Why I’m Practicing Laziness

Unlearning internalized capitalism by stopping, resting, and letting myself simply be.

Kim Thai

Sep 07, 2025

From a recent walk in nature that helped me get through a micro moment of burnout.

Contemplations:

When was the last time you allowed yourself to fully rest?

What gets in the way of your rest?

What can you do to stop running?

I have been thinking about rest a lot lately. And vulnerability.

Both have always been challenging for me to practice, to fully embody.

I have written about rest before, I have sat with the idea of rest many times, I have read all the things on rest, yet it continues to be elusive to me. At times, it can feel like chasing a ghost in the pitch-black night of my mind amidst the fog of burnout.

What happens is both cyclical and ironic: I wear myself out for whatever reason, often work but also just life, and then get mad that I did, which then tires me out even further, sending me deeper into a spiral of seething exhaustion.

How could you do this to yourself?

Again?

You know better.

I seem to lose all sense of my mindfulness practice in these moments as my unkind mind takes over my consciousness. I have luckily always pulled myself out of these moments and found a solid place to land.

But as I recently waded my way through a small episode of this, I am reflecting on my most challenging moments of life and how the common thread has always been exhaustion.

In the moment when I realized that my first marriage was no longer right for me, I was on my knees, crying in my Washington Heights apartment, delirious from not having slept for what felt like years.

In the moment when I decided to quit corporate America, it was not just because I had been working 16-hour days for almost a year but because my team had followed suit. I remember watching them, shoulders slumped, eyes and spirit barely open as they made their way around the gray cubicles of our office, trying to meet a deadline that I had self-imposed on them.

When I think about these moments and even the smaller versions of them, I see the pattern: For whatever faceless reason, I am pushing myself hard to drown out all the noise of my body screaming for me to stop and take stock of where I am in that present moment. I know the signs: I am more irritable, less patient, thus less kind, I write less, and eat junk food to make myself feel better even though inevitably it, of course, makes me feel worse.

I like to think I have gotten better, that I stop sooner, rest more. A large part of why I moved out of the city to be in the Western Catskills was to escape the grind culture, to live a quieter life but yet, it is still ingrained in the culture, in me.

It’s these patterns that are the most stubborn, the most persistent, the ones that piss me off the most, that I know are also my biggest teachers, and I know they continue to show up because I still have much to learn.

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Me resetting my nervous system in our hammock and allowing myself the joy of being immersed in a book.

Here’s where I’ve landed:

We live in a capitalist society that measures our worth through our productivity. It is at times inescapable. It is culture. You are applauded for working hard. Wow, you’re such a hard worker. You are tested, challenged by how hard you can work. It becomes a feat of ego, of personal triumph. And then we start taking it on as an identity, rather than a behavior. And that’s where the trouble lies. That’s when the hamster wheel keeps spinning endlessly. If you’re like me, most of your life, being a hard worker is something you have strived for, that you take pride in, that you attribute your success to. You have the bounty to show for it — promotions, awards, bragging rights. And if you’re also like me, you also have the scars to prove — the regrets, the mistakes, the disappointment in not showing up for yourself.
Because it is culture, it’s also a vicious cycle, one that the invisible tyrants of capitalism want you to keep getting stuck in. How can I rest when I need to pay the bills? How can I rest when these people depend on me? Real-life circumstances and consequences are at stake. This is all real. Though the sense of dire and urgency is less clear.
For me, productivity is even more deeply embedded in me as a first-gen kid. My parents came all the way to this country for what? So you can rest? They sacrificed their entire life so you can take a nap? Do you know how easy you have it? What an ungrateful daughter, what a blemish you are to your ancestors. So this drive to prove myself, to make my parents, my ancestors proud is another silent force pushing me to keep going, at all costs.

Resting as a Radical Act

When thinking of rest through a mindfulness lens, resting invokes a number of Buddhist teachings:

Samatha Vipassana
Mindfulness of the body
Compassion for the self (and others)
Aimlessness

Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh (Thầy1) teaches us:

People speak of meditation in terms of samatha and vipassana. Samatha means stopping and vipassana means looking, looking deeply. If you stop, you stop well. And if you look, you look well. Stopping is an art. Stopping, in order to give your body and your mind a chance to heal because, our mind has the capacity of healing itself…But if it does not heal itself it’s because we have not given it a chance — that is why you have to learn the deep art of stopping, Samatha.

