The Future Is Bright: 24/7 and the War on Sleep

In the round-the-clock world of 21st century global capitalism, our only relief is sleep, and as Crary notes, even that is coming under attack. 24/7 starts with a report on research being undertaken by the US military to extend the amount of time combat soldiers and other personnel can go without sleep, seeking to extend it from days to weeks. Given that military innovations usually make their way into broader aspects of everyday life -- air travel, the Internet, GPS, over-the-counter medications, all manner of consumer electronics, recreational assault weapons -- there is every reason to believe, as Crary asserts, that the sleepless soldier is the prototype of the sleepless worker/consumer. “Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism,” Crary writes. The endless here and now of 24/7 proposes to harvest surplus value not from only our bodies but from our psyches, rendering us little more than real-life Matrix pod-humans.

We may scream at each other over the “correct” way to sleep, but the truth is that where we come down on these questions—and, indeed, whether we even have a choice at all—is largely a matter of our financial resources and anxieties. As with parenting, there are multitudinous dictums competing over how to do sleep right, but few resources to actually achieve our cultural ideals. For well-to-do families, whether to co-sleep with babies may be a considered choice. No such luck for households that cannot afford a bassinet or crib. Coffee-fuelled all-nighters are technically a choice, but usually one coerced by negative economic consequences for missing a deadline. And what can Huffington say to readers who don’t have a bathtub or even a private bedroom from which to banish their phone?

"For Slowave, our fixations on sleep cessation, sleep hygiene and sleep hacking obscure the fundamental necessity of sleep. Instead of treating sleep like a luxury product or a mystery fuel, a vestigial tail or a necessary evil, we should take it for what it is: a third of our lives. If we live 77 years and spend 26 of them sleeping, we didn’t fail. We are just human."

My boyfriend, a South African, was completely disgusted. “You Americans don’t know how to rest,” he said. “You rest only to work better.”

The author of this must be the anti-me

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