SJ Zanolini
“Rest a bit” (休息一下), I tell my dog when he begins panting while playing fetch. The neighborhood aunties in our tiny Taipei park smile hearing this because the refrain echoes what you’d tell a loved one engaging in any strenuous labor. Love is the act of reminding your beloved to tend to themselves, drink some water, catch their breath. Eat this fruit I cut for you is well-known ethnic parent shorthand for the harder-to-articulate I see you working hard and I love you.1
My collie-shepherd mix often needs reminding, but ultimately, it’s easy for him to take a break because although he labors, this exercise for him is play, not his harder daily work of watching for warning signs of my chronic illness. Most of us humans struggle more with claiming space for rest. There is always some work that needs doing, items to circle back to, emails to follow up on, no time to spare, little room for excuses or dropped balls or absenteeism, even if you have a disability accommodation on the record and in writing.2 We tell ourselves that there will be time enough to rest later but somehow that time is always still later, tomorrow, after next week. We joke that we can rest when we’re dead, or retired, although for more of my friends than not, retirement and death are one and the same. You better work, bitch.3
The modern Chinese word for rest, xiuxi 休息, is composed of two characters. The first, a person leaning against a tree; to stop. The second, a reflexive self centered over the heart; exhalation or a more general respiration. Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.4 Whitman has entered the chat, loafing under the trees whilst waiting for Zhuangzi to stop beating his drum so they may dream together of what it would be like to be butterflies rather than men.5 To be more of a dreamer than a doer is to be counterculture regardless of your culture, because to be a Man (to be the default/taken for granted as ideal human type; to be someone who matters) is almost always to be engaged in work, not rest.6
How might we productively define work? Or rather, whose work counts as work, when? Domestic labor is an invisible or minimized kind of labor compared to “real work,” i.e., work that occurs outside of one’s home for a wage.7 This type of labor commodification is commonly assumed to be more taxing (physically and mentally) than work done within one’s home for the benefit of one’s family.8 Fields and factories are productive sites; the hearth or spinning wheel or bedchamber do not get the same credit outside of feminist scholarship.9 We can’t talk about rest while ignoring its gendered nature. Who has earned the right to it? And for whom is there almost never a spare hour?
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Most modern societies feature work structures designed to maximize productivity by minimizing rest. During the hours we are on the clock, employers may monitor our work down to 6- or even 1-minute intervals.10 Jobs are full-time, by design, to wring maximum productivity out of each worker because costs per employee (health insurance, vacation pay, etc.) are fixed, meaning 60 hours from 2 employees is more cost-effective than 40 hours from 3 (although increasingly common are “student” or “non-career” part-time positions offering 30 hours from 4 working just below the benefits threshold, always just hungry enough to be open to picking up a shift on short notice). Overworking employees is cost-effective at scale, quality control or safety issues be damned.11
It has been less than a century since overtime laws were nationally instituted in the United States. The old slogan 8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, and 8 hours for what we will is a progressive ideal forged in late 19th– and early 20th-century labor activism.12 Even today, an end run around the legal norm of an 8-hour work day is baked in for salaried (“exempt”) employees who have no hourly caps on their expected labor, or the assumption that an employee will never say no to overtime pay, and if anyone makes too much noise about this they’re replaceable anyhow. A number of professional occupations, from medicine to teaching across educational levels to any position in a startup, will famously suck as many work hours as a worker can and will physically allocate. Do you have what it takes to make it here? is a cudgel against all but the most stripped-down, consumerist, single-serve forms of self-care.13 Rest, being free but requiring free time, is looked down on. And success, we tell ourselves, will naturally trickle down from allocating more time to work and less to sleep or recreation. Health erosion be damned, worrying about long-term health risks, like resting itself, is for the weak.14
In some other places, conditions are better. Compare the handful of major public holidays on which Americans are guaranteed a day off to the dozen-plus enjoyed by Germans.15 Better still, compare the very notion of a holiday with the enforced day of rest on Sundays that, thanks to old Catholic custom, even in the more Protestant north of Germany, closes down almost all supermarkets and shops, blanketing even large cities in the relative quiet of bans against construction noise and vacuuming your living room alike. You can party inside major Berlin nightclubs for literally every hour of a Sunday, non-stop, but don’t you dare think about vacuuming your flat. Rest is what you make of it, provided your rest doesn’t disturb another.
