Reading about Rest
I started reading about work and life and rest a few years ago when I was feeling burnt out. Early career me was very focused on stability and security and at some point, I realized I was tired. I never wanted to be a workaholic but as it may be clear, I had somehow become one. So I started reading about how other people prioritize life and how to get their creative spark back. Below, is just a list of books on the topic and some thoughts.
- Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang - currently reading
- The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron - June 2025
- This was recommended to me by multiple people and I also saw Doechii did it so I did it. No one mentioned how religious this book was and even though there's a disclaimer about it, it still required me to suspend a lot of skepticism to get through it. Overall, I appreciated that it forced me to dedicate time to myself and to do fun stuff. I also did benefit from the exercises, especially reflecting on dreams and taking time to spend on my hobbies. I was reading a lot when I got to the no-media week and that was, predictably difficult. I'm not sure reading the book by itself is helpful, but daily journaling and weekly artist dates was useful.
- Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey - June 2025
- This was a quick read and somehow, her writing style made me sleepy? Like, in a good way. Reading about the Nap Ministry and resting, really soothed me especially with what was going on in America. This lined up with similar themes to How to Do Nothing
- Life is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler - April 2025
- Okay, this isn't technically a book about rest, but it caught my eye because of a quote: "The average person goes through three to five of these massive reorientations in their adult lives; their average duration, my data show, is five years. When you do the math, that means nearly half our lives are spent responding to one of these episodes". As you can imagine, I had been feeling this uncertainty about work and feeling lost in life and I felt reassured reading about all these collected stories of transition.
- How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell - April 2025
- I've been a social media hater forever. I deleted TikTok because it felt too much and even Youtube Shorts is too addicting. I enjoyed Odell's arguments to take back your own attention.
- The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff - February 2024
- It's funny to be that his career background at IDEO is probably what helped popularize this book since the message of this book is to not fall into the trap of getting all your validation from work. I enjoyed his tracing of the history of overwork in America and how we've gotten to the place we are now. My own takeaway is to invest in other forms of validation so that work is not the primary funnel for my ambition or the main source of external success indications.
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