Mark Bushell, Northumbria University
“When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep on the margin”
Former Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings (cited in Hern, 2017).
Sleep is a vital homeostatic pillar in supporting life and wellbeing. Without it, we quickly begin to develop a host of problems: hypertension, increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, raised potential for developing diabetes, neurobehavioral deficits, and ultimately an increased risk of early mortality (Tobaldini et al, 2017). Yet despite its primacy as a fundamental requirement for self-preservation, sleep has long been antithetical to late-capitalist cultures of work that promote the need to remain switched on for most of the time.
Imagine for a moment that labour relations in the 21st century were structured differently and that employers finally conceded to the long-recognised reality that burnt out workers are less productive and induce significant costs to organisations through time spent off sick (Leitão at al, 2021). Imagine that these employers provided us with more time away from the workplace to recuperate. What would we do with this non-work or ‘leisure’ time? How would we spend it? It is tempting to think that we would make the most of it by doing less and allowing our bodies and minds to recharge. However, even the most rudimentary reading of contemporary leisure suggests that sleep, rest and recovery might be the last thing on our minds.
As the words of ex-Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in the opening quote make clear, late-stage capitalism’s co-optation of rest has now expanded from its initial insurgency into 24/7 labour markets (Crary, 2013) and is now eroding our preferences for inactivity in time spent away from work. Binge watching content on autoplay, algorithmic descents down online rabbit holes, endless scrolling on our smartphones, and intensive fitness regimes all tend to share two things in common: first, they are all marketized pursuits that cede to consumer capital’s ever-greater commodification of leisure time, and second, they all hold the potential to swallow up any lingering commitment to sleep and rest.
In the UK youth population, the average young male (15-17 years) spends 34 hours per week playing video games, surpassing the overall duration spent in school (Uddin, 2025). A burgeoning online market in unregulated supplements targeted towards gamers has emerged in recent years to boost attention levels and extend gaming endurance. Ingredients lists boast combinations of caffeine, nootropics, adaptogens, electrolytes, GABA and many other additives. When gamers finally call time on their mammoth sessions, these sites also offer sleep-inducing products to help send them off. Just as Mark Fisher (2009) described ADHD as a pathology of late capitalism, and that the drugs which ‘treat’ it are sold back to us as part of the commodification of our wellbeing, gamer supplements are marketized to first boost focus and alertness and later to induce sleep in an ‘increasingly bureaucratised and managed world’ (Linneman and Medley, 2023: 419).
Another marketized intervention for micromanaging our internal states has arrived in the form of sleep apps. By algorithmically assessing sleep patterns during the night, smartphone apps such as Sleepscore and Pzizz claim to be able to help users ‘make the right decisions’ to achieve a good night’s rest that will leave us looking better, feeling better and living better (Sikka, 2021: 112). Sleepio is even recommended by the NHS as a CBT-based app that is ‘clinically proven to help address the root causes of poor sleep and insomnia’ (NHS, 2026). The causes of poor sleep are varied and complex, so the claim that the app can help to resolve them with six 20-minute smartphone sessions probably tells us more about the length of NHS mental health waiting lists than the effectiveness of the technology (see Rethink Mental Illness, 2025).
However, there is a greater issue at stake here. Like the fitbits, mindfulness apps and other wellness tech, these sleep apps are built around the same neoliberal cultural imperatives – individual advancement, performance metrics and competition – that pervade working life. Presented in a moral language that speaks of compassion and kindness to the self, these apps still make clear demands on the user to take personal responsibility for their sleep deprivation, rise to the challenge and compete with the targets set by the algorithm. As with the fitness apps however, if we fail in our efforts to hit the prescribed targets, our super-ego’s response is punitive, guilt-inducing and probably not the best recipe for improving restful sleep.