In many other places, working hours and conditions are worse. Rather than a 40-hour corporate workweek working 9 to 5 (no way to make a living),16 across much of 21st-century East Asia, white-collar tech and business sector workers strive for a 996, namely the expectation of being in the office 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week (barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving).17 This work isn’t necessarily confined to the office; corporate salarymen are expected to frequently entertain clients (or corporate higher-ups) after work, drinking through long nights as a means of building social relationships essential to doing business.18
In Taiwan, which for some years now has been facing its own cost of living crisis, young workers often reluctantly leave their home cities (even large southern cities like Kaohsiung or Tainan) to move to Taipei, somewhat upping their odds of securing an income beyond the local monthly minimum wage of 27,470 NTD [about $835 USD], which is alarmingly close to the median wage of 37,274 NTD [about $1135 USD]. Second jobs, gigs, and side hustles of all stripes flourish as a way to maintain a baseline standard of living amidst rising inflation.19
Across the strait in Guangzhou, the fast-fashion giant Shein employs as many as 80% of workers in some parts of town. If we can trust reports that the average Shein employee works 70 or 80 hours per week, taking at most 1 day off per week – sometimes per month – it seems like communism has developed some peculiarly Chinese characteristics indeed.20
Even many college graduates of fiercely competitive universities face brutal working conditions and low earning potential. In response, many took a beat from meme culture and followed Ge You in deciding to “lay flat” (tang xia 躺下) rather than “lean in.”21 By choosing to do nothing, these young people are choosing rest, and choosing themselves, over the high cost and low reward nature of work today.22 Inspired by meme culture, this ethic of refusal echoes Melville’s Bartleby, who simply would prefer not to (and so did not).23
Inspired by generations of modernization without substantive improvement for women in particular, the 4B movement in South Korea advocates four refusals of conditions it identifies as enmeshed in misogyny and the exploitation of women’s labor (reproductive, affective, and domestic): childbirth and any of its precursor steps, including heterosexual sex, dating, and marriage.24 If one cannot rest within one’s own home, where can one rest?
***
Mencius (c.371 – 289 BCE) wrote that when overworked, or without adequate time for rest, men will become like beasts. (Mencius did not dream of being a butterfly.) For Mencius, rest was more than merely sleeping. Rest was something imperative for the preservation of our very humanity. He illustrates this with the parable of Ox Mountain:25
Mencius said, ‘Once Ox Mountain was beautifully forested. But because it was situated on the border of a large state, axes and hatchets hacked the forest down. How could this be mistaken for beauty? 孟子曰: 牛山之木嘗美矣, 以其郊於大國也, 斧斤伐之, 可以為美乎?
‘Even so, through the respirations of day and night, receiving nourishment from rain and dew, buds and sprouts flourished. Cows and goats came to graze there, which made the mountain appear bald and barren. Now when people see this barren baldness, they assume nothing ever flourished there. How can this be the true nature of the mountain? 是其日夜之所息, 雨露之所潤, 非無萌櫱之生焉, 牛羊又從而牧之, 是以若彼濯濯也. 人見其濯濯也, 以為未嘗有材焉, 此豈山之性也哉?
‘And so also it is with people. How can any heart26 be without benevolence and righteousness? People lose their innate goodness of heart the way trees are felled by axes; hewn down day after day, how can a heart retain its beauty? 雖存乎人者, 豈無仁義之心哉? 其所以放其良心者, 亦猶斧斤之於木也, 旦旦而伐之, 可以為美乎?
‘Through the respirations of day and night, in the morning qi what a person likes and loathes is not very dissimilar from other people. It is rather what they do throughout the day that fetters and destroys them. 其日夜之所息, 平旦之氣, 其好惡與人相近也者幾希, 則其旦晝之所為, 有梏亡之矣.
‘The fetters oppose and overcome such that there is not enough nighttime qi to be stored away; when there is not enough nighttime qi to store, then one won’t be far off from [the nature of] beasts. When people observe such “beasts” as these, they’ll assume they are people without talent, but is this the actual disposition of men? 梏之反覆, 則其夜氣不足以存, 夜氣不足以存, 則其違禽獸不遠矣. 人見其禽獸也, 而以為未嘗有才焉者, 是豈人之情也哉?
‘Thus, if nourishment is received, there is nothing that will not grow, and if nourishment is lacking, there is no thing that will not be diminished.’ 故苟得其養, 無物不長; 苟失其養, 無物不消.
