Performance of relaxation

Tuesday evening, 10:37 p.m. The laptop snaps shut after a day of back-to-back meetings and the phone immediately lights up.

Not to unwind — to check the daily step count. Still 1,247 to go. A muttered curse, sneakers on, a lap around the block in the dark. Tomorrow the smartwatch rings have to close. You can’t just break a 47-day streak — whatever that even means.

Welcome to modern life, where even relaxation comes with deadlines. And serious ones at that.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that we would work only fifteen hours a week. He imagined afternoons of contemplative idleness.

What he didn’t foresee was that we would turn those free hours into a self-improvement marathon worthy of an unpaid internship with ourselves.

Sundays are the perfect proof: 7 a.m. alarm for the already-paid yoga class, Instagram-worthy brunch, contemporary photography exhibition, literary aperitivo. By 9 p.m., we collapse onto the couch with that familiar feeling of exhaustion, scrolling through the likes on the exhibition post: 247. A big number.

Turning rest into a performance has become so pervasive that some psychologists call it “leisure sickness.” According to some studies, 44% of people feel guilty when they’re not doing something productive.

Not guilty for procrastinating something important — existential guilt for having “wasted” a Sunday without documenting it, if only to show proof to a friend.

Three gym memberships have become the norm. The leisure calendar is busier than the work one. The €89-a-year premium meditation app gets used during lunch break, because in the evening “there’s just no time.”

The wellness industry — worth about $1.5 trillion globally — has completed the transformation, turning self-care into a full-time job. Eight hours of sleep monitored by a smartwatch that vibrates in disapproval if you slip. A twelve-step skincare routine. Journaling to process emotions.

We’ve quite literally badged in and punched the clock to relax, applying a productivity logic to everything that should be called rest. The performance schedule begins: photos, the right lighting, the right venues, the right expressions.

Even hobbies have been colonized by the same logic. Few people play guitar just for fun anymore: a cover gets posted every Friday, metrics are tracked, the same piece recorded ten times because the lighting wasn’t perfect.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa speaks of a “structural inability to rest.” That’s exactly it: we’ve internalized the logic of productivity so deeply that we can no longer conceive of value outside performance.

We’ve become our own managers, with KPIs to hit even in the time that should belong entirely to us.

The folder closes, the paradox feeds itself, and we keep going — even when we could finally stop.

If only stopping were performative.

Or at least documentable.

So exhausting…