One evening I lay in my bed doing absolutely nothing. That empty moment felt peaceful for some time. No homework open, no notifications buzzing, no urgent plans waiting to be made.
But an urgent feeling that I was not doing something I was supposed to do soon began to nudge me. And I picked up my phone.
Within seconds, I was watching people my age announce college acceptances, show off late-night study sessions, post gym progress, and list off the many things they had “accomplished” that day.
Suddenly, doing nothing didn’t feel peaceful anymore.
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It felt wrong, like I was falling behind in a race I didn’t even remember signing up for.
For a lot of us, rest has come to be an indulgence which we must first earn. Somewhere along the way, being busy has stopped being just a habit and has started becoming a part of who we are, a personality trait and a cultural characteristic.
We measure our days by how full our schedules are and our worth by how productive we appear. School rewards us for piling on advanced classes and extra-curriculars. Families encourage us to stay “ahead,” even when no one is sure what we are racing toward.
Social media quietly turns other people’s highlight reels into a standard we feel pressured to meet, even though we know they do not show the full story. Even rest gets rebranded as “productive rest,” as if relaxing only counts when it helps us work better later.
There is also a more subtle version of this pressure, one that comes from comparison. Even when no one is directly telling us to do more, we absorb expectations from what we see around us.
Someone else’s success can feel like evidence that we are behind, even when we are moving ahead at our own pace. Over time, this comparison blurs the line between healthy motivation and constant self-judgment. For many of us, this creates a constant, low-level anxiety.
There is always something else we could be doing: another club to join, another project to start, another skill to master. And, when free time appears, it may feel uncomfortable, even wasteful. Instead of enjoying moments of stillness, we rush to fill them, worried that slowing down means we are somehow failing.
Ironically, this very pressure to always be productive sometimes results in making us less productive in the long run. When every moment is scheduled and every break feels undeserved, the resultant burnout stops being an exception and starts becoming normal. Motivation turns into obligation. Instead of feeling curious about learning or feeling excited about trying new things, we begin to treat everything like another task on a checklist, something to complete rather than experience.
This pressure does not just affect grades or college applications. It changes how we see ourselves. Productivity becomes the prime way we measure value. And so when we are tired, unmotivated or just simply human, it becomes easy to feel invisible. Creativity also suffers when every activity has to be “useful” and joy becomes conditional, allowed only after tasks are checked off a list.
The strange part of all this is that we have forgotten the converse reality that the moments that shape us most are unproductive by design. Long conversations with friends that go nowhere, wandering through a city without a destination, sitting with a thought until it grows into something meaningful. These moments may not look impressive online, but they are often where identity forms and perspective deepens.
That night, I put my phone down and stared at the ceiling for a while. The world did not collapse. No opportunities disappeared.
The race I had imagined everyone else was running kept going without me, and that was fine.
Rest did not make me fall behind. It reminded me that I am not a machine built to optimize every minute, but a person allowed to exist without constantly proving it.
(Devansh Malhotra, 15, is a junior at West Windsor Plainsboro High School South, New Jersey)