What makes this observation surprising is that it treats exhaustion not as a moral failing but as a technical problem—something requiring maintenance rather than willpower. Anne Lamott isn't suggesting mere rest; she's implying that we often run on corrupted code, our weariness less about laziness than about accumulated glitches that a genuine break can reset. When you've spent weeks answering emails at midnight and your patience is frayed to nothing, unplugging works precisely because it stops the loop; you're not trying to fix the exhausted version of yourself, you're letting the system shut down completely so it can boot up fresh. That distinction—between pushing through versus truly powering down—explains why a single good night's sleep sometimes works miracles that weeks of "self-care" cannot.