The majority of people, after all, busy themselves with tasks which do not really deplete their stores of energy, but which prove monotonous. That monotony is then interpreted as fatigue.
In such cases, rest seems to be more easily attained through a change of activity than through mere cessation of activity.
A business man has been closeted in his office attending to many tedious details, reading letters and answering them, etc., and by five o’clock he feels “tired.” He will then go home, change his day suit for evening wear, attend a dinner at which he will do perhaps much talking, then watch actors for three hours and feel “rested.”
Or at the end of a “heavy” week, he will gather up his golf outfit and walk miles in the wake of a rubber ball. He returns to his work “rested,” although he has only exchanged one form of activity for other forms of activity. Of actual “rest” he has had none.
Children “tired” of sitting in a class room will romp wildly, shout at the tops of their lungs, jostle and fight one another and return to meet their teacher “rested.”
Undirected activity in the young, pleasurable activity in the adult do not seem to make rest necessary, and in fact are a form of “rest.”
Egotistical gratification easily takes the place of rest. Heads of large businesses have sometimes mentioned to me that they worked much harder than some of their employés. Some of them kept on revolving commercial schemes in their heads or attending business meetings long after their office workers had left. “And yet,” they added, “we are not complaining about being tired.” Nor were they as tired, after fifteen hours of “free labor” as their employés were after six or eight hours of routine work allowing them very little initiative and independence of action.
Edison works eighteen hours a day and only “rests” through sleep some four hours out of the twenty four. I wager that if he were put at work in his own plant, under the direction of a foreman, performing regular, monotonous tasks, he would break down under the strain of such long hours and would have to “rest” twice as much as he does now. His work satisfies him, and every new detail he perfects, every novelty he initiates, vouchsafes him a powerful ego gratification.
Napoleon, too, could perform incredible feats of muscular activity and endurance after which four hours’ sleep were sufficient to rest him. His life was for many years a continuous round of ego gratifications, won at the cost of great exertions, it is true, but proclaiming to him and the world his almost unrestricted power and luck.
One is forced to the conclusion that a desire for rest is a desire, not for decreased activity but for increased activity.