Rescue Sleep From The Capitalists

I quit my job to nap in the afternoon.

There were other reasons, sure. The ones I told HR. Needed a change yada yada yada. And they were true enough.

But the nap thing. That was a big.

When it was 3.30 and everything was done and we were all just sitting there I didn’t get why I couldn’t just go home and l i e d o w n.

Internet culture tells us two different stories about sleep. In the first, sleep is another distraction to be sacrificed on the alter of hustle. It is basically non-time, to be clipped away so you have more hours to do things. “You can sleep when you’re dead”, which doesn’t make any sense, because when you’re dead, you can’t sleep, or do anything, cos you dead.

The sort of people who say this are the sort of people post pictures of alarm clock digits on Instagram to show off how little they value their own well-being.

Through this lens, abandoning the day for a snooze is a kind of dereliction, not simply of activity, but of the appearance of activity, which is even more important.

“Busy today?” the checkout girl asks. “Nope.”

The second, newer framing sees sleep as the magic cure. White people with money write books and go on podcasts, breathless with excitement at the discovery that the thing…