Why Rest Isn't Optional: Finding Peace When You Can't Afford to Stop Working

I can't afford to take time off. But I also can't afford not to take time off. That's the bind I've been in—and maybe you're there too.

This week, I hit rock bottom. Burnt out, behind on bills, working 50-60 hours a week and still sinking. My body finally said: Stop. Now. So I took an unscheduled week of rest, even though I couldn't afford it. And that forced pause revealed something I'd been missing: rest isn't the pit stop before getting back to work—it's the finish line.

Drawing from the Hebrew tradition of Sabbath and the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, I explore rest as the point of being alive—not a luxury you earn. We also dig into the guilt that comes with stopping, the trust required to let go of control, and the strange grace of rock bottom. When you can't fix your way out anymore, surrender becomes the only option—and that's where transformation happens.

In this episode:

• Why the Sabbath is a commandment to trust, not just to stop
• Rock bottom as the doorway to surrender
• How rest reconnects us to our center
• Carrying that rest back into work

Featuring insights from Heschel, Rumi, Meister Eckhart, Alan Watts, and Lao Tzu.

If you've ever felt like you can't afford to rest—or like your life will fall apart if you stop—this episode is for you.

Stop. Rest. Trust.

If this resonated, a rating or review truly helps the podcast reach others who might need it. Thanks for being here.

