My parents, bless their working African immigrant hearts, could not set us up for a future where we didn't have to work to live. I've written about this before, but a gospel of rest does not serve us without systems of care in place for people like us.

Don't get it twisted: there are more than enough resources to go into those systems of care. There is more than enough money to pay people to stay home and rest. There is more than enough on this earth to help us solve these problems.

At first I was afraid that I was being protestant in my aversion to mandates to rest over the past year. But watching how our society abandoned the people most critical to keeping it running, I realized telling people to rest was unfair and impossible in the system of capitalism.

Anyway. I've decided that when I see the different flavors of "it's okay to rest!" come across the timelines, I will interrogate them with threads like these, emphasizing that we can only truly rest when proper systems of care are in place.

If I'm resting and still ordering food in, only for a megabillion company to exploit its workers to bring that food to me, my rest is contributing to someone else's harm. It isn't right.

And other examples.