If you're too tired for work, you'll be too tired to think and act alternatively. There's a real politics of sleep we need to recognise

From New York magazine

We like our sleep at the Alternative Global - because we know we’re hardly be capable of our activist lives if we didn’t get enough of it. So our eyes widened (before our lids drooped) when we saw this comprehensive Aeon piece, titled “Being underslept and out of sync is a political injustice”.

The article begins:

For Uber drivers trying to make ends meet, it can be tempting to sleep in the car. It saves on a few journeys and helps make the most of peak-hour business. It keeps a driver readily available for work – and the apps favour those who can clock up the hours. There are carparks where the sleeping bags come out after dark, if only for five or six hours.

Sleeping in a vehicle is clearly not great. There are the obvious obstacles to adequate rest – how to get comfortable, how to deal with the light, temperature and lack of facilities. The sleep is typically short and poor. Then there are questions of privacy – exposure to onlookers, from passersby to police. Sleeping in a car means breaking a norm, often attracting suspicion. To sleep where you work has its own degradations – a sense of permanent connection, perhaps of exploitation. And it almost certainly means sleeping alone.

The carpark sleeper is one of the more dramatic expressions of poor sleep in the contemporary world. Across many walks of life, spanning public and private sectors, people are sleeping badly – and some much more so than others.

Between the poles of homelessness and luxury lie multiple varieties of quiet suffering. One effect of COVID-19has been to highlight inequalities in who gets to sleep well, with such figures as the exhausted medic or delivery-driver coming to symbolise the exceptional demands that fall on some. The divides around sleep have rarely been starker.

When sleep is lacking or disrupted, and especially when these problems are unevenly spread, questions of justice arise. Harmful, undeserved and avoidable forms of inequality emerge, as people find themselves living at odds with the demands of their body and the norms of a wider society. A range of physical, material and social hardships kick in, often paired with political handicaps to do with the exercise of rights.

To be deprived of sleep is to be deprived of much more than one’s hours of rest. Moreover, those spared these hardships tend to contribute, if unintentionally, to perpetuating the problems, and often benefit from them too. This is the domain of circadian justice, where the banners read: No equality without equality of proper sleep!

Problems of sleep matter because they are not just symptoms of other problems. They have their own significance. Bad sleep can make bad circumstances less bearable, and is often the thing that makes them unbearable. It comes with a distinct set of risks.

And it can affect people’s ability to change their circumstances, making other disadvantages more sticky. What opportunities exist for improving conditions will often be missed by those too tired and demotivated to act. Poor sleep is a corrosive disadvantage – one that yields more of the same.

Although sleep is a need, it is a negotiable one. Societies have historically varied in their practices, and minorities have got by on less than is needed, sometimes for a lengthy period. Everyone weighs sleep against other priorities.

This plasticity is what gives scope for the individual to be exploited, by herself and others, as sleep’s nonessential component is eroded. Sleep inequalities persist because their consequences can be deferred – but they cannot be deferred indefinitely.

More here. The article has a fascinating section on how irregular and inadequate sleep patterns affect our political identities

The most damaging forms of inequality linked to sleep may be political. Exercising the rights of citizenship depends on supporting resources – the economic and personal security, and time and energy, that allows people to look beyond immediate needs. When sleep is meagre in quantity, poor in quality or timed in a way that hinders other activities, civic engagement suffers.

It is said that voting and protest are lower among the chronically fatigued. Those whose sleep is irregular struggle to plan their participation and take advantage of what free time they have. Night workers may additionally feel alienated from daytime affairs and institutions. The fact that sleep disadvantages tend to cluster with other kinds of disadvantage means that those less inclined to exercise their political rights may also be those most in need of them.

Policies they might benefit from – including fair compensation for sleep-harming labour – become less likely if they are absent from the process. The desynchronisation of sleep also reduces the overlapping free time in which people can coordinate politically. From protests to party meetings, active citizenship depends on the availability of free time that is shared, and by those not so exhausted as to seek only privacy.

A tired population is likely to be more accepting of regime types that make fewer demands on their participation. Tiredness impairs an individual’s ability to take decisions for themselves. It inhibits the cognitive functions required for an outlook that is other-oriented, deliberative and action-centred. Political disengagement is one likely outcome, but so is acceptance of charismatic and technocratic forms of rule that vest decision-making in elites.

The original Aeon piece is here.