Add The New York Post on Google They’re looking for rest wherever they can get it.
Frazzled Gen Z and millennial New Yorkers are flocking to a new kind of weekend meetup — one where the only requirement is kicking off your shoes, stretching out on a blanket and doing… absolutely nothing.
To combat today’s hustle culture, burned-out twenty and thirtysomethings are taking adult gap years, napping in movie theaters on their lunch breaks and crying in bizarre places throughout the city just to get through the day.
To further relieve them of their daily stress, Brooklyn Reiki practitioner and sound bath facilitator Maaliyah Symoné, 31, created Club Rest Stop, a free “rest club” to force drained city dwellers to unplug and quiet their minds for a bit.
For two peaceful hours on a hot Sunday in late June, 40 participants mingled, meditated, listened to the sound baths, practiced breathing exercises, and — perhaps most unusually for New York — lay silently together without feeling an ounce of guilt in Central Park.
“That’s a lot of tired people,” Symoné pointed out to The Post.
For anyone strolling by, seeing almost 50 people lying in the grass is a scene that contradicts Midtown’s frantic pace.
As taxis honked and sirens wailed in the distance, Symoné’s crystal and Tibetan singing bowls created a surprisingly tranquil soundtrack that seemed to drown out the concrete jungle’s chaos.
Viviana Laurent, a burned-out attendee who had traded Los Angeles for the Big Apple just days earlier, told The Post that the peaceful gathering offered a welcome escape from the whirlwind of settling into a new city.
“I chase sound bath events as often as I can. I try to find them, and my friend invited me to this one. I’m new to the city — I just moved here this week — and I really appreciated how calming the event was,” Laurent told The Post.
Fellow attendee and Gen Zer Rose Mun said the event made her realize how the city’s constant hustle and bustle makes it ridiculously difficult to slow down and be in the moment.
“Today, I realized at 29 how much trouble I had even simply lying down and listening to the sound bath without feeling like I have something I have to do or a task to complete,” she told The Post.
“It’s so hard to let go and be still but I learned from Maaliyah today how important it is to give yourself more moments to truly rest.”
Mun said she believes constant productivity has become so ingrained that many young adults don’t even “know how to switch it off anymore.”
“Our generation is so burnt out and we really need to learn how to properly rest, so I’m grateful for events like this,” she pointed out to The Post. “I think our generation doesn’t actually know how to rest.”
After Symoné’s videos promoting the fledgling club and its first free meetup went viral, hundreds of depleted Gothamites flooded her TikTok comments hoping to snag a spot, with one writing, “Wow, I need this so much — I can barely survive the corporate world and never get a break,” while another simply pleaded, “Sign me up.”
Symoné, an Afro-Indigenous Louisiana native who says she “comes from a long line of healers,” told The Post that her goal with Club Rest Stop was “to create a safe, free space where people can come and see other people resting.”
“A lot of the time, rest comes with shame or guilt. But at Club Rest Stop, that’s the number one rule — you have to lie down. Everyone is doing it, so you don’t feel like the odd one out.”
The 31-year-old launched the club after years of working as a Reiki practitioner, helping burned-out clients in the entertainment industry.
“A lot of us were not taught how to rest properly, I definitely wasn’t,” she said.
“Of course, I have grandparents who would nap. But then I’ve spoken with so many people from my parents’ generation who were like, ‘Oh no, if you’re lying down, that automatically means you’re being lazy.'”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “It’s really important for your mental health to actually restore yourself after working hard, so you can show up as your best self and conserve your energy when you need it.”
Symoné said one of the biggest misconceptions she sees among New Yorkers is that rest “only means sleep,” or that it “needs to require” an expensive retreat, spa day or wellness guru.
Instead, she encourages people to schedule even five minutes of intentional downtime into their calendars before stressful meetings or after demanding workdays.
Now, after just five weeks of promoting her club online, more than 700 people have signed up to learn more.
The 31-year-old plans to host monthly meet-ups in local parks throughout NYC for eager participants to get some much-needed rest.
At the event, Symoné introduced attendees to physician and work-life integration researcher Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s “7 Types of Rest” framework, which argues that burnout can’t always be solved by sleep alone because people can become mentally, emotionally, socially, creatively and spiritually depleted, too.
They also kicked off their shoes, closed their eyes and focused only on their breathing, as she instructed.
The peaceful scene quickly drew curious parkgoers, many of whom wandered over to investigate before stretching out on the grass and joining the group themselves.
Later, after the hour-long soundbath, she reminded the group to “Thank yourself for taking this time to rest,” adding that “Resting reclaims our energy and being a rested person helps us show up as better friends and people.”
Symoné hopes attendees leave with simple techniques they can use long after the event ends.
“Even taking five minutes helps,” she said. “If you know you’re going into a stressful meeting, put aside five minutes in your calendar to do some deep breathing, stretching or simply close your eyes in a quiet place away from all the noise.”
The Brooklynite hopes Club Rest Stop, as part of her Rest Stop brand, will eventually expand beyond park meetups into coworking spaces, indoor gatherings and other free community events.
She wants to offer exhausted Big Apple residents permission to do something many say they were never really taught: “pause, rest and step away from the hustle, even briefly.”
“We’re living in the ‘city that never sleeps,’ and that’s not sustainable,” she stressed. “And it’s also very anti-human.”
In a world becoming “dominated by AI and automated systems,” she believes that “rest is the way to remain human in an automated world.”
