How much rest do we really need?
Laetitia@Work #52
Hi everyone,
My friend Samuel Durand is making his third Work in Progress documentary. Today I’m in Paris for a day of shooting as I’ll be featured in his film alongside impressive people like anthropologist James Suzman! 😍 It would be an understatement to say that I look forward to it. The film deals with a fascinating question: what impact do the transformations of work have on our relationship with time?
To prepare for the interview, Samuel sent me a list of questions, one of which deals with the concept of rest. He’s convinced that if we find ways to make work more pleasurable and sustainable, we won’t need to focus on rest so much. Why do we need time to rest? Why do we need holidays and weekends? In a perfect world, if we weren’t exhausted from our days at work, would we still need time to rest?
There are many layers to the subject of rest and how much of it we need. Brain specialists love the metaphor of crop rotation and fallow land to evoke the cognitive rest needed to renew our capacities. Unionists love to speak about past collective struggles and how rest was institutionalised by forging new political alliances. Anthropologists like James Suzman like to write about the different forms of rest throughout history shaped by the agricultural and then the industrial work models.
I won’t pretend to exhaust the subject, far from it. But I’d like to share two thoughts about it. The first regards the fundamentally social aspect of rest: we’re apes and we need time with our fellow apes. The second deals with the nature of work and is based on the grazing/gorging continuum in the animal world…
This newsletter is about 🦧, 🦁 and 🐄.👇💡
Rest is a social construct
By historical standards, the modern work week and weekend are fairly recent institutions. By and large they are products of the industrial organisation of work. They were hard won by exploited workers who fought collectively for a better life.
As for holidays, they vary a lot depending on country and culture. Most French people take at least 5 weeks of annual holidays whereas most Americans can’t even take 2 weeks of paid holidays for granted.
But in some form or other holidays have been around for centuries, either because their religious foundations are old. Or they are based on pagan rituals to mark the passing of seasons, the solstice, the end of harvesting, life rituals etc.
What all this means is that rest is essentially a social construct. And it’s precisely as a social construct that it has so much value. It’s designed to bring us together, to give us moments to share with others and rituals to celebrate with our communities. We need rest because we are inherently social creatures like other apes 🦧 Without time with our friends, family and communities, we can’t thrive and our health deteriorates rapidly.
Weekends have long had this virtue of bringing families together and offering time for shared rituals. But because the social dimension appears prevalent, people have regularly questioned their use. If we don’t need them for physical recuperation, then surely we could do without them. Or if it’s just about physical or cognitive recuperation, then surely we don’t have to all stop working at the same time, do we?
That’s why the Soviet Union experimented with a different system for about a decade. Stalin saw Sundays as a threat to productivity and industrial progress. Why should machines sit silent in factories for one day every week? Couldn’t another system be invented to avoid such a waste? So a Soviet economist and politician by the name of Yuri Larin came up with an idea so the machines would never be idle: the nepreryvka, or “continuous working week.” Here’s how it worked:
Unlike the ordinary seven-day week, the continuous week began as a five-day cycle, with each day color-coded and marked with a symbol. The population would be carved up into as many groups, each with its own rest day. The days of the week, as familiar as family members, would gradually be stripped of meaning. Instead, each of the five new days was marked by a symbolic, politically appropriate item: wheatsheaf; red star; hammer and sickle; book; and, finally, budenovka, or woolen military cap. Calendars from the time show the days marked out in colored circles like beads on a string: yellow, peach, red, purple, green. These circles indicated when you worked and when you rested. This was shift work, on the most enormous scale in human history. (For 11 Years, the Soviet Union Had No Weekends)
Spoiler alert: the experiment failed miserably and eventually had to be abandoned. Workers dissented and rebelled. They discovered that a-synchronous rest isn’t really worth it. Letters of complaint published in Pravda (the official newspaper in Soviet Russia) included the following words of wisdom:
“What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school and nobody can visit us? It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” “How are we to work now, if mother is free on one day, father on another, brother on a third and I myself on a fourth?”
👉 My book (in 🇫🇷) deals with the many limits of productivity. You can order it online: En finir avec la productivité 📚
What we can learn from the opposition between grazing and gorging
Besides the social component of rest, there is of course a physical and cognitive component as well, which varies greatly depending on the type of work you do. To illustrate that, I’ll take a metaphor from the animal world.
In the animal world, there are different categories of feeders that can be placed on a continuum. At one end of it you have the grazing types. At the other end you have the gorging types.
The grazing category include all grass-eaters (like 🐮 and 🐴) who spend most of their days grazing. It doesn’t require a lot of energy but it doesn’t bring a lot of calories either so they have to graze pretty much all day. Their long grazing sessions will be interspersed with fairly brief periods of digestion (rest) during which they’ll stop grazing.
The gorging category include many meat-eating species, among which all the big cats (🦁, 🐆 and the like). These animals expend an enormous amount of energy over a very short period of time to hunt their prey. Quite often they fail. When they do succeed, it’s like winning the lottery: they have a lot of calories all at once. Between their attempts, they rest a lot. In fact, they nap most of the time. When you watch them, you may believe them to be super lazy. They’re not lazy of course, they’re just not grazers!
The grazing vs gorging dichotomy is very telling when it comes to work. On one end of the spectrum you have low-intensity low-reward work that you need a lot of time for. On the other end you have high-risk high-intensity high-reward work that you just can’t do for a very long period of time.
What the metaphor suggests is that rest depends both on intensity and reward. Problems arise when you have high-intensity low-reward combinations (exhaustive and badly paid work). These aren’t sustainable over time. They have been and continue to be fairly common but they generally result in lower life expectancy (i.e. people die younger).
🎤 I’m in Paris today (October 20) to speak about productivity, its sexism & its perils (i.e. about my latest book, En finir avec la productivité) in a fantastic feminist space called Chez Mona, 9 rue de Vaugirard. Come meet me at 7:30pm 🤗 Book here (in 🇫🇷)
💡Check out all my articles published in English in Welcome to the Jungle, among which Here’s why you don’t need to be irreplaceable at work. And all the new ones in 🇫🇷
🎙️ Nouveau Départ: a lot of podcasts deal with work this season, for example one with Pauline Rochart titled Travail : sociologie de l'expérience 🎧, or this conversation with Nicolas about household chores Réflexions sur le ménage 🎧. Subscribe to receive our future podcasts directly in your inbox! (in 🇫🇷)
Miscellaneous
😠 Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It?, Rachel E. Gross, The New York Times, October 2022: “Gynecology is far more focused on fertility and preventing disease. “We don’t do a great job about talking about sex from a pleasure-based perspective,” said Dr. Frances Grimstad, a gynecologist (…) “We talk about it from a prevention standpoint. We’re trying to prevent S.T.I.s,” or sexually transmitted infections. “We’re trying to prevent pregnancy, unless you’re trying to get pregnant. We don’t talk about sexual pleasure.”
👶 Why You Can’t Find Child Care: 100,000 Workers Are Missing, Dana Goldstein, The New York Times, October 2022: “Positions stocking shelves at Target, ringing up groceries at Trader Joe’s, and packing and loading boxes at Amazon warehouses now often pay more than jobs in child-care programs in many parts of the country. Working at a nail salon or managing pharmacy benefits over the phone can also lead to higher earnings.”
📹 How the Mexican cartels are making profits now, The Economist, October 2022: this enlightening Economist video (15 minutes) explains how the gig economy is transforming work models in Mexico’s drug cartels 💀
Whether you’re on the grazing or the gorging team, I hope you get to enjoy delicious rest this weekend! 🤗