Here, “nighttime qi,” particularly the qi of the early dawn, was a particular kind of consciousness. A period of wakefulness where one is still at rest, or not yet caught up in work and routine. These still moments with and to one’s self call back to Whitman’s “walk[ing] the beach under the paling stars of the morning” as moments of reorientation or reunion with greater space and time. It is this time, when we are alone and in active rest, that preserves the intrinsic core of ourselves that is otherwise frittered away by routine – by work or, more specifically, by overwork.
Mencius was not one of the more radical Warring States philosophers.27 Following his great-grand teacher Confucius’ teachings made Mencius comparatively conservative in his approach to conceptualizing people and their responsibility to self versus social norms. Yet even Mencius could agree that something about working ourselves to the bone day after day is inherently damaging in a subtle but critical way. After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.28
Ox Mountain is a cautionary parable. There are no trees left there for a butterfly to rest below for a while, dreaming of becoming a man. Skipping sleep for long hours at the office, our current cultural obsession with monetizing our hobbies into side hustles, bearing the beastly – and somehow still in 2025 wretchedly gendered – burden of relentless second-shift work, all of it comes at great cost. This cost is not only sleep, but the active rest that is foundational to our innate human goodness.
We often think of rest as a state without movement, stagnating, enforced by illness, boring. But rest also can be a verb, something active and claimed – restorative activity. Recreation, allowing some of those 8 hours for what we will to be something other than laundry and dishes and meal prep and brushing one’s teeth and all the other petty routines that keep bodies and households healthy. Rest is time that transcends material or bodily maintenance, acknowledging the equally important need for spiritual maintenance. Time in which you are awake but unscheduled, unclaimed, free to let yourself roam as figuratively or literally as you so choose. What a person likes and loathes is not very dissimilar from other people in the morning qi. It is rather what they do throughout the day that fetters and destroys them. Work is soul destroying in excess; rest is what restores our humanity. Space and Time! Now I see it is true, What I guess’d at, What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass, What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed, And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.
Active rest, where the mind can freely wander at will, re-finding flow.29 Maybe this sort of rest for you is a formal hobby. Maybe it is assembling puzzles or gaming with family and friends. Maybe it is carving out time to test a new recipe, practice a foreign language, acquire a new skill. Maybe it is more dissociative than associative, like binge-watching or reading. Maybe it involves communion with nature, taking a long-cut instead of a short-cut because you like the change in scenery. Maybe it involves stretching or moving or exercising your body, balancing the rhythms of what, for many reading this, may be a more chair-bound than active set of work postures.30 All of these are forms of rest that go beyond laying about in bed, because rest isn’t only sleep, but all the little things you get to do purely for yourself because they bring you joy. Because the ability to discern, to pick, to choose is itself part of the joy – a marked distinction from the routine of work, where choice and flexibility are mostly absent.
Important as it is, our individual ability to choose rest only goes so far. Every season or so, Audre Lorde’s quote about self-care being a radical act trends on the internet, her reminder that to take care of one’s body is not self-indulgence but “self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”31 Yet stripped of its initial context (Lorde’s positionality as both a cancer patient and a black lesbian feminist writing against the misogynoir of the prevailing culture), this quote is often used to sell self-indulgence – the “treat yourself” ethos of late-stage capitalism. Lorde’s self-care, particularly her claiming of space to rest and nourish her body, was instead aimed at recovery and longevity so that she could continue fighting against the same social structures that made her sick to begin with.32
Individual solutions cannot cure systemic problems. We cannot claim space for active rest when we’re locked into earning a living so we can maintain a place to sleep and food to eat. We cannot claim space for active rest when our house might be on fire. How do we sleep while our beds are burning? We don’t.33
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1. Jenny G. Zhang, “It’s the Season for Fruit, and Also for Writing About Cutting Fruit as an Act of Love,” Eater, July 31, 2019, https://www.eater.com/2019/7/31/20748861/cut-fruit-summer-act-of-love
2. Rebecca S. Dalgin, “The Complex Nature of Disability Stigma in Employment: Impact on Access and Opportunity” in Stigmas, Work and Organizations, eds. S. Bruce Thompson and Gina Grandy (Springer, 2018), 55-70. For an ethnographic examination of the same topic, see Emily H. Ruppel, “Disability and the State Production of Precarity,” Work and Occupations 51.4 (2024): 510 – 549.
