After a painful divorce left him feeling completely unmoored, Jake used his savings to restore an old camper van and go off-grid. What started as a few months of cross-country driving to clear his head turned into a full two years of solitude, reflection, and healing. He parked in free campgrounds, followed backroads, and gave himself space to breathe again.
Along the way though, he ran into a type of resistance he hadn’t expected, and it didn’t come from nature or the challenges of living on the road. I came from people. One of the most difficult and awkward questions he got, time and again, was: “So, what do you do?” or “How do you earn a living?” And when he answered honestly — “I’m not working right now” — people reacted with confusion and disbelief. Their tone was skeptical or disapproving, like he’d said something scandalous or broken some unspoken rule.
Choosing rest
“There are few things less socially acceptable than ‘not working’,” Jake said. “It was as if I had said I hurt puppies for fun. People looked at me like I was lazy, suspicious, even scary.”
What Jake came to realize was that in our culture, choosing rest, especially for an extended time, is considered self-indulgent. Even when that rest is part of surviving something really difficult — like grief, heartbreak, illness, or burnout — it can still be treated like failure.
One day, Jake joined a free community picnic in a small town where he’d been staying. Wanting to be respectful, he’d checked in with local officials to be certain it was okay for him to go to the picnic. But once people learned he was living in a van and not currently employed, he said they literally walked away from him — as if he had a communicable disease. “I honestly felt like it would’ve been better to say I was a serial killer,” he joked. “At least then they might’ve been curious.”
Pause to reflect
Jake eventually found a sense of purpose again. He became a firefighter in a small Iowa town and built a life he loved, full of connection and meaning. But being ready to start again took time. Two full years, in fact. That’s how deep his pain ran. And that’s how long he needed to gather himself. But too often, we’re not given that kind of permission — to pause, to reflect, to recalibrate. Instead, we’re expected to power through, as if healing is something that can be scheduled and checked off a To-Do list.
Why do we find this so hard to accept?
For many of us, the belief runs deep that our worth is tied to our productivity — what we do, build, earn, and perform. I know it does for me. I came from a family where if you weren’t being useful, you were invisible. Even now, I have to catch myself when those old beliefs creep back in.
But when productivity becomes the whole of our identity, it crowds out the parts of us that thrive in stillness — in quiet conversations, in creativity, in simply being.
Worthy
Rest isn’t a finite resource to be rationed like bread in a famine. It’s one of our most primal needs — not just the under-a-blanket kind at the end of a long day, but the kind that rebuilds our spirit, heals us, and reconnects us to ourselves.
As Tricia Hersey writes in Rest Is Resistance: “We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright.”
The simple act of resting, of opting out temporarily, from our performance-driven, comparison-saturated culture, is not only healing.
It’s powerful.
A little rebellious even.