Thanks for reading and crediting my essay here. I'm a "they" though, not a he. :)

I think there is a danger to only embracing idleness/laziness/etc for the sake of preserving productivity. I think that line of thinking, while very naturally appealing and consistent with a lot of productivity research, only ends up setting us down a path of achievement-hunting and productivity-worship all over again.

I worry that when we tell people laziness is needed because it makes us more productive in the long wrong, we commodify laziness (or it can anyway) into yet another thing a person needs to schedule and balance and "do" correctly. And it feeds into this idea, which particularly damages disabled and marginalized people, that we must "earn" our right to a break, or justify it, by becoming more productive after we rest it.

The truth is, some people will never be more productive. Many of us are doing way more than we should be doing, and if we want to return to a healthier baseline, we'd drop some things and never take them back up. And over the course of our lifetimes, most of us will become less busy, less productive, less capable of certain things -- and we have to decide whether we want to live in a world where that is a bad thing, or where that is seen as a neutral, even positive, fact of life.

That said, in order to convince myself to take the breaks I very much need, I still wind up dabbling in this logic all the time! I think it *is* an effective way to slowly put a person on the on ramp toward doing less in the long term... it's just not the final destination, in my book.