Rerest is Resistance: A Manifesto for Spiritual Self-Preservation (Rest is Resistance, Singularity is Childlessness)
A film and culture writer named Sara Stewart lives in western Pennsylvania. This is the author’s opinions, and they are solely theirs. You can read opinion articles on CNN.
The manifesto encourages us to rest as an act of political and cultural self-preservation. The argument that ‘grind culture’ is an important one is made by Tricia Hersey in “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto”. our addiction to 24/7 busyness, is a product of White supremacy and dead-end capitalism.
Hersey powerfully argues that taking a step off the conveyor belt to allow the mind to dream and imagine is the key to becoming more fully alive. As a theologian, she also posits that this is a human right divinely given. She writes in her introduction that culture is collaborating for them not to rest. We are sleep deprived because the systems view us as machines, but bodies are not machines.”
Readers complained about everything from Hersey’s solutions being unrealistic to its being too obvious in an article by the New York Times. And it is true that many people are in jobs and financial circumstances that simply don’t allow for the luxury of saying no to tasks or extra requests from the boss.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/opinions/rest-is-resistance-so-is-childlessness-stewart/index.html
What If We Were Not Here to Quit? How Many Are We? What Do We Need to Know Before We Leave? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
If you need to pay the bills and worry about losing your employment, gambling with the practice of checking out, or “quiet quitting,” may be overly risky.
But it’s equally true that we are living in a time of unprecedented burnout that hasn’t abated, as some theorized it would as most of us move further out of our pandemic mindsets and way of living. Many workers say they are swamped by demands at their jobs. And with a possible recession looming, it’s even less likely people will feel empowered to voice these concerns. So we continue on with the grind, at our peril.
The responsibility of providing for family is one of the reasons that people are drained by work and can’t scale back. Money and time are put toward the children when they are at home. Some women don’t want to enter this arrangement because of the fact their body will be involved in the birth of a child. It was until recently.
It is shown that the right to abortion creates a kind of spiritual and moral isolation between the sexes, with new social incentives such as the right to abortion disfavoring commitment and paternal obligation. The most positive thing that men and women do together turns into a ground of separation. The pregnant woman is separated from him or her unborn child by the man’s right to avoid marriage. The woman’s right to end the pregnancy separates the man who doesn’t want to see it ended from what would otherwise be the most important relationship imaginable. And downstream from this alienation lies the culture we experience today, in which not just marriage rates but also relationships and sex itself are in decline, in which people have fewer children overall and fewer than they say they want, and also have more of them outside of wedlock than in the past.
What if, instead, it was equally acceptable to imagine the possibility of a different kind of work, a less energy-annihilating way of life? If we devoted more time to lauding childless women who choose to devote their time to community care, anti-racism and protecting the environment, then what would it be like? Or just want to have time and space to sit quietly and contemplate being human?
These are not new ideas. My favorite cheerleaders for them can be found in the 1974 essay collection “Pronatalism: The Myth of Mom & Apple Pie.” The book contains such marvels as early feminist Leta Hollingworth, writing, in 1916, of “Social Devices for Impelling Women to Bear and Rear Children.”
Food critic Gael Greene, writing “A Vote Against Motherhood” in 1963 in New York magazine, of how she and her husband “appreciate the time and freedom to pursue potential talents … to pick up and disappear for a weekend or a month or even a year … to slam a door and be alone, or alone together.” And NBC News correspondent Betty Rollin, who writes in a witty, scathing 1970 essay about how “for women, self-development is considered selfish.”
You’ll have a hard time reading this book, because it’s out of print. I would like to say that this is the result of making points that have been sorted out. That’s right, Ha. Almost half a century later, women are faced with fighting again for the same rights that were so recently hard-won when this book was first published.
Childlessness is a resistance idea by Hersey. I do not say that this will degrade mothers or their role in the world. It could be possible for many more women to get involved in caring for family and friends children in a society that wasn’t so very close to removing the right to choose motherhood. Might it then be possible for all of us to get a little rest?
The paper titled “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States” was co-authored by Yellen and her husband, George Akerlof. They were trying to understand why more women were having children outside of marriage when contraceptives and abortion were legal and strategies to control births had improved.
Men could lose out in this new culture as well. While the woman who wants commitment sees her position weakened when abortion is a normal and expected option, the man who desires involvement, obligation, an expectation he can rise to meet, and who is told instead, sees the same thing. In a different culture, the man facing this obligation is told that it’s an economic burden, but it won’t bother him if she decides to get an abortion.