Abolish bedtime

Social media is bad and wicked and you shouldn’t be on it. But sometimes there are unexpected joys that come with being online. For instance, if it weren’t for Twitter (now “X”… ugh), I wouldn’t have heard of “bedtime abolitionism.” Apparently, there is a (pretty niche) discourse among online anarchists concerned that the regulation of our sleeping habits is a form of social oppression. One version seems to be focused on parents tyrannizing young people, but another version seems to see all of us as victims of an oppressive system. Capitalism, because it requires the maximally efficient coordination of labour to maximize productivity (and therefore profit), drives us into patterns of living at odds with our natural sleep schedules. So we are all forced – for the sake of efficiency, productivity and profit – to adapt our individual needs to the demands of the system. Even kids have to break their natural sleep cycles in order to be at school by 8:30 a.m. so their parents can get to work by 9 a.m. in order to feed the machine. Thus our sleep – a natural, but also very individual, rhythm – is regulated, controlled and enforced by a system that works for the benefit of just a few. We need, on this critique, to be liberated from this! Abolish bedtime!

Examine the machine

Now, I’m not sure how seriously to take the conversation around the abolition of bedtime (perhaps even its advocates have their tongues in their cheeks). A world without coordinated schedules for school, work, soccer practice and so on seems like a naïve utopia – a “no place” so foreign to the reality of our lives that it’s not worth giving serious thought to. After all, even if we did somehow create a world where the demands of work didn’t dictate our sleep, the blandishments of electric light and electronic technologies would do that for us.

But that’s also the great power and importance of utopias: they give us a place to look with fresh eyes at the huge portions of our lives that we take for granted, that we leave unquestioned, or accept as merely “the way things are.” The unserious and naïve can be the standpoint from which we can ask whether what seems “normal” to us is indeed – as we take it to be without reflection – “natural.”

What I think bedtime abolitionism offers – not as a serious program, but as a thought experiment – is a chance to inquire into the ways our constructed social systems and their requirements dictate the rhythms of our lives more than our biological systems and their requirements. From an alien’s-eye (or maybe God’s-eye) view that might seem to be backwards. That’s why, in a fallen world with imperfect social systems, we might benefit from some provocations to rethink what we accept as normal. Because the trouble with “normal,” as Bruce Cockburn says, is that it always gets worse.