3. Britney Spears, “Work Bitch,” from the album Britney Jean (2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt8VYOfr8To
4. Idleness is a big theme in Whitman, introduced in the very first lines of “Song of Myself” (1):
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself // And what I assume you shall assume, // For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. // I loafe and invite my soul, // I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”
And periodically returned to, in invitations to his reader-listener-(lover?) to “Loafe with me on the grass,” (“Song of Myself,” 5), and finally, in a kind of triumph the kind of meta-awareness he’s earned while engaged in this loafing (active rest):
“Space and Time! Now I see it is true, // What I guess’d at, // What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass, // What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed, //And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.”
Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892), “Song of Myself” Leaves of Grass (Duke Classics, digital public domain copy via Libby), 33.
5. Zhuangzi (fl. 4th century BCE, aka Zhuang Zhou) was the most counter-culture of the Warring States (475 – 221 BCE) philosophers in China. Writings associated with him poke at the silliness of custom, such as the human propensity (hubris) of calling trees too twisted to fell as lumber or gourds too large to eat as vegetables “useless.” Zhuangzi invites readers to question how something could be useless when it is perfectly so of itself; very large gourd might not be good for eating but may very pleasurably “make a great tub so you can go floating along rivers and lakes”? “Free and Easy Wandering” in The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, translated by Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 2013 rpt.), 5-6. For Zhangzi’s famous butterfly/dream meditation, see “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” in The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 18.
6. Natasha Slutskaya, Ruth Simpson, Jason Hughes, Alexander Simpson, and Selçuk Uygur, “Masculinity and Class in the Context of Dirty Work,” Gender, Work & Organization 23.2 (2016): 165-182. C.f. Max Weber (1905), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens (London and Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1930 rpt.). https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/weber/protestant-ethic/
7. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild identified and studied gender disparities in who performs domestic labor, describing this as a “second shift” primarily borne by working women. For a brief summary of the initial study, and her findings that “the happiest families… were those who did share the second shift,” see Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, “The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild” December 6, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvzE6zYkEQY
8. This presentist view of traditional gender roles obscures women’s substantive contributions to household economy across cultures up through early modernity. For instance, in many parts of pre-modern China women raised silkworms, spun silk, and wove cloth as part of housework (cloth was also made from hemp or ramie); in many early dynasties taxes were at least partially paid in cloth. By the late imperial period, elite urban women might still generate cash by embroidering delicate objects (shoes or other garments) on commission, and it was common for talented daughters-in-law to manage household budgets and coordinate events. See Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California, 1997) and Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (University of California, 2007).
9. A foundational historical reference: Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50. A theoretically dense article that secondarily captures more recent historiography around this topic: Johanna Oksala, “Affective labor and feminist politics,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41.2 (2016): 281-303.
10. Search for “work tracking” and you’ll get little besides direct links to tracking software, or potted advertisements masquerading as helpful articles ala Neil MacAllister, “The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2024,” October 9, 2023, https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-employee-monitoring-software
11. This is now true across multiple industries: “Not just Reagan: Airports across the US have struggled with air traffic control staffing in recent years, data shows” CNN, January 31, 2025 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/31/us/air-traffic-control-staffing-nationwide-problem-invs/index.html; Ella Fanger, “Amazon Says Its Injury Rates Are Down. They’re Still the Highest in the Industry, The Nation, May 2, 2024 https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/amazon-injury-rate/; Lauren Kaori Gurley, “Internal Documents Show Amazon’s Dystopian System for Tracking Workers Every Minute of Their Shifts,” Vice Magazine, June 2, 2022 https://www.vice.com/en/article/internal-documents-show-amazons-dystopian-system-for-tracking-workers-every-minute-of-their-shifts/
12. R. Whaples, “Winning the Eight-hour Day, 1909-1919,” The Journal of Economic History, L.2, (June 1990).
13. Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk, “Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care: A Crip-of-Color Critique,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120.2 (2021): 325-342.