Transcript

The Impossible Bind

The Sabbath Commandment

Rest as the Finish Line

When You Must Rest

The Gift of Rock Bottom

Returning Home

What Rest Revealed

Engagement Without the Grind

The Point of Being Alive

Jacob 0:01

But I tell myself this line that I can't afford to take time off, and yet I can't afford not to take time off. Productivity versus survival. You know, that's the bind that I'm in. The vitalness of rest, the importance of rest. It's a very important thing in life, and it's something that goes overlooked, I think, by many of us. And I'm not talking about the kind of rest that you schedule, but the kind that you desperately need, even when you can't afford it. Because that's where I've been over this last week. I took a week off about, but I desperately needed it. And I couldn't afford it financially, but I still took it anyways. And it's really hard for me to do that. I've been in this cycle now for about three years where I work myself to the bone to the point where I can't even function anymore. And then when I can't do any more, I take time off. My body, it communicates with me. It tells me, hey, you need to stop right now. This is enough. And then my brain says, Well, wait a minute, the bills, you know the fin the lights are gonna get shut off. What about rent? But my body says, No. You need to rest. You need to stay home and not go out there. It's tough though when you're behind on bills. Work, you know, is piling up for me and I should be hustling, but damn it, I have to take time off. And I get into this cycle where even when I take time off, it I feel guilt-ridden, which I'll go into more about later. But I tell myself this line that I can't afford to take time off, and yet I can't afford not to take time off. Productivity versus survival. You know, that's the bind that I'm in. And a lot of you listening are out there in that same situation. You know, I'm I'm looking for work, I'm working 50, 60 hours a week, my air conditioner's out in my car on top of it. I was just done. I was at the end of my rope. So let's talk about rest, guys. It's important. It's something that, if you follow the Hebrew tradition, is a commandment. A commandment to rest. Not everyone out there listening is Christian or Jewish, and that's fine, okay? Just don't throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one for me, okay? Listen to this. In the Hebrew tradition, their relationship with the divine, this whole universe, whatever you want to call it, they have a commandment to rest. They call it the Sabbath. You're familiar with it. What does it mean? What does Sabbath mean? The etymology of that word is from the root Shivat, which means to cease, to stop, to rest. We're not talking about just taking a break. We're talking about a complete cessation or stopping, an ending. You're basically declaring something is finished even when it's not done. Like in my situation, what about the bills? What about the rent? Stop. You need to rest. You need to trust that it's going to be okay when you rest as well. And I struggle with that right now. That's probably the for me, it's a dream right now to be able to take time off and have all the bills paid for. I haven't done that in years. Here I am recording a podcast on my lunch break. Instead of relaxing with my wife right now and eating lunch, I'm recording this episode because it's the only hour that I have available during the day where I can feasibly do it. In Genesis, it says, On the seventh day, God finished his work, which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. He didn't rest because he was tired. He rested as a model. In the Hebrew tradition, they are saying, look, the source of everything takes a chill day. And it's not because he's tired, it's because that's just the way it is. Shavat means finished and rested. Nobody, nothing. Everything stops. Everything relaxes. One of the Ten Commandments. I mean, we're talking about a list of things not to do and to do, and right, you know, it's right there with don't murder and don't steal. Don't kill somebody is right next to take a day off. It's important. It's very important. It's not optional. It's not like, yeah, when I have time. And I get it. There are times where I have not been able to take a day off. I say times, I mean like all the damn time. You know, I've had plenty of times where my dad calls me up. My dad, he's a Seventh-day Adventist, uh flavor of Christian, which they take uh the Sabbath extremely serious. You know, he would call me up and text me all the time, like, you're taking Saturday off, right? And I'd be like, Dad, if I do, you know, the lights are gonna get shut off, or I'm I'm not gonna be able to pay my car bill, you know, and it could go into repo or this and that. So there are times when you cannot rest. But there are times when you must, regardless. It's not an option. It's how we're designed. Every day we rest for eight hours, it rejuvenates us. But beyond that, we also need rest from work in our waking hours. There's a Jewish rabbi and philosopher by the name of Abraham Joshua Heschel, and he wrote beautifully about the Sabbath. You know, our culture says we have the we have the framework that you rest to recharge so that you can go back to work and work better. Like rest serves work. And to some degree, yes, when you rest, you are more productive. That is absolutely true. But Heschel, he says that we work so that we can rest better. Work serves the rest. Rest is not the pit stop, it's the finish line. It is the point of being alive. The Sabbath or the rest day is the climax of the week. It's not the intermission to get back to business, quote unquote. Just being is the point of being here. Things are very backwards in the West. We way overvalue work. It's important. It's n it's necessary. We have to get things done, yes. But it is not the point of existence. Your being, your rest is the point. Heschel has a quote that says, The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays. The weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude, but the climax of living. He says, Six days a week we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self. Six days we're out there working, dominating, trying to control, produce, achieve. But what do we do on the seventh day? We we dominate ourselves. And what do I mean by that? That means that we face our urges to keep going. We try to master them. We have to shift to a trust instead of a control. And I am constantly learning this lesson over and over and over again. And my wife points it out to me. You know, I'll on paper, I'll write out my schedule. Like, I gotta work these next four weeks with no days off. And my wife will just roll her eyes, she'll you'll see. Okay, babe, you'll see. And I'll be like, watch me. And sometimes I'll prove her wrong. I'll get through three or four weeks, but then I'm ready to collapse. And