I Leveled Up My Career By Prioritizing Rest and Refuse to Feel Guilty For It

Humans weren’t designed to work 24/7, the 40-hour work week is an outdated institution that needs to die, and we need to stop pretending that our relationship to work is this be-all end-all.

A disturbing amount of anti-worker propaganda has been circulating as of late. Most of these pieces are along the lines of “go risk death or lifelong disability on the chance your boss will give you more money”. What’s even sadder is that many of the comment sections on this propaganda are tantamount to Spongebob putting his own money in the register at the Krusty Krab.

Then we got the latest episode of Americans Love Being Screwed and Licking Oligarch Boot Instead of Taking a Lunch Break, this piece.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Here’s the short version of my response.

And now for the long version!

Twitter and Reddit have been going hogwild, and for good reason: how DARE someone want to set reasonable boundaries for having a life, it’s not like this employee who cuts out at 5PM every day has a family to go home to, or friends, hobbies, interests, or anything.

But if you’re an American, you are essentially being held hostage in a cult when it comes to most jobs. I already picked up on this ages ago. I’ve been happily job-free since 2014, and have more money and security than I ever did in the past which flies contrary to the countless cautionary tales I had screamed in my ear about self-employment. I’ve long been deprogrammed from this cult.

Before you think this piece is about why freelancing and entrepreneurship are better, yes, there’s some advantages they certainly hold when it comes to controlling how you work. The right to have your own ship and not be someone’s employee must be protected! But that’s not why I penned this rebuttal. It’s because I even see many of my fellow free flyers caving in to poisonous “hustle culture”, and feeling guilty for not getting enough done. That just because many of our loved ones are stuck at shitty jobs they hate, and can’t relate to the owning their time they way we do, that we must feel bad for not hunching over our computers every minute of the day and constantly looking for new ways to hustle.

Now, hustling itself is not a bad thing. I LOVE to hustle. It’s what us entrepreneurial types do.

I’m always coming up with new ways to get leads, post content, market my games, meet people, you name it. When you own your labor, and there’s tractable proof of your knowledge and accomplishments freely available on the Internet, no one can take it from you. You are proud to hustle. Hustling is like a warm, fizzy bubble bath where you use Stardew Valley stardrops as bath bombs and who knows how many beautiful iridium sparks it’s going to create.

But hustle CULTURE is when that bathtub drains when you weren’t even ready to flip the drain switch, and you realize to your horror that your naked ass is now sitting in a bathtub crawling with black mold. Read: a neutral concept that could actually be positive was turned into something grotesque and above all, harmful.

Coming from the video game world, there’s pushback against crunch enforced in studios but then many indie developers wind up enforcing it upon themselves. Out of passion at best, just wanting to get something released and generating royalties already — but also because there’s so much social pressure when you see one amazing-looking demo and screenshot after another on your Twitter feed, or feel like you’ll never be as good as the developers you see getting press on PC Gamer and Gamasutra.

And I say, “Nah.” Why are you doing this to yourself?

Sweet toadlet, you have a life to live. Life is short. Heartbreakingly brief. Haven’t the hundreds of thousands of lives prematurely taken in the pandemic shown you that?

You can drop dead and your boss will quickly replace your corpse while your co-workers won’t get bereavement leave to attend your funeral. If you were even close enough for them to want to attend.

Then for those of us who don’t have bosses, we may have wonderful clients, patrons, customers, and/or fans who respect and value us. But they don’t own you. Remember that. What goes on your books and taxes, no one looks at it proximal to the time you put in. The dollar amount is really what matters and that’s between you, your accountant, and the government.

You know what’s better than trying to adhere to this 40-hour Monday-Friday model even when you’ve long broken free from the bounds of traditional employment?

2–3 hours of laser-focusing on what you need to get done. Or in the case of engagements where you must bill by the time spent, such as my consulting services, properly preparing for those engagements and being well-rested for them to really deliver for your clients. “Deep work” is the name often given to this phenomenon, where you get into a “flow state” upon minimizing distractions and expending most of your mental energy on getting stellar results.

After all, it’s been found that people largely waste a lot of time at work and your brain only gets about 4–6 hours’ worth of actual focus. By the way, that stat is from the Harvard Business Review, not a Xeroxed communist zine passed around at punk shows and DSA meetings.

A few hours of quality work is better than 6–8 hours of numbly staring at the screen, hardly able to type but only doing so out of feeling obligated to.

When I began prioritizing rest, self-care, and finding ways to stay inspired, I wound up making more money than ever.

