The Protestant Sleep Ethic
A recent memoir considers how much we concede when we regard rest as a call to judgment.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Early in the coronavirus pandemic—not long after public-health experts began coining terms such as coronasomnia to describe one of the side effects of the growing crisis—hotels began embracing a new genre of travel. The “sleep retreat” was novel neither in concept (it sold hotels as places to rest) nor in practice (the promised slumber inducements included plush bedding, meditation aids, and pillow sprays). Its innovation, instead, was in messaging. To sell products that amounted, essentially, to fancy rooms misted with high-end Febreze, the hotels were bringing a new twist to the old idea that health is a luxury good.
Marketers are cultural critics by other means. Before they can bring new trends to life, they must first be conversant with the ones that are already there. Sleep retreats gained popularity as the pandemic made traditional tourism untenable. But the branding also acknowledged another shift. Sleep, in the American imagination, has typically existed more as an absence than as a presence—life in its photonegative form. That’s in part why the products created to serve it have been relatively straightforward (beds, bedding, tonics and teas)—and why it has resisted some of the alchemy that turns needs into profitable anxiety. The best consumers, as a rule, are the ones who are awake.
But sleep is not nothing; it is, in some sense, everything. Each day brings new evidence of its effects on people’s mental health, their physical health, their ability to learn, their ability to empathize, their ability to answer the world’s demands—and more reminders of the harm done when the need for rest goes unmet. Good sleep is a radiant privilege, bolstering all else; bad sleep radiates too. In the divide, the market has sensed an opportunity. The whimsically named mattresses, the sleep-tracker watches, the sleep-tracker rings, the “sleep to this” podcasts, the self-help programs, the white-noise machines, the brown-noise machines, the medications and supplements—one by one, pricey or not, they redefine sleep as a rarefied good. The goal is no longer merely to get rest, the new branding suggests. It is instead to get good rest. And, then, it is to get rest that is ever better—more restorative, more sumptuous, more diligent, more worthy, simply more. Conspicuous consumption, coming for the off-hours: The notion is as predictable as it is absurd. You can win at sleeping, it turns out. You can lose at it too.
“The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t,” Marie Darrieussecq announces in Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia. The line is, like many others in the book, measured hyperbole. Darrieussecq, an accomplished novelist, essayist, psychologist, and critic, is also a veteran of a decades-long struggle against sleeplessness. The book is the story of her loss. First published in France in 2021, and now translated into English by Penny Hueston, Sleepless treats insomnia as a question with no answer, an itch with no salve. Darrieussecq’s account of it is by turns hectic and meandering and erudite and feral: Here is, word by word, the addlement of the endlessly wakeful. As her anxious hours give way to weary years, sleeplessness becomes, for Darrieussecq, an incremental catastrophe. “The insomniac,” she writes, “is not so much in dialogue with sleep as with the apocalypse.”
Sleepless is at its most lyrical when it is at its most intimate—a primal scream, rendered in words. The book is most insightful, however, when Darrieussecq does what every failed sleeper must, eventually: fight the exhaustion and return, again, to the waking world. In the second half of the book, Darrieussecq turns her attention outward, exploring sleeplessness as many others experience it—an insomnia whose causes are all too clear. She reads the writings of people who survived concentration camps, places where sleep was enforced in order for the captives, as one memoir put it, “to be more perfect prisoners.” She travels to Rwanda, where genocide’s traumas live on, still, in the night. In Calais, France, Darrieussecq witnesses a wakefulness imposed by the state: the forcible eviction of refugees from the encampment known as the Jungle. “The migrants were driven out in their sleep, at their most vulnerable, in the middle of the night,” she writes. “I saw their last place of refuge—sleeping bags—soaked in tear gas.”
Darrieussecq’s treatment of her own sleeplessness is high-pitched and maximalist; her treatment of others’ is measured, blunt, broad. The discord is eloquent, putting her unrest into chastened relief. Early in the book, Darrieussecq provides a long list of the products and services that have failed to lull her to sleep: weighted blankets, acupuncture, acupressure, tea, yoga, psychoanalysis, machines, meditation, medication, hypnosis. Her interactions with other people’s sleeplessness, though, require her to describe the totalizing exhaustion that comes from having no bed, no home, no protection, no peace. Sleep lends itself to easy allusions—escape, rebirth, death—but in the contrast between her own plush insomnia and the wakefulness of others, Darrieussecq suggests a sharper, and timelier, metaphor. Rest and its deprivation, here, become proxies for inequality.
Last October, Elon Musk posted a message. “I’ve been up all night trying to think of any possible way to de-escalate this war,” he wrote on X, then still known as Twitter. He was talking about Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. He was also talking about himself. The rich man, willing to sacrifice sleep: It’s the stuff of good PR. It’s also the kind of thing Darrieussecq is referring to when, in a moment of wry provocation, she declares, “Insomnia is classier than sleep.”
The notion might amuse, and then it might chafe. Classy sleep makes no sense. But it’s also all too accurate. Sleep is, quite straightforwardly, a matter of class: Study after study and testimony after testimony have only provided more evidence of that. Disparities in access to sleep worsen existing inequalities and entrench them ever further. Rest requires time. Rest requires calm. Precarity, financial or any other kind, is a thief of both. What Darrieussecq has done, in considering her own experience of insomnia, is put the social data in the human terms they deserve. Exhaustion hurts. And when it is chronic, as the book’s descriptions remind, it can feel like calamity—and look a lot like cruelty.
The argument is simple; it reads as radical. American culture, after all, tends to treat sleep less as a matter of morality than as an outlet for haphazard moralism. Getting a lot of sleep is virtuous (wellness, leisure) and also objectionable (self-indulgence, indolence). Getting very little? This may be personally admirable (industriousness, sacrifice, dedication to de-escalating a war) or socially irresponsible (drowsy driving). TikTokers regularly share the morning routines they’ve developed as a means to getting a jump on the day; these typically involve some blend of exercise (willpower), yoga (spirituality), and waking at 4 or 5 a.m.—treating the early hours as a time to grind when many people are (laziness) still in bed. Other influencers have won likes and views for the tips they’ve offered under the assumption that getting sleep is a principled act of self-care: CBD, mouth tape, the tart-cherry-juice drink that has been branded the “sleepy girl mocktail.”
Everyone will have reason, at one point or another, to encourage sleep or fight it: The culture that gave rise to Starbucks is also the one that created Tylenol PM. But the contradictory messages, on the internet as in the world at large, reflect more than the varying demands for sleep. They do broadly what the marketers of luxe sleep are now doing specifically: They treat sleep as one more means of social division. Americans are so accustomed to regarding rest as a call to judgment—as evidence of worthiness, or evidence of failure—that we deliver the verdicts even though we can’t quite decide what we’re judging one another for.
The approach is classically American: the Protestant ethic, applied to the work of slumber. Now, though, all of that messaging comes with merch. Sleep is going the way of other types of buyable “wellness” (beauty, thinness, good health in general). Life’s tenderest hours are moving further into an environment where “you get what you deserve” is not a wan aphorism, but a totalizing rationale. More sleep, better sleep, classier sleep—in the process, the need for rest loses ever more of its universality. And sleep inequality, that matter of justice, is cheapened to a matter of branding. In another world, Darrieussecq suggests, sleep might be a tool for empathy, a reminder of how intimately we are bound together in our wakefulness and weariness. But we live in this world. And, here, her book’s bluntest insight is all too true: The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.