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 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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.