"Bed rotting" got rebranded as self-care. But when does rest become avoidance?
Gen Z took lying in bed all day and gave it a name that doesn't sound lazy. "Bed rotting." Doing everything from binge-watching to doomscrolling to staring at the ceiling. And the framing shifted from "being lazy" to "slowing down" and "self-care" .
I've been thinking about how this applies to building. There's a version of rest that's genuinely restorative. And there's a version where you're calling it "rest" but it's actually fear. Fear of the thing you should be doing. Fear of putting yourself out there. Fear of finding out the thing you built isn't good.
The hard part is knowing which one you're doing. From the inside, they feel identical.
How do you tell the difference between "I need this rest" and "I'm using this to avoid something"? Is there a signal you trust?
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I see it in my daughters, so I get the pattern. Honestly if I'd been born now, with endless great stuff online, there's no way I could've focused on schoolwork lol
On rest vs avoidance, I feel like the idea of avoidance is pretty thin for them. They've grown up with a comfortable enough base that they probably feel they'll get by without pushing too hard. But you'd really have to be in their shoes to know how it feels.