Why Do We Treat Sleep As Lazy When It Makes Us Human?

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Is Sleep Just Rest, Or A Delicious Part Of Being Human?

Why do so many of us feel guilty for loving sleep?
Welcome, dear readers, to FreeAstroScience. This article is written only for you, and it asks a simple but unsettling question: what if sleep isn’t just a health requirement, but one of the sweetest parts of being alive?

We’ll explore how culture, biology, politics, and philosophy all meet in your bed at night. You’ll see why a “magic pill” that replaces sleep would steal something precious from us. Stay with us to the end; the story becomes deeper and more personal the further we go.

Is Sleep Really A Waste Of Time In A 24/7 World?

Why does grind culture treat sleep like an enemy?

In many offices, especially in tech, bragging about short sleep has become a status symbol. Working 70–100 hours a week is framed as heroic, while sleep looks like weakness or poor ambition.

Some trends that capture this mindset:

• “Sleep hacking” routines meant to shrink rest to the minimum
• Executives proud of 4–5 hour nights
• Military research into drugs that keep soldiers awake for longer
• Students and workers using stimulants like modafinil to push past exhaustion

The US military’s research agency DARPA has even supported projects aimed at reducing or bypassing the need for sleep in the field. That’s not science fiction; it’s active policy planning.

At the same time, large tech companies like Apple and Google installed nap rooms and sleep pods. But those cozy chairs weren’t exactly gifts of kindness. They were designed to “recharge” employees just enough to keep them creative and productive for long hours.

So, sleep gets squeezed from both sides:

• Cut back at night to work more
• Optimized during the day to work more

Rest becomes a fuel hose for the economic engine, not a human right or pleasure.

What happens to our minds and bodies when we cut sleep?

The essay we’re drawing from reminds us of a stark fact: humans still need sleep, and a lot of it.

On average, we spend about one-third of our lives asleep. That’s astonishing. If you live 90 years, that’s roughly 30 years in bed. If sleep were “useless”, that would be an absurd evolutionary mistake.

Scientific studies agree on one simple range: most adults function best at about 7–8 hours per night. Going far below that for long periods doesn’t just make you yawn. It harms almost every system in your body.

Documented harms of prolonged total sleep deprivation include:

• Depression
• Anxiety and even psychosis
• Cognitive breakdown and memory failures
• Brain degeneration and neurological damage

Chronic, partial sleep restriction (say, 5–6 hours a night for weeks) builds up more quietly, but still hurts:

• Foggy thinking and slower reactions
• Memory lapses
• Irritability and mood swings
• Weakened immune system
• Weight gain and metabolic disruption
• Higher risk of cardiovascular disease

So if you sometimes feel like your personality melts after a few short nights in a row, that’s not drama. Your brain is literally struggling.

To keep things clear, here’s a quick table with widely cited sleep duration guidelines by age (these are general scientific recommendations, not from the essay):

Age Group	Recommended Sleep (hours/night)
Newborns (0–3 months)	14–17
Infants (4–11 months)	12–15
Toddlers (1–2 years)	11–14
Preschoolers (3–5 years)	10–13
School-age (6–13 years)	9–11
Teenagers (14–17 years)	8–10
Adults (18–64 years)	7–9
Older adults (65+ years)	7–8

So the biology is clear. But here comes the twist: even that doesn’t capture why sleep matters in a deep way.

Can a “magic pill” really replace sleep?

The essay tells a small, revealing story. A philosophy professor once claimed sleep was a waste of time and said he’d happily swallow a pill that erased the need for it.

The author replied: “But I love sleeping.” The professor insisted that what she loved was just the feeling of rest, not sleep itself, because sleep is unconscious.

This raises a powerful question:

• If we’re unconscious, can we really enjoy sleep?
• And if not, does that make sleep merely a health requirement, not a pleasure?

The essay argues the opposite: our need for sleep is part of what makes life rich, grounded, and fully lived.

There’s something misleading about a pill that provides the “effects” of sleep without the experience around it—the softness of sheets, the slow winding down, the shared bed, the hazy borderlands between waking and dreams. Those are not side features. They’re part of what gives texture and meaning to our days.

So, maybe the real problem isn’t that we sleep.
Maybe the problem is trying to compress a deeply human experience into a productivity hack.

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Why Can Sleep Feel So Delicious?

What are the tiny pleasures of going to bed?

Before we even close our eyes, sleep is wrapped in what philosophers Yuriko Saito and Katya Mandoki call “everyday aesthetics”—the quiet beauty of ordinary routines.

Think about your own bedtime:

• The warmth of a shower or bath
• The cool, clean feeling of fresh sheets
• The faint scent of detergent or lavender spray
• The weight and texture of a blanket
• The soft light of a bedside lamp
• The ritual of brushing teeth, creams, maybe a few stretches

The essay’s author recalls a childhood memory: newly bought sheets with bright lilac flowers and emerald leaves, the smell of clean cotton, the feeling of slipping into a neatly made bed, feeling safe and loved.

