I have to remind myself: fully unplugging isn’t luxury but survival.

For a long time I believed if I kept pushing—harder, faster—I’d finish sooner. The problems would end, I’d cross some final finish line, and then I could rest in perpetuity.

That idea rests on a broken assumption: that problems will someday cease to exist. That there’s a place where you can exhale and stay there forever.

Maybe that happens for a few—the founder who exits, the lottery winner, the rare post-money life. That’s the Silicon Valley mythology of the last thirty years. But even the people who “make it” still need to unplug.

Grinding 365 days a year without burning out is naive. You almost have to brush up against full burnout once to learn the lesson: at a certain point, the mind snaps. Motivation cuts out. There’s nothing left in the well.

If you rest while there’s still something in the tank, it regenerates. Empty it completely, and it takes a long time to come back.

I have to remind myself of this—especially as someone who’s naturally restless, who wants to finish the thing and move on. When there’s a tremendous amount of work, there’s also tremendous value in fully unplugging.

A friend models this beautifully. He runs his own company, and every year he makes time to disconnect completely—sometimes a few days at a hot spring, sometimes a full week. He’s Jewish and observes the Sabbath with real devotion. You can’t even reach him by phone.

There’s a beauty to that discipline: the understanding that there’s no better way to recover than to fully disconnect—to let the mind rest, to not take action, to let the nervous system idle.

I think of it like exercise. You can’t obliterate your body every day, maxing out rep after rep. You have to give the muscles time to recover—sometimes days, sometimes weeks.

There’s a pattern to life: a yin and yang, an ebb and flow. There’s a time to push and a time to rest. Too much rest without action, and you stagnate. Too much work without rest, and you burn out.

So the work is learning the rhythm—on every scale.

• Day to day: take breaks, go for walks, unplug in the evenings, turn off notifications before bed.
• Meso: schedule real off-grid blocks—half days, full days—and guard them.
• Macro: take weekends, vacations, and sick days without guilt.

Because working well isn’t just about output.
It’s about rhythm.
And rhythm needs space.

And rest is space.