Article 2 of 4: From Waking Hours to Unconsciousness

Read time:5 minutes

Core idea: Your attention is the scarce resource capitalism is destroying. Sleep is the last space where you’re free—and it’s under assault.

Long story short

– We’ve timed everything: work, leisure, even meditation. Your brain can’t process at this speed.

– Capitalism requires perpetual dissatisfaction—you’re kept close enough to the dream to stay engaged, far enough that you never arrive.

– Sleep is the final frontier: 6-8 hours daily where you’re unavailable for extraction.

– Small sovereignty: grayscale phones, digital sunsets, refusing to optimize sleep itself.

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In the first essay,, I showed how tools cross thresholds; how AI and Strava move from empowering to disabling.

This essay is about something more totalizing: the systematic colonization of every moment of your existence. Not just work hours. Not just leisure. But finally, the last space where you might be free: your sleep itself.

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The Timing of Everything

We time everything now.Sports optimized on Strava. Gym workouts timed. “Power yoga” for calorie efficiency. Reading monitored on Goodreads. Meditation gamified with badges. Young people watch YouTube at 2x speed because there’s too much content, too little time.

Your brain cannot process information at this speed. You’re consuming, not integrating. Hearing, not listening.

The dark irony: AI researchers know this. The foundational paper enabling modern AI is called “Attention Is All You Need.” Attention is the scarce resource.

But instead of respecting its scarcity, capitalism fragments, captures, and exhausts it.

You have no uncolonized time during waking hours. Work bleeds into evenings. Leisure is optimized. Even “doing nothing” became “mindfulness practice” with apps and timers.

Your attention, the neurological capacity to focus, process, integrate, is being systematically destroyed. And you’re too accelerated to notice.

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The Colonization of Dreams

Not sleep dreams. Aspirations. The life you’re supposed to want.

The formula: Work hard → Get educated → Climb the ladder → Buy the house → Achieve success → Be happy.

You’re Always Almost There

Get through school, then life starts. Get the job, then stability. Get promoted, then security. Save for the house, then freedom. Pay the mortgage, then peace. Save for retirement, then finally live.

The goalposts keep moving. Deliberately.

Because satisfied people stop consuming. People who feel they have “enough” aren’t good for infinite growth. Capitalism requires perpetual dissatisfaction.

Advertising creates desire where none existed. Shows you the life you *could* have if only you bought this, achieved that status.

You’re kept close enough to the dream to stay engaged, but far enough that you never arrive.

When you reach a goal? Satisfaction lasts days. Then emptiness returns. Because the dream is the hook. The exhaustion is the product.

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The Scale We Cannot See

Olivier Rey wrote Une question de taille (A Question of Scale). His argument, echoing Illich: beyond certain thresholds, systems that were beneficial become pathological.

A small town has community; a megacity has anonymity. A local market serves needs; global supply chains create dependencies.

Capitalism has pushed us past optimal scale everywhere, and can’t let us come back. Why? Because admitting “enough” exists would crash the system. The entire model requires growth without limits.

This is the “statistical climax” I mentioned in Article 1. We’re riding a wave and can’t tell where the peak is. My fear: we’re already past it. More inputs (hours worked, attention fragmented) for decreasing outputs (satisfaction, meaning, capacity).

We can’t see it because our vision is blurred by pace.

And “enough” is the one thing today’s society cannot tolerate.

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Sleep: The Final Frontier

Which brings us to sleep. The last domain capitalism hasn’t fully colonized. Yet.

You can’t work while sleeping. Can’t consume. Can’t be advertised to. For 6-8 hours daily, you’re unavailable for extraction.

This is intolerable to a system requiring 24/7 availability.

Pharmaceutical Colonization

Enter: pharmaceuticals. Not just for diagnosed insomnia. For optimization.

Caffeine to push through natural fatigue. Melatonin to force sleep on disrupted schedules. Modafinil to stay alert. Sleeping pills to compress rest.

Each drug solving problems created by ignoring your body’s signals, creating new problems requiring new drugs.

Your circadian rhythm becomes a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be trusted.

As Jonathan Crary writes in 24/7, the goal isn’t just extracting value from waking hours but eliminating sleep as economic dead time. Military research into sleepless soldiers. Productivity hacks for “optimal” 4-hour sleep. The fantasy of transcending biological limits entirely.

Sleep is rebellion because it’s the last space where you exist without justification, performance, productivity, or anyone’s gaze. No one can tell you what to dream. No app can optimize it. No metric measures its value.

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Small Sovereignty

I won’t tell you to quit your job and live on solar time. The question is: What small sovereignty can you reclaim?

Practices to consider:

– Phone on grayscale (reduces dopamine hits)

– Delete attention-fragmenting apps

– Watch at normal speed, allow boredom

– Define “enough” for yourself, question whose dream you’re pursuing

– Digital sunset (no screens after certain times)

– Protect darkness (blackout curtains, no LEDs)

– Refuse to optimize sleep: just observe it

– Wake naturally when possible

None are solutions. They’re practices. Ways of noticing where you’ve ceded sovereignty.

Time sovereignty isn’t total control. It’s maintaining enough agency that your life feels like yours.

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Conclusion: The Space Where You’re Free

Sleep is where you’re actually free.

During the day, you’re always someone: worker, partner, parent. You perform roles, meet expectations. Systems track your output, behavior, identity.

In sleep, you’re no one (or anyone). Just a body processing, integrating, dreaming things no algorithm can predict.

Every night you sleep well, naturally, without pills or tracking, you’re committing a small act of rebellion. Insisting your body has needs that don’t care about productivity. Claiming some time is ungovernable.

Next essay: the body itself. Not just your time but your flesh. The most intimate domain where blueprints get imposed, where experts think they know better, where refusing their protocols becomes both terrifying and necessary.

For now: Protect your sleep. Not as recovery for work, but as the space where you’re free.

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Sources:

• Jonathan Crary, *24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep* (2013)

• Olivier Rey, *Une question de taille* (2014)

• Ivan Illich, *Tools for Conviviality* (1973)

• Matthew Walker, *Why We Sleep* (2017)

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