About the refusal to let things rest. Once, lasting tranquility was considered a condition for happiness. Today, however, restlessness is rewarded, the constant movement, the permanent change. The renowned cultural philosopher Ralf Konersmann reconstructs how Western culture revolutionized its system of beliefs and shifted from a preference for calm to a preference for restlessness. With a genealogical perspective, he does not simply take restlessness as a given but explores how it came to attain its status. For restlessness is neither merely subject nor merely object, it is neither inside nor outside, neither means nor end, but always both at the same time. An analytically clear and stylistically brilliant journey through the historical stages of a concept that keeps us perpetually on the move today and seems so self-evident that no one fundamentally questions it.