‘I’m decentering work’: Why we’re in the middle of a ‘rest revolution’

Downtime and time-wasting have all become more aspirational than luxury goods, explains Alexandra Jones. In a world that rewards overwork, she says, rest is now a radical choice

A few weeks ago, in a dusty field at Glastonbury Festival, I bumped into a number of peers who asked (predictably) how work was going. “Yeah, good,” I heard myself telling them. “Although I’m kind of decentering work at the moment.”

“Decentering work” – those were genuinely the words I used, much to my own bemusement and presumably others’ too. They were drawn directly from an emerging lexicon of rest I had started out absorbing by cultural osmosis on social media and, before long, began to invest in. It’s all catchy lingo, of course – “micro-retirement”, “quiet quitting”, “lazy girl jobs” – easily dismissed as internet ephemera. But collectively, I soon learned, these terms point to something important: a subtle, but significant shift in the way people are approaching the relationship between work and rest.

It’s not just emerging in the language we use, but actively playing out in offices all over the country, too. This week, research by the British Chambers of Commerce found that one in 10 UK businesses has seen staff quit rather than comply with return-to-office mandates.

Experts have put forward various theories as to why workers are choosing freedom over stability, or autonomy over loyalty – but to me, it seems a natural response to a working world that has only become more extractive and less stable.

On initial inspection, though, “decentring work” sounds suspiciously like code for “I’m unemployed” – which wouldn’t be too far from the truth, given I was made redundant from my last full‑time job almost a year ago. It was a blow in many ways – a knock to my ego as well as a disruption in the steady forward march of my career.

But in others, it was incredibly liberating. I’d been a freelance writer for five years before that last job and had always loved being mistress of my own destiny. I figured I’d simply go back to working for myself. Pitch, write, repeat.

But when the time came to get back to the grind, I found myself dragging my feet. I was hit by a slow, baggy kind of ennui – not quite burnout but an insurmountable feeling of resistance to the hustle. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself taking on less, resting more, and not immediately filling every quiet hour with productivity.

Some of it is personal, but it’s also reflective of a broader movement. The working landscape has grown noticeably more hostile in recent years. We’re being asked to do more for less: less money, less stability, less long‑term reward, and that’s not just in the beleaguered media industry. The environment – chronic stress, overworking – increasingly (understandably) pushes professionals towards burnout.

Alexandra Jones has been ‘decentering work’ in a bid to avoid burnout (Supplied)

In her book The Rest Revolution, Amanda Miller Littlejohn argues that now many people are “on the verge of burnout, pushed … to keep working … at the expense of their physical and mental wellbeing”.

Rest, then, has become revolutionary because burnout is tailored into the very architecture of modern work culture. Instead, she says, we should reframe rest as an active, intentional practice rather than a luxury or reward – even (perhaps especially) those who have been conditioned to equate their worth with their output.

Across sectors, job security is shrinking. In 2023, an estimated 6.8 million workers (21.4 per cent) were in severely insecure roles – zero‑hours contracts, low‑paid self‑employment or casual/seasonal work – a rise of 600,000 from the previous year. That means roughly one in eight workers now lacks basic stability. Payrolled employment declined by 0.4 per cent (135,000 jobs) between May 2024 and May 2025, and data for June 2025 shows a further 178,000 jobs lost in the year prior. In industries from hospitality to healthcare, people are working harder for less and with little idea of what tomorrow holds.

Writing in Vogue Business, Amy Francombe, a journalist and consultant who specialises in divining the values of Gen Z consumers, pointed out that “instead of clinging to long-term plans that no longer feel plausible, like buying a house or securing a well-paid job, many are overspending in the present and living beyond their means as a form of emotional survival. Financial logic,” she added, “has splintered, and in its place a new consumer mindset is emerging.”

‘Rest has become revolutionary because burnout is tailored into the very architecture of modern work culture’ (Adobe Stock)

And this mindset, she tells me, extends beyond purchasing choices. “Everything has become so out of reach – whether it’s job stability or getting onto the housing market – that it almost feels like you’re an idiot if you’re overworking because it’s not going to get you anywhere.” Rest, downtime, timewasting have all become more aspirational than luxury goods, reflecting, she explains, “a shift in logic”.

The concept of micro‑retirements – deliberate pauses from work to recharge, reassess, or simply exist outside of the grind – went viral earlier this year, with many pointing out that career breaks (however you want to brand them) would have a profound impact on pension contributions. But as Francombe – who is Gen Z – points out, “I simply can’t connect this Amy to 70-year-old Amy in my mind. Maybe bankers will gamble away our pensions on AI, maybe stem cell therapies will mean that I can’t retire until I’m 100, maybe I’ll die in the climate emergency at the age of 40. It’s all so uncertain that I might as well just go on holiday rather than pay into a pension.”

Of course, the fetishisation of rest isn’t just down to the fact that work is unstable and kind of depressing right now. As Ellen Scott, digital editor at Stylist magazine and author of Working on Purpose, points out, “I think we are desperately hungry for true, restorative rest, but we can’t sate that hunger.” She argues that part of the reason that downtime is constantly being repackaged and sold back to us is because “true rest is so rare and difficult to get hold of nowadays”.

It’s time we started resting without turning it into a radical act (Adobe Stock)

“The technology that we’re surrounded by and the capitalist culture of productivity mean it’s incredibly difficult to have a quiet, peaceful moment for longer than a few minutes,” she explains. “Our expectations have changed and we accept that we should have constant sensory stimulation, or constantly be ‘doing’.”

In the meantime, though, we feel both overworked and overstimulated. “Because true rest feels like such a remote, slippery thing, we eat up any offering that tells us how to get it, whether that’s a new trend to try (quiet quitting! Lazy girl jobs!) or a product that will act as a cheat code to the rest we’re craving.

“You can really see that in the rise of retreats; we’re desperate for rest, struggling to fulfil that need, and so we’ll happily hand over significant amounts of cash for someone to please tell us how to do it.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to rest without performance – not to optimise it, brand it, or turn it into a “radical act”, but just to allow it. I’m still working, but I’m no longer trying to win at work. I don’t know if that makes me lazy, disillusioned, or ahead of the curve – probably a bit of all three. But I do know that stepping back hasn’t made me feel less valuable. If anything, it has sharpened my sense of what matters.

Maybe “decentring work” wasn’t just a throwaway Glastonbury line after all. Maybe it was my nervous system, trying to tell the truth before my brain caught up.