Title

Rest can be sold, because rest promises a return. Buy the mattress, the app, the retreat, the supplement, and you will work better, earn more, perform at your peak. The promise is always, in the end, a promise about your output. The product is rest; the pitch is productivity. Even the language of self-care, which sounds like permission to do nothing, is in fact a tightly conditional permission: care for yourself so that you may continue to function, maintain the machine so the machine keeps running. It is the logic of the factory applied to the soul, and it has been astonishingly successful, because it allows a person to feel rebellious and indulgent while doing exactly what the system requires of him, which is to keep himself in good working order. Idleness cannot be sold this way, because idleness refuses the premise. It does not promise to make you better at anything. It offers no return on investment. Its only product is itself: the hour spent, the light watched, the thought followed nowhere in particular, the afternoon allowed to pass without producing evidence. There is no pitch in it. You cannot monetize a man staring at rain. You can sell him a meditation app that promises the rain-staring will lower his cortisol and improve his quarterly performance, but the moment he accepts that pitch he is no longer idle. He is resting, strategically, on the advice of his wellness coach. The rain has become a tool. The idleness has been quietly converted back into work. The conversion is the whole game, and it is happening constantly, and most people never notice it.

[...]

A life in which every hour serves work, including the hours of rest that serve work by restoring you for more work, is a life that belongs entirely to work, even in its leisure, even in its sleep. Such a life has no outside. It is productive all the way down, optimized in its very relaxation, and a person living it has never once, not for a single hour, simply been alive without being also, somehow, useful. The idle hour is the one hour that has an outside. It is the one hour that does not belong to the project of your own improvement. It is, in the most literal sense, free time: not time freed up for other tasks, but time that is genuinely free, owned by no purpose, answerable to no return.

938. Snail Wizard

Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.

for the purpose of this poll, things like "animation" and "musical" are not options here because those are mediums and can be any genre! i also sort of felt like inclusion of either of these would result in them dominating this particular poll. so instead, think of which of these selections MOST sums up the movie you're thinking of. it's okay if multiple of these apply, but just pick the one that would sum it up best.

A typography edit with text above to the left and below a drawing of a weed, a dandelion. The image is black ink on yellow background. Above the plant is written "APRIL - the weeds burst up from the gutter"

To the left of the plant are written the words "I pray" with a speech bubble above saying me too.

Below the plant is written "and may God forget to more the grass."

The entire image is textured to look aged and printed.

(nihtâ-kitohcikêw)