Luxury is usually easy to picture. The holiday, the hotel suite, the car, the clothes, or the freedom that comes with having more money. But for entrepreneur and creative strategist Sibu Mabena, some of life’s most luxurious things are far less visible: switching off her phone, sleeping without an alarm, and having the freedom to step away from responsibility for a while.
In the recent episode 6 of The Anele Podcast: Her & Now, Mabena tells hosts Anele and Mantsoe that she works incredibly hard, but not just to stay busy. Part of what all that hard work buys her is time. Time to rest, take a short nap, laugh with her sister, or simply do nothing.
It is an interesting way to think about success in a culture that tends to measure ambition by how much we can fit into a day. Mabena is not rejecting hard work. She has built Duma Collective from a business she registered while still at university into a creative agency with roughly 45 employees. Her argument is more nuanced: intense work feels different when you also have some power to decide when you are available and when you are not.
The luxury of choice
That idea has a name in workplace research: autonomy. While having control over your time does not remove pressure, research increasingly points to autonomy as an important part of wellbeing at work. A 2025 study on workplace wellbeing found that job autonomy can help weaken the relationship between multitasking and job stress, while broader research has linked autonomy to subjective wellbeing.
Mabena speaks openly about the importance of collaboration and bringing people into a business who know more than you do. As Duma grew, she brought in experienced leadership rather than continuing to carry every function herself. At one point, she paid her managing director more than she paid herself because she recognised what that expertise could help the company become. Seen that way, delegation is not simply a management technique. It can also create freedom.
That freedom was not there at the start. Mabena founded the company as a student, with no capital, no payslip and no assets, in a sector where clients settle invoices in 60 to 90 days while salaries are due on the 25th. She has had to solve that cash flow problem from the employer’s side, which is the same problem the report finds many women still facing from the other side of the counter.
Rest is not equally available
There is, however, an important reality behind any conversation about choosing when to rest: not everyone has the same amount of choice.
First for Women’s Report also found that 36% of women surveyed spend five or more hours every day on unpaid domestic and care work. The research also found that 77.3% believe formal institutions do not recognise how much time and money that unpaid work saves or costs. The picture is reinforced by Statistics South Africa’s 2026 research on gender disparities in care work, which found that unpaid care responsibilities continue to fall disproportionately on women.
So telling women simply to “make time for themselves” can miss the point. Time is not always sitting there waiting to be reclaimed. For many women, it is already spoken for by paid work, children, household responsibilities, family members, and the countless small tasks required to keep daily life moving. That is what makes Mabena’s framing useful. The goal is not necessarily to create a perfectly balanced life. It is to build enough agency into the life you have that you can occasionally choose yourself without guilt.
Success should create space, not only more work
Mabena describes herself as someone who genuinely enjoys working. Her ambition is tied to purpose, creativity, and service, rather than an attempt to escape work altogether. But she is equally clear about the value of opting out occasionally. Perhaps that is a more useful definition of success than simply becoming busier as your career grows.
More responsibility will often come with achievement. But if every promotion, client, opportunity, or milestone leaves you with less control over your own time, it is worth asking what all that success is eventually meant to buy. Sometimes luxury is not adding something else to your life. It is having enough freedom to put the phone down, sleep a little longer, and know that, for a few hours, nothing needs you.
Episode 6 of Season 2 of The Anele Podcast: Her & Now is now available on YouTube.