Even states of restful contemplation or daydreaming have now become anathema to personal progress, with their adverse effects on academic performance and task related processing all documented in the literature (Moonyham and Schooler, 2013). Much less discussed is the way that non-focused wakeful states can incubate creativity and self-reflection as they activate the default mode network (DMN) in the brain. The DMN is a neuronal network that comes to life during wakeful disengagement, supporting the development of personal narratives, particularly around how we perceive ourselves and how we relate to others (McMillan el al, 2013; Menon, 2023). Like sleep however, the practice of restful contemplation holds little value as a source of profit and competitive gain, so it is often denigrated as pointless and indulgent.
Ultra-realism has reflected on the idea that we are now surrounded by examples of deaptation, a concept developed by Adrian Johnston (2008) to refer to the way in which an initially functional strategy can become counterproductive under changing societal conditions (see Hall and Winlow, 2025). Sleep – or more specifically our relationship with it – has become deaptive in contemporary social life because it is now seen as serving little useful purpose; an inconvenient obstacle in an economy super-charged by competition and the fixation with individual advancement. Consumerism’s commands to ditch restful states in favour of its jouissance-inducing offerings can be powerful and persuasive but they are not simply forced upon us. Rather, liberal capitalism is adept at forging cultures of permission (see Raymen, 2023) which provide the subject with ethical consent to pursue potentially harmful consumer lifestyles that relegate the importance of sleep and rest. We come to see these practices not as vital to human wellbeing or goods within themselves but rather as dispensable commodities that can be cast aside or regularly replaced by other activities.
Perhaps we need to do more, then, to recognise the value of sleep and recuperation as internal goods rather than interchangeable pursuits or as vehicles towards achieving other goals such as greater productivity. Perhaps we should give rest greater recognition as a key component of our telos or that to which we continually strive to live a good life. This may seem counterintuitive as we are bombarded with ideological messages that implore us to stay focused and remain ready to face off against one another in the next battle for symbolic or material advancement. But unless we act to alter our perceptions around rest and collectively realise its value as a virtue and something that is indispensable in order to live well, we will continue to stare bleary-eyed into a future defined by marketized alertness and all of the ills that follow.
References
Crary, J. (2013) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Portland: John Hunt Publishing.
Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2025) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. London: Routledge
Hern, A. (2017) Netflix’s biggest competitor? Sleep. The Guardian. 18th April 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/netflix-competitor-sleep-uber-facebook
Johnston, A. (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity. Northwestern University Press.
Leitão J, Pereira D, Gonçalves Â. (2021) Quality of work life and contribution to productivity: assessing the moderator effects of burnout syndrome. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 18:2425
Linnemann, T. and Medley, C. (2023) Side affects may vary: Palliative capitalism, punitive capitalism and US consumer culture. In Ayres, T. and Ancrum, C. (eds.) Understanding drug dealing and illicit drug markets pp.416-434. Routledge.
McMillan, R.L., Kaufman, S.B. and Singer, J.L. (2013) ‘Ode to positive constructive daydreaming’. Front. Psychol. 4:626.
Menon, V., 2023. 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), pp.2469-2487.
Mooneyham, B. and Schooler, J. (2013) ‘The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review’. Can J Exp Psychol. 2013 Mar;67(1):11-18
Oschinsky, F.M., Klesel, M., Ressel, N. and Niehaves, B. (2019) Where are your thoughts? On the relationship between technology use and mind wandering.
Raymen, T. (2023) The Enigma of Social Harm. Routledge.
Rethink Mental Illness (2025) New analysis of NHS data on mental health waiting times. Available at: https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/media-centre/2025/02/new-analysis-of-nhs-data-on-mental-health-waiting-times
Sikka, T. (2021) ‘The Neoliberalization of sleep: A discursive and materialist analysis of sleep technologies’. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology, 26, pp.105-121.
Uddin, S. (2025) The average teen boy now spends 34 hours a week gaming. Independent. 15th September 2025. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/teen-boys-gaming-online-mumsnet-b2826672.html
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