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. It’s 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. It’s 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 isn’t a morbid obsession. It’s a rebellion. “We are a user base constantly being pinged, tracked, and prompted to engage,” 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. It’s 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. It’s a forced meditation for people who can’t stand meditation.
“You can’t optimize stillness. You can’t hustle your way to surrender. You just have to lie there and let the world spin on without you for a few minutes. It’s terrifying, and then it’s liberating.”
But let’s be honest. It looks strange. It feels like a piece of performance art from the 1960s, a happening that’s forty years too late. You can almost see the ghost of Marina Abramović 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 “stillness sessions” and uses your phone’s accelerometer to scold you if you move too much. It’s 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 “performative burnout,” a way to signal your exhaustion for social capital. It becomes another thing to schedule, another wellness box to tick.
“Is it truly a release if your first instinct upon ‘reviving’ is to post a photo of your stillness to Instagram?” 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 Dubois’s 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 life’s relentless forward motion.
The return is just as important. A facilitator rings a small bell. Eyes blink open. There’s a collective, silent intake of breath. For a moment, the world seems sharper, the colors more saturated. It’s the contrast that provides the charge. You have to play dead to feel intensely alive. Dubois describes this moment as a “system reboot,” a brief clearing of the cache before the notifications and obligations come flooding back in.
It’s a quiet, strange, and deeply telling ritual. We’ve tried yoga, mindfulness, and digital detoxes. We’ve bought the weighted blankets and the sunrise alarm clocks. And now, it seems, we’re 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 it’s 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.
