With my children's love for driving and climbing trees, I am amazed that they, along with my husband and I, are enjoying the longer nights, relaxing and playing in our home.
As we approach the official start of winter during the winter Equinox (December 21), we enter a season historically associated with less work and production. Most populations modeled their lives agriculturally before the industrial revolution; winter, with colder temperatures and fewer hours of sunlight, was a time to escape from our labor. Crops cannot grow under a blanket of snow, and even hibernating animals make it meaningful for humans to do the same.
However, in our modern times, many of us still expect to maintain our regular work schedules and even more hours to meet year-end deadlines or prepare for holiday festivities.
At the same time (or even more so), it seems to be the perfect season to reflect on what the authors of these three books in recent years: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Overthinking, and The Rest is Resistance are prompting readers to reclaim our humanity: breaking the link between our intrinsic value and what we produce.
The reasons for how we find ourselves in this situation of overwork and burnout are not clear. The authors do not discuss the original origins, but they all, more or less, reference the larger cultural movements that have accelerated our prioritization of work over our well-being. The industrial revolution, our capitalist economy, and the development of digital technology are such movements.
However, I am a minister, wanting to address this important and significant topic at a metaphysical level, to zoom out from the psychological and socio-economic historical levels and see it from a theological perspective, in a way that may be significant as it lifts the veil on the unexplored beliefs driving our behavior.
Allow me to do this by transporting you through time and space and escorting you to an introduction to a systematic theology class in 2007. There is 24-year-old Lydia sitting in the introduction to the systematic theology class. It was her first semester at Yale Divinity School.