then there's sometimes like last week where it just my body, it says, Nope, you're staying home. What is you might be thinking, okay, the Bible's three thousand thirty five hundred years old? What does it have to do with me? And my finances, you know, in two thousand twenty-five. Everything. You you see, this commandment in the Hebrew tradition was not given to people who had everything figured out, everything was organized, they loved working. This was given to the Israelites right after they escaped slavery in Egypt. They had nothing, no homes, no security, wandering in the desert, terrified about where their next meal is gonna come from. You can read the stories when um m you know mana would appear daily. Something they could eat, but they couldn't hoard it. It would rot. They had to trust each day to the next. That's where I am right now. I have no idea how I'm gonna pay all these bills I have. But it's not that I don't care. It's just that I I I trust it. I've rested, and you know what? I'm 42, I'm gonna be okay. I'll figure it out. I'm just gonna focus on putting one foot in front of the other. These Israelites, God said to them in that in that terrified state they were in, wanting to hoard everything, stop anyway. Rest anyways. Trust me, anyways. Just stop. Rest, trust. That's a good motto. Stop, rest, trust. So if these people could rest with nothing, maybe we can rest when we think we have nothing as well. Just maybe. Just maybe. I had a note here that says the commandment is to rest is also a commandment to trust. Because it's tough. The reason we don't rest is because we don't trust that things are gonna be okay. Oh, I know when when I for me just recently, when I saw that I wasn't going to make my rent, even working maxed out days, that's when I just exhaled. And you know, it's stressful. But when the when the realization dawned on me, I was like, well, I'm gonna take a few days off then. I know that's a bad mindset, probably, but sometimes, like I said, you have to have rest that you don't schedule. That you're you you just know you need it. And you have to deeply experience it, breathing from your heels, fully resting each day. And during this this past week, I did not I did not even think about the podcast. And I love doing this podcast, I love it so freaking much. I hope to God that I can do this full time because right now I am buried up to my eyes in shit. I love this. I love talking to people. I wish I had more time to talk to people. This is a creative endeavor for me, and yet I'm buried in work, and I can't I can't indulge as much as I would like to in doing this podcasting thing, and it kills me inside. One of the greatest sources of joy for me over these last couple of months has been doing this podcast, and it's still super small. I have barely anyone listening. I just am starting to get my first couple of comments from people, and it feels good. It feels really good. That to me is a rest in into itself. I got a comment from someone the other day on an older episode I did, I think it was episode four, and they said, This episode was just what I needed to hear today. Thank you. I said, Your comment was just what I needed to hear today, thank you. I bring this up because, you know, even the the podcast, which I love doing, I had to take a step away from it because the last couple episodes for me have been very stressful because of my incredible workload and trying to figure out these episodes with little to no free time. So I even had to walk away from that. I walked away from everything. And I said, babe, I'm taking some days off. We're gonna have some fun, we're gonna hang out with the kids, we're gonna play some video games, you know, we're gonna eat uh whatever the heck we want. We're just gonna let it all hang out and take a little staycation. And she was she loves having me around because I'm not around that much. Damn it. Rest is the point of life. It's what we are here for. What's the point if you can't rest? Rock bottom is when you realize that you need it, you know, and that for me is I love rock bottom, honestly. I the reason I love rock bottom is because I'm I can be a very controlling type of person, uh, at least for my my own life, not controlling of others, but wanting to control my circumstances. It's hard for me to surrender. And yet that's where the freedom is, that's where the trust is. So I it's this balancing act. I've been much better at it the last couple of years, but I still struggle. And when I hit rock bottom, that's the point where you can't keep going anymore. Not that you won't, but you can't. Your body shuts down, your mind shuts down. You've hustled as hard as you can and you're still sinking. And that's where I was a week ago, a little over a week ago. Rock bottom. I'm like, damn it, I'm not gonna make rent. I'm burnt out, my air conditioning's out in my car. Oh, I need to recover. It forces you to surrender. You can't, I, you know, I can't, I couldn't control my way out of it anymore. I had to let go. But the nice thing about it is it's this humbling experience, you know. Like, there's this quote from Rumi where he says, Don't turn your head. Keep looking at the bandage place. That's where the light enters you. That's where the light enters you. The wound, the breaking point, the place where we are the most vulnerable. And for me, it's when I I feel like I can't fix something or control something. And it's it's a blessing in disguise. Like I mentioned, that rock bottom, it's like it opens something up in me. It's like, wow, I can't get out of this. I can't run from this. And then transformation happens. These cracks, it's where the light gets in. But it's unfortunate in my in my case that it takes rock bottom for me to surrender and finally rest. So going forward, I'm gonna try to force myself to take one day off every single week. And I think it might benefit me because even though it's my day off, I can maybe pencil in like an interview with somebody, you know, and just do an hour episode with someone, and then I can just focus on editing, you know, and and simple things instead of trying to plan all these episodes out. I've wanted to do so many interview episodes, but I don't ever take a day off, so I can't. So I'm gonna try to be better at this and avoid rock bottom going forward. And I'll let you guys know in future episodes how I do on that. Wish me luck. But it's all about trust, you know. Trusting, letting go, surrendering. We're grinding, hustling, trying to control everything. We think we're being responsible in that process, but it's like we are, I don't know how to describe it. It almost feels like the more I try to grind or hustle my way to where I need to be, it's like I'm outside of myself. I'm away from my center. I'm I've gone on a walk, a long walk from home, and resting is when you come home again. The word shov in Hebrew means to return, and that's