A Book Reflects on the Ritual of Playing Dead
The air in Prospect Park is thick with the scent of cut grass and exhaust fumes from Flatbush Avenue. Itโs warm. But the scene on the lawn is cold, almost unnervingly still. Dozens of people are lying on their backs, arms resting limply at their sides. They are playing dead.
This isn’t a protest. Itโs not a film set. It is, for a growing number of people, a form of radical self-care. A new book, The Still Point: Stillness and Surrender in an Age of Noise, chronicles this bizarre and quietly compelling phenomenon. It’s a deliberate, public performance of non-existence. And it might be the perfect antidote to a culture of relentless performance.
The author, cultural anthropologist Jeanette Dubois, spent two years embedding herself in these groups. She lay down with them in parks from London to Seoul. Her central argument is simple. This isnโt a morbid obsession. Itโs a rebellion. โWe are a user base constantly being pinged, tracked, and prompted to engage,โ Dubois writes. The only way to truly log off, she suggests, is to simulate the final shutdown.
So they lie down. For thirty minutes, they are nothing. Not an employee, a parent, a consumer. Just a body taking up space, demanding nothing. Itโs a temporary abdication of all responsibility. Clinical psychologist Dr. Kenji Tanaka sees a clear therapeutic link. The practice, he explains, forces a confrontation with the “incessant internal monologue” that fuels modern anxiety. Itโs a forced meditation for people who canโt stand meditation.
โYou canโt optimize stillness. You canโt hustle your way to surrender. You just have to lie there and let the world spin on without you for a few minutes. Itโs terrifying, and then itโs liberating.โ
But letโs be honest. It looks strange. It feels like a piece of performance art from the 1960s, a happening thatโs forty years too late. You can almost see the ghost of Marina Abramoviฤ nodding in approval. The connection to performance art is one Dubois makes explicitly in The Still Point. She argues that by making this private desire for escape a public spectacle, participants reclaim a sense of agency over their own exhaustion.
Of course, the wellness ecosystem is already moving to integrate and scale the practice. There are apps, naturally. An app called RePose offers guided โstillness sessionsโ and uses your phoneโs accelerometer to scold you if you move too much. Itโs a strange paradox. Using technology to escape the pressure of technology. Media studies professor Dr. Alana Reed is skeptical of this commercialization. She calls it โperformative burnout,โ a way to signal your exhaustion for social capital. It becomes another thing to schedule, another wellness box to tick.
โIs it truly a release if your first instinct upon โrevivingโ is to post a photo of your stillness to Instagram?โ Reed asks in a recent column. It’s a valid question. The line between genuine ritual and curated content is impossibly thin.
The experience itself, according to accounts in Duboisโs book, is deeply personal. It begins with profound awkwardness. The feeling of damp grass seeping through your jeans. The distant wail of a siren. The fear of being judged by a jogger running past. But then, something shifts. The body, which we spend so much time commanding, finally gets to just be. The book documents people feeling a “phantom lightness” as they let go, a sense that they are momentarily untethered from their own lifeโs relentless forward motion.
The return is just as important. A facilitator rings a small bell. Eyes blink open. Thereโs a collective, silent intake of breath. For a moment, the world seems sharper, the colors more saturated. Itโs the contrast that provides the charge. You have to play dead to feel intensely alive. Dubois describes this moment as a โsystem reboot,โ a brief clearing of the cache before the notifications and obligations come flooding back in.
Itโs a quiet, strange, and deeply telling ritual. Weโve tried yoga, mindfulness, and digital detoxes. Weโve bought the weighted blankets and the sunrise alarm clocks. And now, it seems, weโre so desperate for a pause that the only option left is to rehearse our own end. To lie down in a public park, close our eyes, and pretend, just for a moment, that itโs all over.
The organizers of “The Great Stillness” have just announced their next event is planned for the lawn outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
