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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.
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.
“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.”
They sure don’t.
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.”