter the work or the pay. I remember my parents and grandparents mostly thinking of their work as
J-O-B-S and not as an identity, along with trust in labour unions. Work has changed as well--trades are looked down on and everyone now needs a university education much like I needed a high school diploma. But high school was public school and didn’t mire you in debt.
I think younger generations have the right idea to push back on companies trying to make this the workers problem. Viva La Revolution!
Sister Boomer here Pamela who believes our generation has a LOT to learn from those who saw us grinding away and realized there IS a much better way. They don't take half the shit I've been conditioned to accept all my life, as it should be. They push back and any gains we enjoy now have come from them. This is the way.
The generation before us Boomers considered work a way to make money. It was hard getting work during the Great Depression but the money it got you could buy stuff you needed. No one expected to love their job, though it would be nice not to loathe it. Getting work was the big thing as in "Write if you get work." Doing it was just work as in "Why do you think they call it 'work'?"
As someone who has in the past dealt with clinical depression, my love of "bed rotting" is simply not depression. I'm sure it is for some people. But my newfound love of being a bed person (I call myself a bed person affectionately) isn't about being sad. It's actually quite the opposite. I'm in the most joyful season of my life, and spending time in bed reading and watching and talking to people (through chat, through text, through facetime) and writing (yep, I write in bed) has brought me untold amounts of joy. My peacock motif duvet cradles me and my brain is allowed to just....be. Man, I love it.
I understand why people view it askance, but as you said, there's a gross ableism at work there, besides a misconception about what's happening when we take to our beds. I am both supremely comfortable in my bed, and also rejecting hustle culture/productivity culture.
I like "bed person" (or the "duvet days" mentioned in the article) better than "bed rot," because it gets to the difference between voluntary, pleasant time spent in bed and the feeling as a disabled person (whether that's mental illness, serious injury, energy limiting illness, etc., etc.) of being left to rot in one's bed (metaphorically and, for some people in care homes, horrifyingly, literally). As someone also stuck in bed sometimes for various disability reasons, I agree that spending time in bed on purpose, reading, writing, chatting, etc., is very relaxing! I'm planning to buy a day bed for my living room because I prefer that to a sofa.
Yes, I think my problem with the term "bed rotting" is that it feels like it glorifies the symptoms of my absolute devastating depressive episodes a bit too much. I absolutely do not oppose the trend in itself, but the name feels unfortunately chosen because "bed rot" is what I would describe what it looks like when I am stuck in bed for days or weeks on end and sometimes cannot even get out to take a shower or can hardly push myself to get up to go to the toilet. Actual refreshing rest deserves a different name, I would say.
I totally see what you're saying — but also think that we *do* have those terms (self-care day, duvet day) and they don't do what O'Sullivan argues, which is to underline how society at large conceives of expansive rest, in whatever form, for whatever reason, as abject.
To me it feels like a sick day when I was a kid. I was sick maybe 2/3 of the time, but my parents only let me have a handful of sick days, so I learned to cherish that time in bed with a book, a snack and the TV on. (Actually, the TV was in the living room, so I'd turn the couch there into my bed for the day.)
As someone who has also dealt with major depressive episodes AND loves a good lazy Saturday, I think it would be useful for the community to develop “signs that you might be tricking yourself.” Because I have done that. But they are also not the same!
I know what you mean...I have both chronic migraine and major depression and can get stuck in bed for long periods. Over the years I've had to figure out what's depression and what's "I am just sick and can't move for a long time/need extensive rest." Turns out depression is when I stop brushing my teeth ;)
This is exactly what I mean! For me it’s “do I remember to eat before I feel awful.”
That's a REALLY good point! Our brains are tricksy, and I can EASILY see how loving being a bed person could...flip over into some sort of self-protection/denial of a slide into depression.
