The glowing rectangle finally goes dark, the credits roll, and a familiar feeling washes over you. Not relaxation, not rejuvenation, but a strange blend of mental fuzziness, a vague guilt, and a brain that, despite two hours of apparent disengagement, still feels like it’s running a marathon in the background. You just ‘relaxed’ by binge-watching, but you’re left more depleted than you started. This, I’ve found, is the insidious lie productivity culture sold us about rest.
I used to chase that feeling, the one where the world outside faded into the background, replaced by a curated narrative or an endless scroll. I craved it after a particularly demanding week, like the one where I’d received a wrong number call at 5 AM, jarring me awake and leaving a subtle, persistent thrum of irritation through the whole day. That kind of abrupt interruption, much like the constant pings and notifications of our digital lives, doesn’t just disrupt sleep or focus; it trains the brain to remain in a state of low-level alert, even when it’s supposedly ‘off-duty’. My approach to ‘rest’ then was to simply replace one form of input with another, hoping the sheer volume of new information would somehow override the old. It never worked.
The deeper meaning here, the one we often miss, is that the commodification of leisure has tricked us into believing that distraction is restoration.
