The Rise And Shine Of Sleep Capitalism

Apart from whispering "new bikini" into my phone on a seasonal basis, I try my hardest to ignore my targeted ads. But as I hit my mid-late 20s and tentatively googled anti-aging skincare routines, the all-seeing algo caught wind. Algorithms served me age-defying beauty remedies with alarming frequency; my Instagram scroll interrupted by everything from face yoga apps to “preventative” Botox.

I resisted the bulk of these offerings but fell prey to one particular product: a $59 silk sleep mask that promised to dramatically reduce the look of wrinkles, dark circles, and puffiness – all apparently caused by the perils of moisture-sucking cotton pillowcases.

These silk eye masks rippled irresistibly across my screen as fresh-faced influencers spoke sweet promises of getting 10+ hours of sleep each night (or at least looking like you have). I was transfixed.

I selected a tasteful olive green mask and typed in my card details with the heady mix of self-loathing and arousal that often accompanies extravagant purchases. I paused before hitting “pay,” the alternatives flooding before my eyes: if dark circles were such a concern, I could simply go to bed earlier and stop partying at weekends. But no, insisted the voice of internalized capitalism, this will fix everything.

The day my mask arrived, I rushed to bed to experience the promise of perfect sleep and even more perfect skin. I got comfy, placed it on with ceremonial precision, and gleefully anticipated slumber. When I woke the next morning, however, the eye mask was not on my face but laid neatly on the pillow next to me, my skin exposed to my vampiric cotton pillow once more. Only, I had no recollection of taking it off – just a faint sense of suffocation in my dream.

Funny, I thought, and tried again the following night. But the same thing happened – the night after that, and the night after that. I'd go to sleep wearing the eye mask and wake to find I'd unfastened and removed it, as though my dream self refused to be encased in the silky confines of consumerism. As though my subconscious was rebelling.

It got me thinking about the absurdity of it all, not just that I’d succumbed to a lavish anti-wrinkle purchase when I could likely rely on my baby face to see me through a few more years, at least. But that sleep – that last sacred realm of escape – was being increasingly encroached upon. Sleep used to be the enemy of capitalism, and now it seemed to be another arena for it.

In the 2010s, our recommended eight hours were at odds with the rise-and-grind mentality of hustle culture. In late 2019, London’s Somerset House even devoted an entire exhibition to this fact, bringing together works by 50 multidisciplinary artists examining the root causes of sleeplessness and proposing solutions. The show was inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), in which he writes: “In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation and consumption, sleep subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.”

It’s an observation that builds on Karl Marx’s seminal writings on the wakefulness of the worker. “The inherent tendency of capitalist production” is “to appropriate labor during all the 24 hours of the day,” Marx writes in Capital: Volume 1, as he explains how “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor” leaves no structural place for sleep at all. (Note: capital is the true “vampire” here, not moisture-sucking pillowcases.) In the hungry eyes of old-school capital, the one and only excuse for sleep has been to recuperate the workforce.

Somerset House’s 24/7 exhibition was ironically taglined “A wake-up call for our non-stop world” – ironic in the sense that it ran until February 2020, when the real wake-up call of the pandemic took hold. As life slowed to a halt for many, and work-from-home models made space for more snoozing, we realized just how much we’d missed it. But with this increased focus on rest came the relentless, near-competitive pursuit of the perfect night’s sleep.

This side of 2020, sleep optimization – or “sleepmaxxing” as TikTok dubs it – is one of the hottest wellness trends, materializing in a dizzying array of beauty rituals, sleep accessories, and sleep tech. We’re not talking benzos and bedtime stories, we’re talking viral “sleepy girl mocktails” concocted from cherry juice and magnesium powder; homeopathic sleep supplements sold at $72 a packet; $300 sleep tracking rings that give you a nightly “sleep score” and monitor everything, from how many times you twitch to how many times you breathe your crush's name before dawn; and $5,000 heat-controlled “snore mitigating” mattress covers, sold by so-called “sleep fitness” companies.

My sleep mask is just the tip of the pillowy iceberg. Sleep has never looked so good, nor been so attainable, coos the sleepmaxxing market – provided you can afford it, of course. Based on the aforementioned products alone, the costs of shut-eye are eye-watering. Forget sheep – start counting dollars instead.

This sleep-productivity industrial complex is painfully paradoxical, but perhaps not surprising. Sleep tracking tech, especially. We spend approximately one-third of our existence sleeping (or attempting to do so). While the hard industrial labor of Marx’s time is no longer the reality for many, sleep today means precious time away from the attention economy, from having our eyeballs scraped for cookies as we get lost in an endless scroll. No wonder, then, that our sleep patterns are being converted into metrics and KPIs – that we are being put to work even as we rest.

What is still safe, for now, is what goes on below: our dreams. But, as Berlin-based Jungian psychoanalyst Jakob Lusensky tells me, that might not be the case for long. “There’s a renewed interest in dream analysis these days. That’s positive on one hand, but it also means our dreams are at risk of commercial exploitation,” he explains. “In the eyes of big corporations, all this time and data is going ‘to waste.’ I worry that attempts will be made to infiltrate the dreamworld in the interests of consumerism and productivity.”

Whether we end up having our dreams mined for data or go full-on Matrix, our sleeping bodies used as living batteries to power omnipotent machines, remains to be seen. For now, though, I’m putting my luxury sleep mask to bed and choosing dark circles over the darker machinations of the sleep optimization market.