There’s things where you need to put time in to improve, sure. There’s no hacks for getting familiar with new software or learning an instrument. You get better with experience. But when it comes to what many of us do for money, time is not always proportional to what you bring in.

I refused to concede my physical and mental health, since pointless sacrifices that don’t benefit me are exactly why I skipped out on traditional employment. It turned out that when I stopped over-extending myself trying to fit as many bookings, writing gigs, dev sprints, and podcast appearances into my week as possible and just laser-focused on the best and most appealing opportunities that came my way, rest made me more efficient.

I already chose this career type for freedom and the ability to engage in the vast amount of self-care I require because of my traumagenic illnesses. Traditional jobs are inherently incompatible with that. I thrive on my own, I wither with any normal job. With that said, despite the great deal of deprogramming I already had, the hustle culture bug would still bite me time to time.

Then I used lockdown to realign a lot of my short-term and long-term business goals, and started saying no to more things.

Then I discovered The Nap Ministry.

Rest is incredibly powerful. Rest is liberating.

One week, I decided to just lay back and do less client follow-up and wait for them to contact me. My brain felt scrambled every time I loaded the design docs and Trello board for my own game, ditto for opening Medium. So I didn’t put up a vacation responder or anything, I just ignored the emails from the business consulting and writer boards I’m on alerting me that work was available. I caught up on reading, worked out, made lots of acai bowls, and played Stardew Valley and finally got the game modded after I put it off for two years.

When I was done resting, I felt like fucking Superwoman. I suddenly got more done in one day than I had for a week before. With a clear mind and plenty of reading to inspire me, I added several pages to my game’s new storyboard. My ADHD symptoms were barely showing: my executive function improved so much, that I could just write down a list of things and actually do them, not break down from the overwhelm.

My clients haven’t gone anywhere and I’m still getting bookings. I’m getting more done on my own projects, and still making time for social media and the millions of annoying personal things I must deal with. So I don’t buy that you must give up having a life in order to have a successful career.

Even if you have less control over your time due to being an employee, leveling up your career often has absolutely nothing to do with how many hours you put in.

Right here on Medium, there’s essays I’ve put lots of care and research into just to get $5 in royalties but stuff I threw up on the bus then cleaned up at home that generated hundreds of dollars.

Most of all, irrespective of game and essay royalties, it’s been happenstance meetings and people who saw my work that led to more opportunities and renown. I’ve written detailed pitches and proposals that took hours to put together, just to get rejected: then a random shitpost resulted in an investor offering me money. I also once submitted a one-sentence response to a casting call and wound up billing the client for over $20,000 of writing work. What I published for him vastly grew my following, and led to being solicited by editors instead of having to pitch.

So that Fortune piece is an abject lie. Hard work is an agnostic concept. Sometimes it pays, sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s more likely to pay off when you own your labor like us free agents do: but it’s definitely not guaranteed. You may get an amazing job offer by a sheer fluke, while busting your ass for your current employer gets you bupkus.

It’s not just late-stage capitalism and toxic hustle culture that has you feeling guilty or bad about resting, and wants to discourage it. There’s also a lot of deeply-embedded Calvinism and Puritanism at play here, plus racism and misogyny.

Basically, everything terrible we have in this society stems from racism and/or sexism. Like the tipped wage system and the War on Drugs. We have no childcare in this country because the only time we did was during World War II, then that was gone the second women were banished to the kitchen once the soldiers came home. 76 years later, “let’s just have women deal with the kids” is still the government’s response to the urgent need for childcare.

So that’s why you feel guilty for resting. Because gee, how horrific it would be if you aren’t conscripted into work for work’s sake in the domestic sphere or the service of an employer. Then propaganda about how you should sacrifice any free time and semblance of self for ~a career~ only drives it home.

A career is however you choose to define it. It can be a series of jobs. It can be a whole bunch of different things. Or maybe you just want to get an hourly wage then go home.

After all, someone needs to do those jobs that keep society running which “career track professionals” don’t want to do, and that can’t always be easily made into self-employment. Like retail, food service, care work, and keeping our infrastructure from crumbling. Those workers also deserve thriving wages, time to themselves, and respect. We can’t live in a society comprised entirely of technologists, bankers, and Internet writers.

Rest because you deserve it.

Rest because you can give the universe more of what you have to offer when you’ve properly recharged.

Rest because you can’t do more for others until you’ve taken care of yourself first, and no one can care for you like you care for you.

And don’t even fucking think about apologizing for it. You still deserve success by making space for rest.