This piece hits on so much. Most workplaces are dysfunctional— not in a haha, we’re all human amirite? kind of way. It’s extractive: how can I get the most out of you and pay, recognize, and value you the least? Years of surviving office politics, bad bosses, RIFs, passive aggressive leadership, AND not receiving the personal development, mentorship, or opportunities promised to high performers has resulted in people of all ages asking: why am I grinding this hard? If you have a critical mind and push back on unreasonable expectations— you get rebranded as disengaged, difficult to work with, or a quiet quitter. So, in order to prevent this perception from becoming a reality, you often have to silence yourself, pick your battles, and steer clear of the people who have failed up, and are (unintentionally/sometimes very intentionally) antagonizing their workforce by not leading, by being in a position of power that’s unearned and that they will weaponize should you question their standards and MBA way of thinking. We rarely center the cost of all of this on the worker and instead it’s: how much does all that of this cost the employer? It’s workers who are paying this price with compound interest— thank you for highlighting what’s at the root of these problems and who is actually struggling.
This is absolutely 1000% spot on. I lost count of the number of leaders I have worked with who refuse to acknowledge the ways in which the organization -- and their leadership (or lack thereof) -- contributes to high turnover, low morale, and general disengagement.
Totally! A lot of “people managers” (god I hate that phrase) are allergic to conflict/conflict avoidant and they create these communication problems at workplaces where no one can directly address known problems. But part of that bigger problem is that they see themselves as a Boss and they understand the psychology of power but not the psychology of the underclass. The underclass has never willingly been subjugated, no one is like: tell me what to do, treat me terribly, add more and more to my workload and I will do this forever with a smile on my face. It’s common sense, but when you yourself have never been a mere peasant lol, the empathy, self awareness, and understanding are lacking.
It's also the promise of higher productivity meaning getting more, more stuff, more free time, more recognition and so on. Instead, all the higher output went to some boss's boss's boss. It's been forty years. Suddenly, it seems, people are starting to catch on.
It’s fascinating, and, I guess a little disheartening, that the thing I do is so widespread it has a name. Bed rotting is, indeed, a gross term, one that I don’t think I can self-apply. But ever since the pandemic started, I’ve absolutely had days where I stay in bed all day and just sleep on and off. I at first thought I was sick, but no, just deeply exhausted. It happens two or three times a year, and now I just roll with it. Clearly I need the rest at those times.
Yes, the pandemic was a game-changer energy-wise! More often than is comfortable, I feel intensely exhausted at the end of the workday, whether at the office or WFH. Like I just need to completely check out.
Okay I know this wasn’t the entire point of the piece but the paragraph about “indicators of depression” also being forms of deep rest was mind blowing to me. After my parents’ divorce and watching both my mom and sister go through deep depressive periods, I think I built an entire identity around being the child who gets shit done, who no one has to worry about, who stays productive. And reading that paragraph, I was like, wow this is a huge part of why I literally don’t know how to relax. All the things I avoided out of a deathly fear of falling into a depression also meant I was avoiding rest. All the time.
Fuck.
AHP hits the incredible insights once again.
I think there is a lot to this. The people I've worked for who were the most driven to keep working both had an awkward affect when there was no work to do. One had a relationship with alcohol as a segue between the end of the work day and bed, the other would literally work to exhaustion on the regular. I would not categorize either as having a contemplative side.
I call bed rotting “pajama days.” Since I WFH, I occasionally have a day when I don’t get dressed until late afternoon (I have yet to go an entire day in my PJs). After being an elder caregiver for seven years, when I did not have the choice to be lazy, I figure I deserve these once in a while. It isn’t depression, it is recharging.
You do deserve it! It is recharging!
I have done away with the idea of PJs altogether. There are inside clothes and outside clothes--when I get home, I shower and put on my inside (read: comfy) clothes. I only put on outside clothes if I have a reason to leave the house. So on the scattered days when I don't have to leave at all, I stay in inside clothes all day and feel 100% fine with it!
Yes! I know a lot of people who wear their same clothes from work/errands/whatever until they are getting ready for bed and I do NOT get it! Since I was a teenager, basically, as soon as I am home and know I'm not going out again, outside clothes (AND BRA) are OFF, I have a shower (or at least wash my face) and that's it! Various sex friends over the years have found it hilarious that as soon as we get in from a date, say, or picking up food, I'm like shower/bathrobe before anything else, ha.
