Rest turned into a protocol

What it costs to optimize the parts of life that were supposed to be the reward

I took the dogs out this morning and reached for my phone before we’d made it to the end of the driveway because there’s a business podcast I’ve been meaning to finish, and a walk felt like the responsible place to do it. I stood there for a second with my thumb over the play button and realized I didn’t actually want to listen to it. I wanted music that cleared my head, the songs I know every word to and make the walk feel like it flies by. So I started my favorite Spotify playlist, but the whole walk a small voice kept nagging me that I was wasting a perfectly good opportunity to learn.

On a normal walk I’m usually brain-dumping into Claude, talking through some problem I’m stuck on and letting it sort my thoughts before I get back to my desk, or I’m clearing my inbox one swipe at a time so the morning feels like it started early. And I love it. I come home with a clearer head and a lighter inbox, and I can’t pretend it’s a bad use of the time. It works, and that’s the trap, because some part of me has somehow decided that simply walking without doing something “productive” is a waste. I realize how crazy that sounds when I say it out loud. But aren’t most of us being flooded with messages that we need to optimize every moment or every task?

Somewhere in the last few years rest turned into a protocol. There’s a correct way to sleep now and a correct way to walk, a stack of supplements for the morning and a different one for the night, a way to turn a cold shower into a discipline and a slow Sunday into a recovery day with a name and a checklist. Ultimately, we’re told there’s a better way to do the things that used to just be living, an optimal way to parent and to take a vacation and to spend a Saturday, a productivity system for the parts of life that were supposed to be the reward for being productive. Culturally, it feels like we believe any experience is an opportunity to be done “better.” I’m the exact person who has bought into it without even realizing it. I read the studies and buy the biohacking ring and turn my own body into one more dashboard to manage, always looking for the next thing to improve.

This week I built another agent for our business that saves me roughly thirty minutes of admin work I was doing daily. When it finally ran the way I wanted, the first thing I felt wasn’t relief. I was already scanning for something to pour into the thirty minutes it had just handed back to me. The whole conversation around AI right now is about volume, do the work of five people, ship more, 10x your output, and my instinct bends that way so every hour I free up I repack with another hour of doing. But when I finally took a step back, I wondered what it would feel like to let one of those hours just stay empty.

I’m writing this while half-listening to a webinar I promised myself I’d watch, which probably tells you how seriously I’ve taken my own point so far. Underneath all of it is a question I don’t love sitting with, which is why. Why the pull to always be doing the second thing, why a walk and a podcast and an inbox all at once feels more correct than any one of them on its own, and whether the wiring that’s been so good for the business is going to cost me something I won’t notice until it’s already gone. My kids are little, and I can picture looking up a few years from now, very optimized and very on top of everything, but unable to remember the actual texture of any of it. And that’s the part that frankly feels very scary.

I don’t have a happy ending to this where I delete the apps, get comfortable with silence and rest, and turn into a calmer person that isn’t always on a frantic hunt to optimize. I’ll probably still brain-dump into AI on tomorrow’s walk. But this morning, with the dogs pulling ahead and a song on that I didn’t have to think about, I felt better than I have in a while, and I know that must mean something. The walk was better with the music.