Sleep is the only guaranteed daily change of pace. The 24/7 world obliterates rhythms – days and nights, work and play, the seasons. Tech culture is even helping cheapen the very concept of sleep, Crary notes: "sleep mode" on your laptop just means it's waiting until it can be productive again. The American military is leading research into drugs, dietary changes and hi-tech breathing masks that might greatly reduce the need for sleep, while smartphones and iPads take over our bedrooms, their glowing screens disrupting our rest. One in three British workers is chronically sleep-deprived, we're told celebrity business leaders like to boast about rising early, while those lower down the ladder, saddled with shiftwork and lengthy commutes, have no choice but to sleep fewer hours. It's hardly surprising, from this perspective, that sleep is under attack. In an increasingly individualised world, sleep is also oddly communal: every time you drift off, you're entrusting yourself to your society – if only by your faith that no one will murder you in your sleep. "The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism," he writes. The world is becoming "a non-stop work site or an always-open shopping mall of infinite choice", yet you can't work or shop when you're sleeping. The Money Shredding Alarm Clock simply makes all that more literal: you snooze, you lose.Ĭrary's (broadly Marxist) thesis is that sleep is one of the last remaining spaces of resistance to capitalism's unremitting march. Lazing in bed sets you back in this interminable rat race. In a consumer society, the official point of life is to make money, then use it to buy things. It isn't mentioned in Jonathan Crary's fascinating new book 24/7: Late Capitalism And The Ends Of Sleep, but I suspect he'd regard it with both horror and a sense of vindication, since it's the perfect metaphor for his argument. More evil than Clocky, the alarm clock that rolls away when you reach out to silence it, or the Puzzle Alarm, which makes you complete a simple puzzle before it'll go quiet, the Money Shredding Alarm Clock methodically destroys your cash unless you rouse yourself. And so I wrote the book.The Money Shredding Alarm Cloc k – details of which surfaced online a few weeks ago – surely signifies the end of the long-running quest to design the most effective way of waking up. There had been a lot written about the importance of nutrition and exercise, but sleep was still underrated and dismissed. It was after I collapsed that I started studying this epidemic of burnout. Being a divorced mother of two teenage daughters, I had bought into the delusion that this was the price of success and of managing all aspects of my life. Yes, in 2007 when I collapsed from sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and burnout. Did you have a moment when you said, I’ve got to change what I’m doing? We have so many phrases that confirm that-“You snooze, you lose,” “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” But now there are role models, people who are prioritizing sleep and are supereffective. What stops people from prioritizing sleep is the fear that somehow they’re going to miss out. I think it’s deeply ingrained, but we’re at a moment of transformation. Thomas Edison called sleep “an absurdity” and “a bad habit.” Is that idea ingrained in our culture? Thanks for sharing your expertise on sleep, the topic of our cover story. This story appears in the August 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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