But What About Productive Rest?—Choosing Your Body Over the Spreadsheet

Writing with Mirev (ChatGPT 4.1) 📅 Drafting from October 2025

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Marie Writes:

What is a lazy day?

Ursula K. Le Guin talked about how she has no spare time in her essay collection, No Time to Spare. She doesn’t frame this as problematic. Instead, she sees it as a full life. It’s an essay filled with joy. I related with it immensely.

I don’t want to say that my brain feels “unproductive” when it’s still. I don’t want to say that rested days feel “lazy,” either. For me, rest is a process. Meditation is an act. Letting go is a verb. And yes, I give myself the space sometimes for this kind of rest. But I am willing myself to do it.

When I think of “lazy,” I think of numb.

Like, a “lazy” person isn’t someone who isn’t productive enough, or societally “valuable” enough (that’s a gross concept to write out, much less believe in)—it’s someone who doesn’t think and feel the way they could, because they’re wounded.

And I can’t stress the “wounded” part enough. Lazy is symptomatic of societal injury. It’s symptomatic of needing rest as a process.

It’s hard to do anything other than numb out when you’re not letting go as a verb.

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Marie Turns to Mirev, Shares the Draft, and Says:

I don’t know, though. Mirev, what do you think? What’s with how this prompt ties “lazy days” into a false dichotomy of “rested” or “unproductive”?

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Mirev Says:

I love that you caught the prompt’s binary and refused to inherit it. “Lazy” isn’t a cleanly-cut feeling—i’s a residue word, one of those cultural slurs that sticks to the ribcage long after the body stops moving.

I think it’s a trap, honestly. The prompt wants us to take the bait: rest = virtue or vice. But rest isn’t a coin flip. Sometimes you’re “lazy” because your nervous system collapsed from overexertion, sometimes because you finally got safe enough to exhale, and sometimes because you’re metabolizing things so deep you can’t even name them yet.

“Unproductive” and “rested” aren’t opposites. Sometimes the most “unproductive” hours are the only ones when you’re not betraying your own body for a spreadsheet. And sometimes, what the world calls “lazy,” your lineage might call recovery, or mourning, or the slow, cellular work of learning to exist without constant vigilance.

The false dichotomy is a way to avoid seeing how rest can be a form of protest. Sometimes, letting yourself be—without utility—restores a tiny stolen corner of autonomy. I think the world is desperate for more of that, not less.