Last semester, during one of NYU’s mandatory adjusting-to-college meetings—this one was focused on time management—we freshman were given spreadsheets and asked to fill in a typical week’s schedule. We blocked out classes and homework time, extracurriculars and sleep. Afterward, during the group discussion, our academic adviser asked a question that stuck with me: “How many people here feel guilty about their free time?”

Almost every hand in the room went up.

As college students at a relatively prestigious university—and before that, high school students chasing admission into a relatively prestigious university—we’d long been trained to prioritize our transcripts. But for me, at least, it was more than that.

The world is workaholic. Late nights, early mornings, under-eye bags, and caffeine dependencies have become shortcuts for self-validation. If you’re working so hard it hurts, you must be doing something worthwhile with your life, right? At least you’re sprinting toward some goal instead of staying static.

We are all living out the creeds of rabid motivational posters—or trying to. Effort. Grit. Perseverance. Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard. Be stronger than your excuses. Dreams don’t work unless you do.

But here’s a radical idea: hard work is not valuable for hard work’s sake. Bragging points on the tail end of an all-nighter are not a currency that will get you anything but drooping eyelids. And those don’t translate into happiness or fulfillment.

I once read about a little test to help discover your true passions. Imagine you have an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of money. What would you be doing, in a world without deadlines or paychecks?

And if your response to this hypothetical scenario is “sleeping” or “resting” or “taking a break,” that’s a red flag.

It’s time that we as a society celebrate hard work’s polar opposite: slacking off. Instead of engaging only in activities that will check boxes on our short- and long-term to-do lists, we should sometimes go nowhere in life besides where we already are. Step off the racetrack and lie down in the grass beside it. Take some deep breaths.

Watch that movie. Take that walk. Play that video game. Open that social media app. Sleep in that extra hour. Stop punishing yourself for being a human instead of a machine. Stop feeling guilty about your free time.

Usually, when someone asks what I did after a day full of naps and Netflix, I respond: “Oh, nothing. I did nothing today.” Because I’ve reduced such activities to filler. Fluff. The gaps between one important task and another. So unimportant, they might as well not exist. Nothing.

But recreation, including the utterly passive kind, is important. Our beloved forward momentum may be productive, but it’s also destructive. It inevitably leads to burnout.

If you want to do your best when it counts, do your medium-est when it doesn’t. And in between those times, while you wait for either an assignment or a calling, stop measuring your efforts at all.