I have learned over time how challenging and liberatory this art of stopping is. Though I have been imperfect (whatever that means) in my practice of rest, I know that I have prevented so many other times of burnout from this simple act of stopping what I am doing, interrupting whatever autopilot my consciousness has kicked into gear and simply taking stock.

This for me looks like walks in nature, lying on the floor in the middle of a work day, getting in the hammock and reseting my nervous system whenever I need, having a cup of tea in silence.

This is where I go into the deep practice of mindfulness of the body. I start taking stock of what’s somatically happening from head to toe and bring my loving attention to it. This is where I remember how deeply ingrained and internalized capitalism is in my body, in my bones and allow my out breath to be a passage way to let it go.

For me, this meant allowing myself to sleep. Like, a lot. Taking naps when I needed to, even if it was out of my normal routine. It meant canceling plans, no matter how much I wanted to keep them. It meant, sadly not drinking coffee anymore, or at least doing it mindfully so I could get some sense of exactly how tired I was.

Me taking catnaps with Charlie (L) and Watson (R).

Thầy continues by saying:

To love one means also to take good care of your body. That is one of the basic things. But do you allow your body to rest? Are you always assigning it to do something, always? You have never allowed your body to really rest, even during the time of sleeping; your body is assigned to do something, consciously or unconsciously. And even during the time of sleep, your body does not rest. In the lying position, allow yourself to be in the here and the now. All your projects, all your worries, must be postponed. Why do you have to worry when your body needs a rest? If you continue to worry, how could your body rest? So you have to support your body by not worrying.

And so slowly, I begin to let my mind and body rest, knowing that they are ultimately one interlocking, dependent system.

Eventually with each in-and-out breath, I remember that I deserve this, that this act of resting is in actuality an act of self-care, of compassion, of love, for myself.

This is why I get so angry when I push myself past the limits these days because it feels like a betrayal of self. The irony is that by being unkind to myself in these moments, I am perpetuating the cycle instead of undoing it.

So by practicing forgiveness in these moments where I will inevitably take missteps, the most radical form of practicing rest is actually just simply meeting myself where I am, over and over again. This I believe is what Thầy means by arriving at our true home. It is in this space where we remember that this practice though it may start with yourself is truly for all of us.

Thầy says:
You do it for yourself, but you do it for all of us. We need you to be peaceful. We need you to be stable. We need you to have joy. That is for the sake of the world. Your practice is not an individual matter. Your practice will benefit the whole world. When you are able to breathe in and breathe out with joy and peace, the whole world profits. Not only will the people who are close to you profit, the whole world will profit.

I remember the first time I heard about the monastics in Plum Village taking a lazy day and being a bit dumbfounded by the idea. Out of all the ways to translate a day of rest, why would they call it “lazy”?

As I have learned over time, one of the doors, gateways of liberation is considered to be aimlessness.

It is exactly what it sounds like. A wandering, a state of not having any particular goal or purpose. You might have heard the invitation to “dwell” in the present moment, yes, it is this same idea.

Aimlessness is the practice of simply being, it is an invitation, a cold splash of water that reminds us that one of the biggest ways to liberate ourselves is remembering that we have nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, nothing to go after.

This in our modern times can be considered lazy. What a wild notion — to embrace this idea, to lean into it, rather than let it be a demarcation of your worth. Can we allow ourselves to redefine laziness into one of self-care?

“We are taught to think that if we are aimless, we won’t get anywhere. But where are we going?” Thầy asks.

Practicing aimlessness, being “lazy”, has been one of the biggest gifts of my lifetime. In these wide open spaces, I find that my curiosity spikes, that I reach more towards joy, towards creating, writing, and recently have re-discovered the joy of reading. Not just on my phone, not just headlines, but a nice good hard book with a spine that cracks and pages that smell like sweet pine.

For me, I’d rather break the illusion of destination and simply revel in being in the present moment, in the here and now. Because as hard as it is to remember sometimes, I know deep in my bones that this is all we truly have. So we must treasure it and be in it, instead of running towards something else, as much as we can.

Just One Breath.