The Politics of Rest — Let's Talk
Reclaiming Liberation Through Individual and Organizational Collective Resistance
Rest is not the absence of work—it's the presence of liberation.
Read that again if you need to.
In a society built on extracting maximum productivity from human bodies, the simple act of stopping becomes revolutionary.
When Tricia Hersey founded The Nap Ministry in 2016, declaring "rest is resistance," she wasn't promoting self-care—she was advocating for it.
She was launching a liberation manifesto that connects our exhausted bodies to centuries of stolen labor and offers collective healing as the pathway to systemic transformation.
For first-generation professionals and underrepresented leaders navigating systems that weren't built for us, understanding rest as a form of political resistance isn't a luxury—it's a survival strategy.
The politics of rest reveals how capitalism and white supremacy operate through exhaustion as control, while simultaneously offering tools for building human-centered alternatives to extractive organizational models.
How capitalism colonized our rest: The historical foundation of grind culture
The relationship between rest and resistance runs deeper than modern hustle culture. Let’s take you through a lesson in sociological theory, one developed between 1904 and 1905. Protestant capitalism deliberately weaponized exhaustion as a tool of domination, beginning with slavery and evolving through industrial capitalism into today's "24/7" economy.
Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant work ethic reveals how religious ideology transformed labor from necessity into a moral imperative. Work became a divine calling, productivity became a spiritual virtue, and rest became “lazy”. This framework provided ideological justification for plantation capitalism, where enslaved Black bodies were systematically deprived of rest as a mechanism of control.
The legacy lives in our bodies today.
Jonathan Crary's research on "24/7 capitalism" demonstrates how contemporary systems attempt to eliminate all boundaries between work and rest, treating sleep itself as inefficiency to be optimized away.
Digital capitalism creates what Crary calls "a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks" …the complete colonization of time itself.
For marginalized communities, this historical context isn't abstract. Marginalized groups carry the biological toll of centuries of stolen rest through what researchers call "weathering"—the cumulative impact of racial stress across lifespans.
The intersectional reality: Who gets to rest and who doesn't
Rest is not equally accessible.
First-generation and underrepresented professionals navigate workplace cultures built on assumptions of inherited privilege, lacking the cultural capital to understand when rest is acceptable or how to set boundaries without career consequences.
The same systems that deny marginalized communities equitable wages, healthcare, and housing also systematically deny access to recovery and respite.
This creates what liberation scholars call "differential exhaustion"—the way capitalism extracts more from already-vulnerable bodies.
Black feminist scholarship (K. Crenshaw). reveals how intersecting oppressions compound the need for rest while simultaneously making it less available.
Class intersections amplify these barriers.
Working-class communities face job insecurity and multiple employment necessities that make rest a privilege they cannot afford.
First-generation professionals often bear additional family financial responsibilities, making it more challenging to take unpaid time off or reduce work intensity.
They often lack mentorship on workplace norms related to boundaries and may not understand when rest is acceptable without risking their positions.
The work of adrienne maree brown and others demonstrates how pleasure and rest become tools for liberation when practiced collectively rather than individually. Brown argues that rest enables the imagination necessary for envisioning alternatives to current systems—making it essential for transformation, not separate from it.
Organizational liberation through rest-centered leadership
So why do I share theory and social justice paradigms?
Because I believe knowledge is power
I believe knowledge should be accessible
My work focuses on human-centered leadership
through empowerment and liberation
So let’s get into it.
Traditional leadership models were designed to extract, not sustain.
Let’s break this down:
ex·tract
verb
remove or take out, especially by effort or force.
Extractive Leadership:
Takes energy from people without replenishing it
Demands performance without providing support systems
Uses up people's creativity, passion, and labor for organizational profit
Assumes unlimited capacity - expects people to give endlessly
Prioritizes short-term gains over long-term human wellbeing
Treats people as resources to be consumed rather than humans to be developed
Creates dependency - keeps people needing the system to survive
Examples:
The manager who: Takes credit for your ideas in meetings while you do the work
The boss who: Texts you at 9pm expecting immediate responses but is unreachable when you need help
The organization that: Promotes "work-life balance" while rewarding people who work weekends
The leader who: Asks you to train your replacement without telling you you're being laid off
The company that: Offers "unlimited PTO" but creates a culture where no one actually takes time off
The workplace that: Celebrates your "resilience" when you work through a family crisis instead of offering support
Regenerative/Sustainable Leadership (What's Possible):
re·gen·er·ate
verb
renewal or restoration of a body, bodily part, or biological system (such as a forest) after injury or as a normal process
sus·tain·able
adjective
of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged
Regenerative / Sustainable Leadership:
Gives back more energy than it takes
Invests in people's growth and capacity
Creates conditions for people to thrive long-term
Recognizes human limits and works within them
Builds systems that support rather than drain
Develops people's skills and opportunities
Creates abundance rather than scarcity
Examples:
The manager who: Publicly credits your contributions and actively advocates for your promotion
The boss who: Checks in on your workload and redistributes tasks when you're overwhelmed
The organization that: Actually tracks whether people are taking time off and encourages it
The leader who: Gives you 6 months notice about layoffs and helps you find other opportunities
The company that: Pays for your therapy, professional development, and encourages you to use both
The workplace that: Automatically reduces your responsibilities during family emergencies and holds your position
The Difference:
Extractive: "How can we get more from this person?"
