Vicky Mochama is a contributing columnist to The Globe and Mail.
Due to a localized economic downturn that seems to be centred on my immediate environment, I’ve had to make some adjustments. It happens to the best of us. Unfortunately, it comes at a time that is not financially convenient.
See, it’s a Mattress Renewal Year.
After some time in the gig economy, a pandemic and a few moves, I’m concerned that my mattress has itself taken on the attributes of the age: a certain bodily angst manifested by the urge toward slovenliness and decline. That is – and I want to be clear that I’m not proud of it or anything, and I am obviously working on it – sometimes I find myself lying down in bed thinking “that smell can’t be me.” (Judge not lest ye be judged!)
So yes: it’s a Mattress Renewal Year. And that comes with many anxieties.
One of them is the weather. I can’t be expected to think about a mattress in summer. In the summer, I’m a brief visitor to my mattress: Sun’s out, I’m out. Not so in winter, when the oppressive weather makes the price and purpose of a mattress clear. As the impending snow descends, I am called to my mattress.
It is the place from which I enter what the Guardian informs me is “goblin mode.” It’s also the central setting for what the New York Times calls “languishing.” In more recent weeks, young people, according to the New York Post, are getting to the point and simply “bedrotting.”
That term stems from a question posed by TikTok user g0bra77y, who in May asked if anyone likes “rotting away in their bed” (then pointed at herself). Hundreds commented back saying, yes, speak our truth, sis. On that platform, more people posted videos from their beds of rot. Once more, a young woman had casually spoken truth to a hidden cultural phenomenon.
Oxford Dictionaries names ‘goblin mode’ as its word of the year
Bedrotting joins China’s tang ping (lying flat) movement as acts that raise important questions. In “lying flat,” some young people in China are pushing back against its culture of competition and ambition. They’re just refusing to work hard for whatever the next professional benefit is. They asked: What if, in the face of the corporate and societal ladder, I just ... lay down? That ladder’s still gonna be there.
Bedrotting also isn’t about skipping or abandoning work, in the Guardian’s eyes: “If anything, it’s the opposite of pulling a sickie; it’s about self-care and wellness. More of a weekend kind of a thing.”
That is, you still have to go to work, but you can lie down about it. No quiet quitting or rage applying: just a zen sense of interior and exterior horizontality.
Still, there is the unspoken question: What if people just want to lie down, like a lot, physically and spiritually?
Once you leave the house, life seems hellbent on making sure you don’t lie down again. There are many terms for these efforts: the Protestant work ethic, hostile architecture, hateration, holleration.
Lying down in public is a fraught act. In a 2019 survey, 7 per cent of 187 U.S. cities had municipal laws and ordinances that effectively prohibit sitting or lying down anywhere in public spaces; 21 per cent barred sleeping in public. The Canadian advocacy initiative The Homeless Hub calls these and other laws that criminalize poverty and the public experience of it “neo-vagrancy” laws. Their research found that nearly 75 per cent of Canadians live in a jurisdiction with such laws, including nearly 30 with anti-public-sleeping laws.
Ask an expert: Languishing is so last year ... but what’s next?
What some have made criminal, others have made art. In 1999, the artist Tracey Emin held an exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery in which she displayed the mattress where she had lain for four days in a suicidal depression. Surrounded by “crumpled tissues, period-stained clothing, cigarettes, empty vodka bottles, a pregnancy test, lubricant, and condoms,” the public display of the bed was a window into vulnerability. It was challenging, confrontational and, of course, controversial: One critic called it “an endlessly solipsistic, self-regarding homage.” Sounds like someone who needed a nap on his way into work that day.
I didn’t invent society and there’s not much I approve about it, but I understand that it has its rules: In public, you ought not to be prone. So I take to my mattress, a safe-if-somewhat-scented harbour in a world lacking in rest. All one really wants, I think, from the most ambitious to the least, is to return to one’s mattress.
Which brings me back to my search and its attendant anxieties. Summer gives me brief cover; look, if it gets really bad, I’ll open a window. Or I’ll get in touch with the better art galleries.
I’ll need to save up, after all. Mattress renewal rates are not looking favourable.
Vicky Mochama