14. Scientific knowledge demonstrates a causal link between sleep insufficiency and progressive degenerative conditions, but this is only just beginning to filter into popular understanding. 5-10 years ago, unserious propaganda pieces still normalized chronic sleep deprivation as an indicator of success, such as this piece which starts off by describing the “Thatcher gene” (supposedly a very rare genetic predisposition for thriving on only 3 or 4 hours of sleep per night), and then citing U.S. President Donald J. Trump as a contemporary example of a “successful business leader” who benefits from sleeping four or fewer hours per night: “Exactly How Much Sleep Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Other Successful Business Leaders Get,” Inc. March 6, 2017, https://www.inc.com/dave-schools/exactly-how-much-sleep-mark-zuckerberg-jack-dorsey-and-other-successful-business.html; another popular interpretation of a Johns Hopkins study on REM cycles argues that sleep quality, not quantity, is what matters: “The Sleep Habits Of Highly Successful People,” Forbes, November 13, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/11/13/the-sleep-habits-of-highly-successful-people-infographic/. Only more recently have discussions of sleep hygiene and the importance of hitting a minimum of 7 hours per night begun to filter into popular framings of the topic, “14 Clever Things Successful People Always Do Before Bed,” Good Housekeeping, January 28, 2025, https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/wellness/a63493513/things-successful-people-do-before-bed/.
On the causal links between sleep deprivation and the physiological changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease and memory more generally, see: Laure Peter-Derex, Pierre Yammine, Hélène Bastuji, and Bernard Croisile, “Sleep and Alzheimer’s disease,” Sleep Medicine Reviews 19 (2015): 29-38; Lisa Lyons, Yann Vanrobaeys, and Ted Abel, “Sleep and Memory: The Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Transcription, Translational Control, and Protein Synthesis in the Brain,” Journal of Neurochemistry 166.1 (2023): 24-46; Zhengyun Han, Xingmao Yang, and Shuiqing Huang, “Sleep Deprivation: A Risk Factor for the Pathogenesis and Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.” Heliyon (2024).
15. While living in Berlin in 2022-3, I enjoyed not working through 2.5 days of Christmas, New Year’s Day, International Women’s Day, 3 days of Easter, Labor Day, Pentecost/Whit Monday, and possibly a smaller holiday or two I’ve overlooked. During these days, almost everything from grocery stores to subway kiosks shut down. In Germany holidays as well as Sundays are legally protected days of rest for nearly all workers (although some classes of businesses, such as restaurants, are able to opt-out). By law, “Sundays and the public holidays remain protected as days of rest from work and of spiritual elevation” (Art. 139 WRV, part of the German constitution via Art. 140 GG). “Der Sonntag und die staatlich anerkannten Feiertage bleiben als Tage der Arbeitsruhe und der seelischen Erhebung gesetzlich geschützt.” (Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs, Article 139) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/wrv/art_139.html. In comparison, US federal law does not require businesses to close on public holidays, only federal offices and schools.
16. Dolly Parton, “9 to 5” from the album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, https://youtu.be/UbxUSsFXYo4?si=QUHq-uOmbkGGBCOr
17. VICE Asia, “The Extreme 996 Work Culture in China,” August 28, 2021, https://youtu.be/l8wWoQ3_F00?si=-cNPHE94GrNPNndE
18. While most recent media points to 996 as a problem of the Chinese tech industry, extended workhours (particularly for salarymen) are a longer running trend. The medical anthropologist Elanah Uretsky has written on the significant pressure faced by businessmen and government officials alike to attend mandatory social gatherings after work as a more informal setting for negotiating agreements. These events involved heavy alcohol use and sometimes also contracting sex work, making health impacts “occupational hazards” in the early 2000s. Elanah Uretsky, Occupational Hazards: Sex, Business, and HIV in Post-Mao China (Stanford University Press, 2016).
In the 1980s and 90s, the same issue was frequently linked with salary work at Japanese and Korean conglomerates. There’s an obscene but patent way that the brutality of the Japanese colonial “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” has an internalized afterlife in the idea that a 996 work culture is the only pathway into competitiveness/modernization.
