"The urge to leave began with a cricket song."
— A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Summer Seminar starts today!
Join me for an 8-week exploration of rest, comfort, and purpose through fiction.
What rules do you hold yourself to? What limits do you put on your choices or behavior? What discipline do you subject yourself to when you're unfocused, unproductive, or lacking motivation?
We no longer need rule-issuing institutions like the church or the military to keep us in line. We control ourselves.1 We strive, achieve, and self-correct according to a set of internalized rules imposed by no one but ourselves. To be sure, these rules can help us navigate unjust economic and cultural systems. But they also lead to pervasive restlessness.
Many of us live in a state of restlessness every day, and quite often, we perceive this as a personal deficiency or failing.
But what really is restlessness?
The suffix -ness signals a state of being, a condition. It transforms the adjective restless into a noun. But not a mere thing or object. It’s a noun that contains, surrounds, and shapes what it holds.
The suffix -less means without. Being restless means being without rest. Today, restless often connotes fidgety, not still. Restless becomes pathologized—associated with ADHD, autism, anxiety disorders, OCD, and other conditions.2 To be “normal” is to be still and patient. To be restless is to be impulsive and unfocused—at least within our society of control.
Restlessness is the condition of being without rest—being without grounding or support, being without a period of recovery or relaxation. Restlessness, therefore, is a serious problem that we lack the resources to address appropriately. While restlessness might be constructively perceived as the need to move, to affect change, and even to self-soothe, we often express it in reckless decisions and rash consumption.
Sometimes, these sudden choices take the form of odd fixations. In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the character Dex becomes fixated on the sound of crickets—a sound they expect to be very pleasant but has never heard. Dex decides to change their vocation and leave the City to experience cricket songs.
After leaving the City, Dex lives a life of literal restlessness. They travel from town to town, providing tea service to anyone needing (or desiring) comfort. Everywhere they go, they ask about crickets.
Two years later, Dex finally pulls out their handheld and looks up where they can hear crickets. Crickets, it turns out, are nearly extinct. The last known crickets exist on a particular mountain in the wilderness. This discovery leads to another abrupt choice. Instead of continuing to the next town, they veer off course and head straight into the wilderness.
“The urge to leave,” to veer off course, is a longing for rest.
The urge to burn it all down, pivot, even “shake things up” is an ache for respite. That’s not to say that leaving, burning, pivoting, or shaking things up doesn’t contain the seed of a good idea. But that longing must be contextualized.
In her memoir Bossypants, Tina Fey shares some advice she learned from Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels: “Don’t make any big decisions right after the season ends.” Prolonged focus, hard work, and long hours lead to restlessness—and restlessness leads to “big decisions” that often exacerbate the problem. She notes, however, that “The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it.”
The Saturday Night Live performer or writer has the benefit of seasonality. They sustain a demanding schedule and intense workload for a season and then get time for rest.3 The vast majority of us don’t have this kind of seasonality. We mold ourselves to the 24/7 cycle. We lose our sense of life’s rhythms.
A season is context. A rhythm is context. When that context is stripped away, we might find that’s never a good time to weigh a big decision. This only adds to our restlessness. We long for rest so that we can contemplate change.
We speed up or intensify our work to create space for contemplation only to find that space filled in with unexpected (or, at least, unaccounted-for) activities. We devote ourselves to self-care, only to find those self-care activities impinge on our capacity for rest.
Restlessness as a political condition
To return to the idea of restlessness, I propose that our restlessness is a political condition. If we lack the power to claim rest and recovery for ourselves, then we are dealing with a political problem. If we’re constrained from existing within life’s rhythms or making space to contemplate change, then we’re not restless; we’re prevented from inhabiting a space of restfulness.
In recognizing this political condition and our urge to leave it behind, we can reorient toward restfulness. In doing so, we might hope to transcend restlessness as a condition of posthuman political economy and view our choices as opportunities to broaden our capacity for rest.
We can envision the political conditions required to make restfulness accessible to all. We can claim rest for ourselves, recognizing that our resistance to it isn’t pathological but political. And, we can use an orientation toward restfulness to make choices about what's next instead of trying to control our restlessness.
Fidgeting and squirming are natural results of the exhausted world we live in. Maybe, just maybe, we can indulge the urge and move toward stillness.
If you’re interested in exploring restlessness and restfulness this summer, it’s not too late to join the Summer Seminar!
As a group, we’re reading two novellas about rest, comfort, and purpose—along with four short essays by powerful thinkers. We’ll discuss, reflect, and find new ways to approach a more restful life. Enrollment ends soon!
Many theorists have argued this position. Among them, Gilles Deleuze described our self-disciplining condition in response to Foucault.
To be sure, restlessness is a symptom of these conditions. But it’s also more than a symptom.
This is, of course, a gross simplification of what is a time filled with other projects—some of which are undoubtedly commercial.