“Today, the zeitgeist has shifted. What was once prohibition might now be heard as permission: to stop, take a breath, and remember that we are more than what we produce, more than our job title or bank balance. Sabbath, in this light, does indeed represent resistance to the dominating paradigm of more more more, an invitation to, well, the experience of grace.”

A few months ago, The New York Times ran a remarkably astute editorial about the state of American sleep. Apparently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently declared insomnia to be a full-blown public health epidemic. The “Sleep Industry”—a $32 billion/year endeavor—has responded. They’ve introduced a spate of new soporific technology, from pills and teas and chocolates to bracelets and mattresses. (The number one selling paid app on iTunes this Spring was the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock.)

But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is how these items are being marketed. We are told that “for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings… improved by 8 percent.” These products are not being marketed as aids to help us rest, but as widgets that will improve our performance at the office, or on the playing field, or in the bedroom, or whatever venue we value most.

The most effective way to sell sleep, in other words, is to make it constituent of work, handmaiden to productivity. Rest is no longer rest, just a prelude to more work. Thus the human being becomes a machine to be “optimized”, as the life-hackers transparently put it. Like a machine, our worth depends on our performance; it may even be synonymous with it.

The trend isn’t an isolated one, of course. It’s well known that the US, despite boasting the smallest amount of required vacation, leads the developed world in ‘untaken vacation days’. And even when you do get to the beach, visions of the New Yorker cartoon pictured above abound, of a man and woman basking under the sun, listening to the waves as the woman reads a book and the man… types on his laptop. The caption reads: “I’m not a workaholic. I just work to relax.”

Some see these numbers as evidence of a superior work ethic. Others write them off as a dehumanizing but necessary byproduct of technological advances afforded by 21st century capitalism. Others still, and I would include myself in this number, wonder if something deeper is going on, if our collective over-occupation might be indicative of a pathological fear of boredom and, yes, death. Some would go so far as to say that work is a socially approved means of justifying our existence, of reminding us we are alive and allowing us to forget that we will die.

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