19. “Asia’s Stuck Generation: Stuck with Low Pay, How Taiwan’s Young Graduates Cope with High Costs,” CNA Insider, July 28, 2023, https://youtu.be/I2CK-j-pR7M?si=NRAqADjNNbmiknIp; “Monthly average wages increase 2.77%,” Taipei Times, February 18, 2025, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2025/02/18/2003832042
20. “Shein suppliers’ workers doing 75-hour week, finds probe,” BBC News, November 13, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59245708; on “Communism with Chinese characteristics,” refer to Huiming Jin, Marxism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (Gale Asia, 2017) https://archive.org/details/marxism-and-socialism-with-chinese-characteristics
21. A popular Chinese meme from 2016 featured the actor Ge You (best known in the West for playing the male lead in Zhang Yimou’s historical epic of mid-20th century China, To Live). In the meme, known as “Ge You lays flat,” he sprawls on a sofa in a refusal to leave after abusing a homeowner’s hospitality. This meme became so popular the actor wound up suing multiple parties to claim damage for its unauthorized use; see “Ge You lays flat,” https://baike.baidu.com/item/葛優躺/19819414. On why Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (2013) probably isn’t worth reading, check out “Lean In,” If Books Could Kill, March 14, 2024, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-if-books-could-kill-104279346/episode/lean-in-158860595/
22. JS Tan, “Tech Workers Lie Flat: Why is China’s internet industry putting an end to the grueling schedules that have fueled so much of its growth?” Dissent Magazine (Spring 2022), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/tech-workers-lie-flat/
23. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231
24. Brianna Zimmerman, “South Korea’s 4B Movement Lowers the Birth Rate in a Fight for Gender Equality,” International Affairs Review, August 8, 2023, https://www.iar-gwu.org/blog/iar-web/south-koreas-4b
25. “Gaozi shang” 告子上 in Mengzi 孟子, adapted by the author from the translation by James Legge, https://ctext.org/mengzi/gaozi-i
26. Originally this is the term xin 心, was also a stand-in for all of the emotions collectively, as well as all of the action of mentation. Because its range of meaning includes both consciousness and conscience, it is most accurately rendered as the compound “heart-mind.” Here in English I’ve rendered it only as “heart” for contextual flow more than denotative accuracy.
27. Mencius is all too painfully well known to centuries of students forced to memorize his philosophy while studying the “Four Books,” which were canonized as the pinnacle of (Neo)Confucian learning and remained the foundation of elite literacy between the 12th through 19th centuries. Mencius’ biggest and best-known takeaway is that human nature is intrinsically good, premised upon the idea that anyone who saw a baby about to fall into a well would of course (instinctively) try to rescue it. But he also believed in a society stratified by occupation (scholars and farmers at the top, and anyone who made a living by trade, rather than the production of either grains or ideas, at the bottom). Zhuangzi and other radicals sought ways to withdraw from service – from work – within the state, instead finding their satisfaction in the more personalized pursuit of the Dao; that said, much like gentlemen of leisure in our own time, in Zhuangzi’s time it likely took some family funds to support one’s self as well as servants keeping clothes washed and bellies fed.
28. An old English proverb popularized in the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining, “The Shining (1980) – All Work and No Play Scene,” Movieclips, May 27, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQ_MjU4QHw
29. The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has researched and extensively written on the concept of “flow states.” In some of his work, he compares the modern psychological notion of “flow” to the Daoist idea of “non-action” (wuwei 無為), which is less about not doing than not pushing (not going against the flow of the Dao). In conversations with my editor for this piece, a German-American who cut her intellectual teeth on continental philosophy, we arrived at Heidegger’s rendering of the German “Gelassenheit” as another potentially comparable term.
30. Chapter 23 of the Basic Questions text of the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon contains a passage outlining various harms done by five kinds of repeated activities or postures:
“To observe over a long time harms the blood. To lie down for a long time harms the qi. To sit for a long time harms the flesh. To stand for a long time harms the bones. To walk for a long time harms the sinews. These are the so-called ‘harms caused by the five taxations.’”
A key takeaway from it is that all activities need to be varied, or moderated, even ones we might consider positive such as observation (which includes reading). For a contemporary situation of part of this phrase, see Lihong Lou and Xiaqu Wu, “Chronic Disease Prevention Insights from Long-time Sitting Damaging Muscles: A Traditional and Modern View,” Chinese Medicine and Culture 8.1 (March 2025): 32-39.
31. Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer” in A Burst of Light (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand books, 1988).
32. Kim and Schalk, “Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2021): 329; Kathleen Newman-Bremang, “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care,” Refinery 29, May 29, 2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/05/10493153/reclaiming-self-care-audre-lorde-black-women-community-care
33. Midnight Oil, “Beds are Burning,” October 4, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejorQVy3m8E; c.f. “Parable of the burning house” in the Lotus Sutra, Encyclopedia of Buddhism, accessed April 13, 2025, https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_burning_house