There's a ferocious advocacy for resting right now, I've noticed.
Yes, the pandemic and quarantine with so many of us sitting on a giant pause button for months accelerated this, but the idea isn't really new. To name one semi-recent example, Jenny Odell's excellent and seminal book, How to Do Nothing, was published in 2019, but the push-and-pull of work versus leisure has been with us ever since (some) humans didn't have to work every single waking moment to meet basic needs.
The general idea here is that contra to regularly scheduled programming, it isn't ideal, moral, or even practical to be doing and producing something every moment of your life, if you don’t have to just to stay afloat.
It seems to me that this must be a reaction to the ever- increasing understanding that the rewards of "the system" are illusory. In China, the movement is called "Lying Flat.”
It also seems related to to social media and the way it turns life into a constant performance, with boffo box office profits promised and never materializing in the bank.
To have the time and space to not be constantly productive, some things have got to go. And so I'm announcing here and now, ta da!: the end of my monthly Art Challenge Calendar project.
I started it in April with the idea of doing it for a full calendar year, to see how I'd like it. I was curious about the different kinds of art challenges on Instagram, since there are just so many of them — curious about how organized them and how, how many people did them, and so on.
By July, though, my curiosity felt satisfied enough, and by August, I realized — I don't want to spend more time on Instagram. (See previous post for contemporaneous evidence!) I don't want to encourage other people to spend more time on it, either. This project doesn't make sense for me anymore.
I could have just stopped doing the calendars without a word of course, slinking quietly off into the night. But I think there's something misleading about only announcing beginnings and not the endings of projects, and this feels related to performative hustle culture.
Ending is the fate of every project at some point. So why not tell the whole story when we can? To not do it gives the false impression that the only thing that ever happens is new beginnings — when, at any given moment, and equal or greater number of projects and ventures are winding down. And this is okay! Endings aren't necessarily a failure, but they are a decision and as we reconsider the value of resting, it's a good moment to talk about the endings that make that rest (or something else) possible.