I Spent $300 Learning How to Relax

I am lying on a yoga mat that cost more than my first car, trying to remember how to breathe. The instructor's voice is telling me to "let go of my to-do list" while I mentally add "learn to let go" to my to-do list. This is my third rest workshop this month. I am very serious about not being serious.

The wellness industry has discovered that burnout is profitable. For $89, you can learn to do nothing. For $150, someone will teach you that productivity is toxic while selling you a $40 journal to track your non-productivity. I own four of these journals. They are blank. This feels like performance art, but it's just late capitalism.

My phone has seven apps dedicated to rest. One reminds me to rest. One gamifies resting. One has a leaderboard where I can see how I rank against other people who are also competitively resting. I am currently in the 78th percentile of people who have successfully done nothing today. This should not be a thing you can rank for, and yet here we are, turning the absence of doing into another thing we can fail at.

The newest trend is "rest coaching." A woman charges $200 an hour to tell you it's okay to stop. I book a session. During our call, she asks me what my rest goals are. I realize I have created quarterly objectives for my leisure time. I have a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has color coding.

She tells me I'm "bringing too much intentionality to my rest." I am being too productive at being unproductive. The irony sits between us like a third person on the Zoom call. I pay her via Venmo and immediately feel more relaxed, which might just be the relief of having completed another task.

I used to know how to do nothing without consulting a professional. I used to waste time without monitoring my waste. Now I photograph my leisure and post it with captions about boundaries. I perform rest the way I perform everything else.for an audience, with metrics, fully optimized.

Tomorrow I'm attending a workshop on spontaneity. I've had it in my calendar for six weeks.