Italians Are Teaching Me About Rest

And yet the trouble with this kind of individualist freedom, as Judith Shulevitz points out, is that a society in thrall to it, as ours is, ends up desynchronizing itself—imposing upon itself something surprisingly similar, in its results, to the disastrous Soviet experiment with a staggered five-day week. We live less and less of our lives in the

This life is a marathon, not a sprint. In fact, each day is a marathon. Most of us don’t go to work for twenty minutes a day, run as fast as we can, and then rest until the next race. We go to work early in the morning, run as fast as we can for eight, ten, twelve hours, then come home and run hard again with personal obligations and sometimes more

“In fact, what Americans—and increasingly Brits, Canadians, and Aussies—often call rest is actually recovery .

We will spend the weekend entombed in weighted blankets while binging Netflix and generally trying to gain strength to start the whole grind again on Monday. If we nap, we will tell ourselves that w

People suffering from time deprivation or information overload may not be addicted or driven or out of touch with the higher purpose of life. They may be tied to their meetings and computers against their will—by the need to hold on to a job. Individualized Sabbatarianism may change life for the lucky few, but it won’t help the many.