Oh my gosh, the first thing I do when I walk in the door is take off my shoes and my bra. That's true freedom.
Yes! (though when I lived in Alaska, I did usually go outside to walk my dog in my 'inside' clothes, because it was too cold to take off the warm things I was already wearing to put on something else)
I also do the same thing, and I think it comes from wearing a uniform in highschool. I didn't want to stay in it one minute longer than necessary, but I didn't see the point in putting on clean clothes just to change into pajamas, so i just had this hybrid of things that were comfy, but that I could wear if I was made to go to the grocery store.
(#BigPajama (like Big Pharma on instagram earlier this week was hilarious)
Like yoga clothes. Definitely!
Coming in hot (from a Time magazine article that wandered by my LinkedIn feed: RAGE APPLYING - “Feeling stuck and unappreciated at work? Want to work somewhere with a higher salary, better work-life balance and a boss you can actually stand? Maybe you’ve just had a really bad work day. Your first instinct might be to fire out applications to every relevant job listing you see—known as “rage applying”—but that might not be the smartest move.”
Can. We. NOT?
As you said, dissertations could be written about these phenomena. One thing we collectively continue to not name is these responses for at least some people (myself included) are a form of processing, coping, or responding to the mass trauma and upheaval of recent years, including the diffuse and anticipatory grief of the pandemic.
Maybe we should take a page from John & Yoko's Bed-ins for Peace and recast "bed rotting" as a form of work protest, a "lie-down" strike if you will :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed-ins_for_Peace
One of the ways I can tell that I'm pushing too far is when my sleep schedule starts coming apart. I can't always do anything about this -- when grades or report cards are due, it's time to grind; when it's summer, it's hot until late & bright early. But I can use what I've learned from wrestling with eating disorders and pay attention to my body, and do my best. I'm fascinated that someone doing what's best for them, for whatever reason, is framed as inherently abject bc it's not engaged with labor. How is my taking a day to sleep in & watch fun YouTube cooking videos hurting anyone? But apparently, I'm the bad one for not being efficient enough, well enough, rested enough, etc. I like the "rot" epithet in the same way that my queer friends & I lovingly refer to each other as "bog witches", and it reminds me of the good conversations I've had in death positivity spaces.
I'm not on TikTok --- how much of this is happening with femme influencers / posters? I wonder about how femininity's relationship to abjection is coming into play here.
If you keep calling yourself garbage, you'll keep believing you are garbage - my therapist, 2021
Why do we have to label everything! Let me live, world!
Philosophers and marketers call it reification, making something into a thing. It lets us talk about it. For example, women all over the US were experiencing the way their lives were limited in the 1950s and 1960s, but no one really talked about it until Betty Friedan called it "the problem" in The Feminine Mystique.
Even the man without a name had a name.
I get that, but it kind of already had a name - resting!
My grandmother used to lionize Arthur Fiedler, longtime conductor of the Boston Pops orchestra, for saying "Who rests, rots." She had a plastic clock with his form at its center and arms-a-twirl with the time, a baton in the minute-hand. Who rests, rots. Such an obnoxious pronouncement. The man is dead now, and so is my grandmother. No one much cares that the second-stringers in the Boston Symphony Orchestra made extra bucks playing arrangements of "Yesterday" or Bing Crosby's tunes. The clock is gone, too. When I went to a memorial service for my uncle at the house where it hung, I gave a look, because I wanted to see it, rotted.
Who rests, rots, indeed. So does everyone. So did Fiedler, and Granny. The constellation of love, joy, resentment, and abuse that we all live in needs attention, care, and improvement, and we need rest to give it those things, because if we are whirling around "working" all the time, we may not notice the damage we do in our semi-permanent exhaustion.
Enjoy your days to the full extent of your ability to do so, then rest, finally, rot.