REST IS RESISTANCE
by Don Hall
The modern workplace is a pyre disguised as progress. Every morning, millions shuffle into glass towers or log into Teams calls, dutifully pouring gasoline over their sanity in exchange for a paycheck, a title, and maybe—if they’re lucky—a ping-pong table. It’s the corporate equivalent of The Hunger Games: competitors smiling through clenched jaws while middle management cheers for “team spirit” from the Capitol. We watch each other smolder under “stretch goals,” “crunch time,” and “lean staffing,” and still call it a career.
The tendency for companies to burn employees to the ground isn’t accidental—it’s systemic, efficient, and, for the moment, wildly profitable. Corporations learned long ago that exhaustion is cheaper than inspiration. It costs less to replace a human than to nurture one. HR becomes the hospice for the burned-out, offering mindfulness apps and pizza parties instead of fair workloads or moral leadership. The language of wellness is wielded like a sedative, a soft lie to muffle the screams of the overworked.
What began as the industrial demand for productivity has metastasized into a cultural virtue. Hustle isn’t a symptom—it’s a shrine. We post our own incinerations on LinkedIn like medals of valor: “Worked 80 hours this week, crushed it!” The system doesn’t need to coerce us anymore; it just flatters us into compliance. “Do what you love,” they said, and suddenly passion became the cheapest fuel on earth. Workers light themselves up for the illusion of meaning, mistaking corporate purpose for personal identity.
The rot lies in the unwritten contract: Your worth equals your output. That calculus rewards the sociopath and punishes the humane. The executive who fires 30 people gets a bonus; the team lead who refuses overtime gets a reputation problem. We measure loyalty in late nights and unpaid weekends, pretending it’s mutual. But when the company decides to “restructure,” loyalty proves to be a one-way street lined with burnt-out husks.
Why do we let it happen? Because we’ve internalized the idea that to resist is to risk exile. Capitalism runs not only on labor but on fear—the primal dread of being left behind. Every paycheck carries a whisper: You need us more than we need you. And so, like the frog in the pot, we acclimate. A little more heat, a little less sleep, a few more “urgent” emails at 10 p.m. We convince ourselves this is temporary, a necessary sacrifice for security or prestige. But security in this system is a mirage: it only exists until the next quarterly report.
The pandemic should’ve been our wake-up call. Millions saw, for the first time, that their jobs weren’t sacred and that their exhaustion wasn’t noble—it was exploitation in business-casual. But even after the Great Resignation, many slinked back into the same fire, convinced the problem wasn’t the structure but their stamina. That’s the cruelest illusion of all—that burnout is a personal failure rather than a deliberate design.
The truth is that modern corporations are built to extract everything and give nothing permanent in return. People are data points; their suffering is a line item. When employees collapse, companies recycle their resumes into PowerPoint slides labeled “turnover costs.” The leadership books say “people are our greatest asset,” but assets are meant to be leveraged, depreciated, and replaced. It’s a polite vocabulary for slow immolation.
And we—the singed survivors—participate willingly because we still believe in the American myth of “making it.” The system doesn’t need chains when it has dreams. We trade our health for the hope of freedom, but freedom never arrives. Promotions come with golden cages, not keys. We know the fire is burning us, yet we stay close because warmth feels safer than cold uncertainty.
The fix isn’t simple, but it starts with rejection—rejecting the lie that exhaustion equals excellence. Rejecting the hero narrative of the workaholic who “saves the project” by sacrificing weekends. Rejecting the idea that our humanity is negotiable. Companies won’t stop burning people down because building people up doesn’t appear on the balance sheet. But people can stop handing over kindling.
The new rebellion is rest. The quiet revolution is saying no without apology. Imagine if burnout weren’t a badge of honor but a mark of failure—not personal failure, but institutional. Imagine if we measured leadership not by how much it demands but by how much it protects.
Until then, we live among ashes and call them opportunity. The charred remains of our time, energy, and empathy litter the cubicles and inboxes of a culture that equates self-destruction with success. Every fire needs oxygen. Maybe the first step toward freedom is learning to hold our breath.
