Sleep Is for the Bourgeoise
I have not slept properly in months.
Not because I am busy, busy is a lie we tell ourselves to feel important.(lmfaoo but honestly I do get busy with a lot of stuff to do so I can’t sleep) I am not sleeping because I cannot afford to. And I am starting to think that sleep, real sleep the kind where you close your eyes and the world actually goes away has become a luxury good, priced out of reach for anyone who is not already wealthy.
Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, calls this the age of achievement. We are no longer subjects of discipline (Foucault’s world of prisons and factories) but subjects of performance entrepreneurs of the self, constantly optimizing, always on. The neoliberal subject is not told what to do. They are told to want to do. To internalize the demand for productivity until it becomes indistinguishable from their own desire. There is no boss anymore. You are the boss. You are the worker. You are the product. You are the customer. And you are always, always falling behind.
The result is burnout. Depression. Anxiety. And most insidiously insomnia.
Sleep is unproductive time. It is the one activity that cannot be optimized, accelerated, or monetized. You cannot multitask sleep. You cannot do it faster. You cannot outsource it. And so it has become the enemy of the achievement society. We brag about how little we sleep the way we used to brag about how much we drank. It is a badge. A credential. I am so important that even my own biology must wait.
But here is the thing I have been turning over in my head like a stone in my shoe: sleep is not a choice. It is a privilege.
Think about it. Who sleeps well? People with money. People with safety. People who do not have to wake up at 5 AM to stand in line at CBE or Kebele. People who do not lie awake calculating how many hours of work it will take to pay for the thing that broke. People who do not live in a city where the neighbor’s party is your alarm clock and the police siren is your lullaby.
To sleep well, you need:
- A quiet room (rent control? ha.)
- A bed that does not destroy your spine (costs money)
- A mind that is not racing with the terror of inadequacy (priceless)
- Enough security that tomorrow does not feel like a threat (requires wealth)
In other words, you need to be bourgeois.
Han writes that the depressive individual is “burned out, overworked, and exhausted by the imperative to achieve.” I would add: they are also awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, because the achievement imperative does not punch a clock. It follows you into bed. It lies down next to you. It breathes in your ear: you could be doing more. Or wakes you up early in the morning whispering: the cost of living.
I have started to wonder if the 8-hour workday was a lie. Not because it does not exist, it exists, technically but because it was designed for a world that no longer exists. We work 8 hours. Then we commute. Then we answer emails. Then we “side hustle.” Then we doomscroll. Then we try to sleep, but our brains are still spinning at 3000 RPM because we spent the entire day in a state of low-grade fight-or-flight.
We are not tired because we worked hard. We are tired because we never stopped.
The ancient Greeks had a word for it: kenosis - emptying out. They thought it was a spiritual state, a necessary void. We have achieved kenosis without trying. We have emptied ourselves of everything except the compulsion to produce. And then we wonder why we cannot sleep.
I am not writing this to offer solutions. I have no solutions. I am writing this at 1:47 AM because I am awake again, and I needed to tell someone that this is not normal. That the inability to sleep is not a personal failing. That it is a symptom of a world that has decided rest is a waste of money.
They say sleep is for the weak. They are wrong.
Sleep is for the bourgeoise.
The rest of us just lie here, eyes open, waiting for the sun.
But, I had a wonderful sleep last night. Finished up work early and it was magical, I am well rested right now all I am seeing are rainbows and butterflies.
A bit of manga update, I started reading Otona Taisen or War of the Adults by Tsuzuki, Masaaki and Kappy.
I stumbled on this completely by accident. I was scrolling through the MyAnimeList manga challenge one of those community bingo boards where you tick off boxes like “read a manga with less than 10 chapters” or “read a manga from a genre you never touch” and get a badge or so on and so forth, and this thing just appeared in the “newly published” feed. The cover caught me. Something about the composition: love that fisheyes first person prespective thing, I do not know what I was expecting.
Four chapters in and I am already hooked. The premise is absurd in the best way: Yutaro Urashima, a man so committed to being a “proper adult” that he has written himself a personal constitution literal Articles of Adulthood which accidentally becomes the catalyst for a world-altering surveillance system where your social reputation is currency and survival depends on how “adult” you are perceived to be. It is Battle Royale meets The Circle meets a mid-life crisis. I have no idea where it is going but I can feel the potential radiating off every page. The art by Tsuzuki is sharp with expressive faces, clean action lines, backgrounds that feel lived-in and oppressive at the same time.
I am four chapters in and I am already excited in a way I have not been about a new series in a while. There is something here. I can feel it. Whether it sticks the landing is another question but the takeoff has been thrilling. Same with Phantom Busters — I wrote about it in an earlier field note, which you can read here: /field-notes/observation/2026/05/03/refusing-victim-mindset/