the modern um shuv means to return, and it it is uh understood today as repentance, but it it repentance today is like this negative connotation, if you ask me. It's like, you know, you better own up to what you you don't did, you know. But it's like, no, returning to your center, resting, Shabbat, Sabbath. Meister Eckhart has a quote where he says, God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. I wrote that quote down, and that's why I kind of had that metaphor in my head. Like, we're walking away from our centers, you know. Uh, the more that we do, the more that we're busy, do do do, get more done. Even this podcast, it started to like take me away. I I was like, I love it, as I mentioned, but it was like I got to this point where I was thinking to myself, like, oh, I gotta, I gotta see where people are falling off in engagement and views and clicks and all this, all the logistics of the podcast. But all it's all the while, it's like my strick card says, God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. So come back. And yet we can leave that center when we're seeking, striving, trying to get there, quote unquote. But when every time that I rest, I realize that I am, I am already where I need to be. And then when I go back to work, I carry that with me. That feeling of centeredness. Like today, I was doing deliveries and I just felt like I was exactly where I needed to be at every moment. I wasn't rushing to get each delivery done as fast as possible. I was efficient, but you know, when I'm walking out of the restaurant, I'm just feeling myself, my steps, opening the door of the restaurant, the feeling of my body as I move to the car, the feel of the wind, my environment around me, just taking it in. Otherwise, it's like I'm detached from myself and I'm somewhere else, and I'm not living my actual life that is here and now. And rest reminds me of that. I carry that rest with me when I go back to work. I love it. That's what I got out of the rest, really. When I when I like what what actually happened when I stopped? Well, you know, the first few days, um first couple of days I started because this was like an unplanned week that I took off. It it started as like a um a half day, and then a couple of half days, and then it was like two or three full days. I I I mean, I I'm talking about a rest week here, and I probably still worked about 30 hours. But what always happens when I first stop and rest is there's that panic that sets in, and that guilt, and the voice in my head that's screaming at me, like, what about this? What about that? The mental tallying of the bills, you know, it comes, and then I just remind myself to be present, like it's gonna be okay, and then it just calms down, and then I can really start to enjoy my rest after that, at least to the best of my ability. Um, you know, I sleep better, my mind is clear. Um, and just the fun that you have from resting. I I just wish I could put it into words. It's like I feel like a dry sponge that was like dry and twisted, and then rest is like this wonderful stream of water, and I start cracking and then coming back to my original position. Like, take, for example, my last episode that I did, Ghost to the Restaurant. I love that episode. It was like me talking about my old friends and um, you know, my social life and how a lot of that feels gone nowadays. And that episode just came out of me, and I was really pleased with it. And the last couple of episodes before that episode were very, I don't want to say forced, but I was very nervous about them and I was very uptight, and the last one just flowed right out of me. Like it felt so good. And the only difference is that I completely walked away from my job. I completely walked away from the podcast. And when it came time to do an episode, I opened my notepad and I just sketched like a whole episode like automatically. I'm thinking to myself, man, what would it be like if I had regular normal time off to do this podcast? You know, like holy smokes. You know, it's like I'll be in my restful period and awesome moments of productivity will happen like that. But I know that the work ahead doesn't disappear, the bills are still there, but it's like my relationship to them changes. I see them more clearly instead of being swallowed by them. It's uh it's like a metaphor they use in Buddhism where when you are not mindful, you are in the river as it's coming down and it's pushing you around and sweeping you away. But when you rest, for me, it's like you once again are sitting by the river and you're watching it go by. Not like a disassociation, but a perspective. It puts you in the proper perspective, it gives you your footing back, if that makes sense. And then when you come back to work, it feels so much better, you know. Like there's this quote from Alan Watts that I wrote down for this episode. It says, uh, this is the real secret of life, to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. So when I force myself to take time off, I always feel so refreshed when I come back. Like work goes from being serious to sincere. And I always make up, or I always end up um uh making more money too, ironically. It's like I'm always in the right area of town. Um, you know, low tippers, they don't bug me as much. But yeah, I make more money when I when I come back after resting. It's weird. It's like I do the same thing, I do the same job, I put in the same effort with the same strength, but I just make more money easier. It doesn't feel the same. It's like there's engagement without the grind. And to me, it just reminds me why we're we're all here, and I just wanted to talk about it today. That's the point of being alive, guys, is rest. To be, to exist, not to work. You know, in the Hebrew tradition, God's name is I am, not I am working. It is simply I am. And yes, we do have to work, but it's very important for you to take your rest seriously or sincerely. And that's really all I wanted to say today. Um, probably a shorter episode than usual, but I wanted to let you guys know I going forward, I am going to take my rest more sincerely, and I honestly hope you do too, because it's why we're here. But I love you guys, and I'm really glad that you're here. That's your homework assignment this week, is to remember to rest. So if you uh made it to this point, I guess you're one of the few who uh listens to the podcast, and I'm grateful for you. So, you know, if you can take a second and just give me a rating because it means a lot to me. Anyways, I wanted to close out with a Lao Tzu reading from the Tao De Ching. It's verse 16. It says, Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity. If you don't realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kind-hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you. And when death comes, you are ready. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Relax.