You Need a Season of Rest and Celebration
Embracing the winter season of your creative life
One of the strangest compliments managers give is calling someone who produces a lot of work a “machine.” Why would any human being want to be a machine?
Machines work until they break — and then they’re replaced. But so many employers and hustle-and-grind-until-you-die influencers sell you on this idea that success only comes to those who outwork everyone else.
As a society, we put the most pressure to work like, and even look like, a machine on women.
From mothers being expected to work a full-time job to help make ends meet and to then work a second shift once they get home taking care of the children — and often their male partners — to our impossible beauty standards that treat any woman over 25 as an old hag, the message is clear: work until you break.
Olivia Rodrigo sums it up perfectly in her song “all-american bitch”:
And I am built like a mother and a total machine
One of the fundamentals of our humanity is the need for rest. As the code bros are fond of saying, this is a feature — not a bug.
Rest is when our body and mind heal from the rigors of life. It’s also when all the information we have taken in…
