I Make, Therefore I Resist—The Art of Not Being Useful in a Culture of Extraction

We live in a system where exhaustion is a status symbol and urgency is the air we breathe. Productivity is treated like morality, and stillness—real, intentional stillness—is often met with suspicion. But beneath this pace, there is a quiet truth rising: rest is not laziness; it’s resistance.

In a world that commodifies our attention, exploits our energy, and conditions us to override our own bodies, reclaiming rest becomes an act of defiance. It’s not just personal. It’s political.

But not all rest disrupts.

Sometimes what we call “rest” is really avoidance—a numbing, a coping, a momentary collapse under the weight of a system that never lets us pause. Scrolling, binge-watching, checking out. These aren’t failures. They’re signals. Necessary sometimes. But not liberating.

Rest as resistance is different. It’s conscious. Intentional. Done on purpose, not by default.

It’s the moment we choose to lay down—not just our bodies, but the belief that our value comes from what we produce. It’s a returning to ourselves. A remembering. And that remembering is dangerous to a system built on forgetting.

There are many kinds of rest, most of them invisible. Most of them uncelebrated. But all of them necessary.

Physical rest—stillness, sleep, release.
Mental rest—clearing space from solving, analysis, lists, and loops.
Emotional rest—letting feelings rise and move through the body.
Sensory rest—retreating from the overstimulation of screens, sounds, touch.
Creative rest—respecting receptive and expressive periods, knowing they are part of nature.
Social rest—taking space from interactions that require masks, explanations, performance.
Spiritual rest—surrendering into something larger and mysterious, remembering you are held.

Each of these forms of rest touches a different nerve. Each one pulls us out of urgency and back into alignment. And in a world obsessed with hustle, each one quietly says: I am not a machine.

This exploration doesn’t just live in my thoughts—it pulses through my hands. Through brushstrokes. Through the unapologetic slowness of my art-making. Making art in this way becomes a meditation on what it means to pause, to resist, to feel. It is not only a reflection on rest but a practice in it. And more than that—it’s an act of refusal. A refusal to create solely for consumption, for marketability, for speed. I’m not making art to feed the algorithm or please the market—I’m making it to remember who I am beneath all that noise. To reclaim what has been stripped from me: my own rhythm, my own voice, my own source of power. Creative flow that isn’t for sale is dangerous in a system built on extraction. And that’s exactly the point. I make not to uphold a culture obsessed with productivity and profit, but to root myself in something deeper. Something wilder. Something free.

Rest, as I’ve come to understand it, isn’t something everyone can access equally—and I don’t take lightly the ways my own life has made it more available to me. My relationship to rest is shaped by the privileges I carry: whiteness, education, financial stability, and the relative ease of my physical and mental well-being. Rest, for me, is a conscious choice. And that’s the point—many don’t have that choice. My ability to step back is held up by systems that protect me more than others.

I hold this practice knowing that rest is not distributed equally. And I speak to it not to centre myself, but to point directly at the inequity. For those of us with access, rest must become more than personal healing—it must be part of how we unlearn, disrupt, and refuse the systems that thrive on our disconnection from one another.

Rest is a way back to the body. A way back to rhythm. A way back to source.

Let your rest be unrushed. Let it be intentional. Let it be a whisper of the world you’re here to help build—one breath, one pause, one radical act at a time.

D.

Footnote:

This essay is shaped by the work of several contemporary thinkers whose insights have helped anchor rest as a form of resistance. Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of Rest Is Resistance, is a leading voice in this movement. Adrienne Maree Brown explores rest, pleasure, and emergence in Pleasure Activism and Emergent Strategy. Octavia Raheem writes beautifully about the spiritual and healing dimensions of rest in Pause, Rest, Be. The work of bell hooks and Audre Lorde offers foundational wisdom on self-care as political and spiritual survival. Additionally, Gabor Maté’s writing on trauma, stress, and the mind-body connection—particularly in When the Body Says No—illuminates why rest can feel unsafe or out of reach, and how cultural conditioning shapes our inner lives as much as our outer realities.