I’ve always had a complicated relationship with sleep. Not love-hate so much as love-love – except the affair is entirely one-sided. I crave it, I court it, but when it’s time to surrender, my body folds its arms and refuses. I know the science. Seven to eight hours will make me glow. Nine hours will make me a saint. I could probably teach a masterclass in sleep hygiene, if only I could pass the prerequisite of actually sleeping.
At eighteen, insomnia stopped being an eccentric quirk and turned into a medical file. I was prescribed Zopiclone, and when that didn’t work, Seroquel – the tranquilizer they slip to people who see hallucinations, not just people who like to scroll at 3 a.m. And with this new drug came a kind of velvet sleep: dense and narcotic, like slipping underwater. That was until the next day, when fourteen hours later, I was disoriented. Eyes gummy, brain full of static, I was ashamed that the very cure meant to improve my sleep made me feel more broken than the illness itself.
For three years, I circled that drug like a toxic relationship: sometimes surrendering, sometimes resisting, never able to predict whether I’d wake up on time or at all. Last week, in a fit of impatience, I double dosed on a Sunday night. I started the next day at four in the afternoon, having missed two lectures and staggering around my apartment like a zombie. When I finally caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror – greasy hair and vacant eyes looking back at me – I flushed the pills for good.
The irony is that while I was dragging myself half-conscious to classes and jobs, the world around me was busy fetishizing “eight solid hours.” Sleep has become less about survival and more about branding – another thing to optimize, display, and measure. Think of sleep tracking devices marketing their “sleep scores” as a badge of wellness, or mattresses selling minimalism as though they were iPhones, packaging rest itself as a lifestyle brand. What I’ve realized is that deep sleep has been reframed as a performance of privilege, wellness, and control; becoming one of the sharpest new markers of status in late-stage capitalism.
Before the industrial clock colonized our nights, sleep was less an eight-hour block and more a social pastime with intermissions. Historian A. Roger Ekirch notes that for centuries, Europeans practiced “first sleep” and “second sleep”– dozing off after dusk, waking around midnight to pray, gossip with neighbors, or even sneak over to a lover’s house before curling back into bed until dawn. Night had its own culture then, a looseness that feels almost illicit compared to today’s rigid sleep-hygiene commandments. Imagine waking at 1 a.m. because it was simply the rhythm of life – your body in sync with darkness instead of productivity. What’s striking is how ordinary that was, and how bizarre our modern obsession with “unbroken deep sleep” might look in comparison: not a natural state, but a demand engineered to serve factories, and the punch-in-clock. The eight-hour sleep model neatly mirrors the eight-hour workday, disciplining bodies into predictable cycles that fit assembly lines and office hours — and now, in its latest reincarnation, it feeds the wellness economy, where even rest is expected to be a performance.
By the twentieth century, sleep had been drafted into the workforce. It was no longer just something your body did, but something scientists could measure, optimize, and discipline. Sleep labs sprang up to quantify REM cycles, transforming rest into a unit of efficiency. Mattress companies followed with promises that the right springs or memory foam would deliver not just a better night, but a better self with Sealy and Tempur-Pedic selling tranquility like it was a kitchen appliance. Now, in the wellness era, sleep has become the crown jewel of lifestyle optimization: blue-light glasses, melatonin gummies, the Calm app’s celebrity bedtime stories, Oura rings that score your unconscious. Art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary points out that in a culture where every second must be monetized, sleep stands out as the last barrier to 24/7 capitalism – Yet even here, the market has found a way in: our dreams themselves are packaged as content, whether through apps that narrate fantasies with celebrity voices or tech that tracks and gamifies REM cycles. Crary warns that this intrusion represents the ultimate commodification of human interiority—sleep and dreaming, once the most private recesses of life, reimagined as another frontier of productivity and consumption.
Contemporary sleep discourse likes to present eight hours as a common denominator, but the data shows otherwise. Research by clinical psychologist Aric Prather demonstrates a consistent correlation between socioeconomic status and sleep quality. Shorter sleep duration, more interruptions, and a higher risk of insomnia are all tied to material disadvantage rather than individual “bad habits”. The sleek world of sleep tech – noise-canceling sleep pods and blackout curtains – only amplifies this divide. Access to these technologies and the quiet, stable environments they provide is unevenly distributed. Working-class sleepers in cramped apartments or shift workers facing irregular hours simply don’t have the same opportunities for “restorative sleep”. Meanwhile, Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley New York Times’ best-selling book Why We Sleep promotes an ideal of “optimal sleep” as universally attainable through discipline and good hygiene. This sidesteps structural inequities that make such optimization a luxury. The cultural script around sleep continues to frame exhaustion as a personal failure, even though its very distribution reflects deeper social fault lines.
These inequities are not only environmental, but also embodied and intergenerational. Studies in social epidemiology show that chronic stress from financial insecurity, racial discrimination, and precarious work rewires sleep patterns at a neurological level, making rest both lighter and more fragile. Health disparities compound this effect: sleep apnea, asthma, obesity, and untreated chronic pain – all more prevalent among the working poor – interfere with rest in ways that no blackout curtain can solve. Even knowledge of “sleep hygiene” functions as a kind of cultural capital: families with stable routines and private bedrooms pass down practices that normalize early bedtimes and quiet, while others inherit habits formed under conditions of scarcity and vigilance. Historically, too, class has shaped sleep. In his book The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life anthropologist Matthew J Wolf-Meyer notes that the Industrial Revolution restructured night into labour and leisure, factory whistles dictating when bodies could rest. The eight-hour movement recognized sleep as a labour right before medicine reframed it as a lifestyle choice. In that sense, the modern obsession with “optimal sleep” revives a much older story: that the ability to sleep well has always been unevenly distributed and politicized.
Recent surveys make the generational angle explicit. Surveys show that only about 54% of Gen Z Americans (ages 12-26) feel they get enough sleep on an average weekday, while nearly 40% of Gen Z and Millennials in Canada report that financial worries are harming their sleep and mental health. The reasons go far beyond “too much TikTok”: financial precarity, pandemic disruptions, and a world of gig work and constant surveillance leave young people disproportionately restless. What looks like a generation “choosing” late nights and fractured circadian rhythms is often just the embodiment of structural pressures such as student debt, housing insecurity, and precarious labor that make efficient rest nearly impossible. In that sense, Gen Z isn’t uniquely bad at sleep; they are simply the most visible evidence demonstrating how uneven rest is distributed in a society that still insists sleep should be a matter of personal discipline.
I know this script because I’ve been cast in it. I’ve tried aromatherapy, crystals, not scrolling in bed, meditation, giving up caffeine and nicotine after 1 p.m., the list is endless. I even got a watch that tracks my sleep for my birthday. But no matter what I do, my sleeping grades always hover in the seventies, because in addition to being an insomniac, my walls are thin, my rent is high, and the city never shuts up. Psychologist Aric Prather’s research confirms what I already feel in my bones: poorer material conditions mean poorer sleep. But the cultural script still frames exhaustion as a personal failure. As anthropologist Matthew J Wolf-Meyer warns, the very invention of a rigid sleep norm turns rest into a test of character; one you’re bound to fail if your circumstances don’t fit the mold. Historian A. Roger Ekirch reminds us that sleep wasn’t always this way. Before capitalism sanded it down to eight identical hours, it was once flexible and communal. And as art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary observes, even our failures at sleep are now folded back into systems of surveillance and optimization, as if the unconscious itself could be turned into a report card.
This means that every time I wake up groggy, ashamed by another failed night or from the chemical hangover of Seroquel, I’m not just failing myself, I’m failing a social fantasy. And what’s more exhausting than that?