Regenerative: "How can we help this person grow while they contribute?"
Look at this interesting response from Steve Jobs when asked:
What was the most important thing that you personally learned at Apple that you're doing it next?
Hi response:
“…I now take a longer term view on people.
In other words, when I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn’t to go fix it.
It’s to say we’re building a team here and we’re gonna do great stuff in the next decade, not just the next year, and so
What do I need to do to helo so that the person that’s screwing up learns versus how do i fix the problem”
This perspective is revolutionary. Instead of throwing people away when they're not producing what the company wants, we invest in their growth. People get tired, life happens—and instead of discarding people when they need rest, we need to build rest into jobs for the long term.
Why This Matters for Underrepresented Leaders:
Traditional workplaces assume leaders have infinite capacity, inherited resources, and support systems that enable endless availability. For underrepresented leaders, these models become sites of particular violence—demanding they prove worthiness through unsustainable sacrifice while providing none of the structural support that makes such performance possible for privileged counterparts.
Leadership consultant Jacqueline Twillie's R4 Framework specifically addresses this: Risk, Resilience, Rest, and Reward. This framework positions rest not as weakness but as strategic necessity—the foundation that enables sustainable risk-taking and resilient leadership over time.
Rest as liberation in workplace contexts means recognizing that for marginalized leaders, sustainable pacing often yields better long-term outcomes than unsustainable intensity. It means understanding that the additional emotional labor of being "the only one" requires intentional recovery practices. It means challenging productivity myths that equate overwork with competence and recognizing rest as essential for the quality decision-making that leadership demands.
The Nap Ministry represents the evolution from self-care to liberation practice. The four core tenets reveal rest's revolutionary potential: Rest disrupts white supremacy and capitalism; our bodies are sites of liberation; naps provide portals for imagination and healing; our dream space has been stolen and must be reclaimed. This isn't individual wellness—it's collective liberation.
These movements share common elements: theoretical grounding in broader liberation frameworks, community-centered rather than individual approaches, historical consciousness connecting to resistance traditions, and intersectional analysis recognizing how systems of oppression shape access to rest.
Building human-centered alternatives: Rest in organizational transformation
The future of leadership requires abandoning extractive models for regenerative approaches that build sustainable capacity rather than depleting human resources.
This transformation is particularly crucial for first-generation professionals and underrepresented leaders who need organizations that work with their realities rather than against them.
Rest-centered organizational design includes clear communication about workplace norms (especially important for first-generation professionals who lack inherited knowledge about boundaries), mentorship programs that explicitly address self-care and sustainability, flexible benefits acknowledging diverse family responsibilities, and advancement pathways that don't require unsustainable sacrifice.
For individual leaders, embodied leadership research shows that physical, emotional, and mental well-being directly impact leadership capacity. Somatic approaches integrate mindfulness, body awareness, and nervous system regulation as leadership tools. Rest becomes not just recovery from work but active preparation for transformative leadership.
Rest is not the opposite of revolution—it's the foundation. Every successful movement for liberation has required sustainable practices that enable long-term resistance rather than quick burnout. Rest provides the imagination space necessary for envisioning alternatives, the resilience needed for sustained challenge to systems of oppression, and the collective care that builds movements capable of creating real change.
For first-generation professionals and underrepresented leaders, embracing rest as resistance means rejecting internalized messages that equate your worth with your productivity. It means understanding that sustainable success often requires different strategies than those modeled by leaders with inherited advantages. It means recognizing that your well-being is not selfish—it's strategic.
Organizations serious about equity must move beyond diversity initiatives to fundamental transformation of work cultures that assume unlimited capacity and inherited privilege. This means building systems that work for people carrying multiple oppressions, family responsibilities, and economic pressures—not just those with traditional support structures.
The politics of rest ultimately challenges the assumption that human beings exist to serve economic systems rather than economic systems existing to serve human flourishing. In choosing rest, in creating space for imagination and healing, in building collective practices of care and restoration, we engage in the fundamental work of liberation: refusing to accept extractive systems as inevitable and building regenerative alternatives in their place.
The revolution may not be televised, but it might be well-rested. And in that rest, we find not escape from the work of transformation, but the sustainable foundation that makes lasting change possible.
If this resonates, you're not alone—and you don't have to figure this out by yourself.
The politics of rest isn't just theory; it's practice. It's choosing to build something different together, to model the regenerative leadership we're talking about, to create spaces where rest and resistance happen in community.
Join the Thriving Human Community - A Thriving Ecosystem of Care
Dignity, empowerment, and liberation on our own terms. A community modeling leadership rooted in humanity—where transparency, vulnerability, reciprocity, and justice are the fabric of how we grow.
This is where we practice what we preach: rest as resistance, wealth-building as community work, mentorship that flows in all directions. Because revolution isn't a solo project—it's collective work that requires sustainable practices.
Ready to rest, resist, and build together? [Join us here]
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