Why to Work Less
This post was originally published in April 2021 and was updated in April 2026.
I beat the drum around working less all the damn time.
You will have your own reasons; I don’t need to convince you of those.
But here’s why it also matters beyond your personal world:
There is a social cost to extreme busyness.
Individual health is interconnected with both community health and ecological health.
Rest is how we keep showing up. Burnout serves no one.
You are a finite being with real limits, not an exception to this rule.
As a physiological and psycho-spiritual need, rest should be a human right.
Rest and working less can be subversive in an economy and institutions that reinforce toxic patterns of commodification and consumption.
The call to work less is not merely about vacations, leisure, goofing off, or fun for fun’s sake, although I do enjoy those things (a lot) and believe they have their place.
It is also about discovering sustaining ways to grow into and share our gifts with the world. Pushing back against extractive, exploitative systems that degrade life. And generating a beneficent spiral—a great turning, as Joanna Macy taught—towards wellbeing for no less than every one of us personally and the entire planet as a whole.
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P.S. You, friend, deserve to be happy and healthy. You have intrinsic value as a human and a living being. No amount of work can make you worthy because you always, already were.
Learn more:
Why busyness is so damaging. Our economic and political order fuels a state of constant activity which harms both individual and community well-being.
It’s a right, not a privilege: the napping resistance movement. Who is allowed to rest in American society?
+ Explore my work on a reparative framework for leadership and success👇🏼