Nothing “productive” happens in that moment. Yet it’s one of those scenes that stays with us for decades. That’s a hint: sleep isn’t just absence of consciousness; it’s surrounded by a whole sensory mini-world.

Those moments before and after sleep also have their own special taste:

• The drift into unconsciousness, full of fleeting images and half-dreams
• The early-morning re-entry into your room’s familiar shapes and colors
• The first smell of coffee in the kitchen
• The awareness of warmth under the covers versus the cool air outside them

Many people say they love the feeling of slipping away, that strange in‑between zone where you’re still kind of aware, but reality has already started to bend.

That in‑between zone is so common that sleep scientists gave it a name: hypnagogia. It’s like standing in the doorway between two worlds, just for a few seconds.

Is sleep ever a shared art of intimacy?

Now ask yourself: when you picture yourself asleep, are you alone?

For most of human history, the answer would have been “no”. Families often slept in the same bed or same room for warmth and safety. Even strangers shared beds while travelling.

Today we tend to think of bed-sharing as intimate:

• Couples
• Parents and young children
• Siblings
• People with their pets

Many of us still care deeply about who is there when we fall asleep.

Researchers Anu Valtonen and Elina Närvänen speak of “sensual everyday intimacy” when they write about co-sleeping. They describe the bed as an object that shapes and expresses our closest relationships. They highlight experiences that only exist when we share sleep: the familiar sound of a partner’s breathing, the feel of “spooning”, the comfort of a warm body next to you.

There’s a touching story in the essay: a woman says she needs her husband in bed to fall asleep, even though he likes to stay up late watching TV or playing games. Sometimes he lies down with her, waits until she sleeps, then gets up again. She says: “The idea that he is awake when I am sleeping creates a feeling of safety to me.”

Here sleep is not just about rest. It’s about trust.
You’re unconscious. You can’t defend yourself. And you still choose to share that state with someone.

That might be why “staying the night” is still emotionally heavier than casual sex for many people. We expose ourselves in our most helpless state.

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How Does Sleep Expose Our Radical Vulnerability?

Why do our bedtime rituals take so much care?

Think about your bedtime checklist:

• Brush teeth
• Wash face
• Remove makeup, apply cream
• Change into loose clothes
• Turn off phone, dim lights, maybe put in earplugs

These steps often have a simple logic: we’re preparing a body that will soon be unattended. We won’t be there to fix tight clothes, rinse our face, or clean our teeth. So we do it before consciousness goes offline.

The essay points out that some products even rely on sleep’s length. Skin treatments, for instance, are designed to work during those quiet hours when you’re not touching your face or rushing around.

There’s a deeper pattern here: good bedtime routines are often slow. They take time. They stretch the gap between “doing” and “being”. They help us shift from the daytime rhythm of tasks and decisions to a nighttime mode of surrender and rest.

Sleep is the opposite of hustle.
When we sleep, we temporarily drop the illusion that we can control everything.

Why is there “value in oblivion”?

The essay includes a small conversation that feels very familiar. The author tells a friend that one big relief of sleep is “not having to deal with people.” The friend is not antisocial; she enjoys company, but she also needs alone time.

What she likes about sleep is that she doesn’t have to choose between staying in or going out. The need for sleep decides for her. No more agonizing over FOMO or guilt. Sleep imposes a boundary when she’s too tired to draw one herself.

Her husband then adds a simple line: “There’s value in oblivion.”

That sentence is a small thunderclap. It goes against everything we’re told about constant awareness, mindfulness, and being “on” all the time.

Yes, mindfulness matters. Yes, presence has value.
But sometimes, dropping awareness is just as healing as cultivating it.

There is relief in:

• Not checking messages
• Not tracking calories or steps
• Not replaying awkward conversations
• Not planning the next day

For a few hours, we’re not managers of our own life. We’re just living organisms, breathing in the dark.

To give a sense of how modern life often treats sleep, consider the idea of sleep debt—the gap between how much you need and how much you actually get. A simple way to picture it mathematically is:

$\mathrm{SleepDebt}=\sum _{\mathrm{days}}(\mathrm{RequiredSleep}-\mathrm{ActualSleep})$

If your “RequiredSleep” is 7.5 hours, and you get 5.5 hours for three nights, you’ve stacked up a 6‑hour sleep debt. Your body and mind will collect that payment, one way or another.

Sleep, then, isn’t a bug in our design. It’s a boundary—one that protects us, even when we treat it like a problem.

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What Does Sleep Tell Us About Being Human, Not Machines?

Is wanting to erase sleep a kind of perfectionism?

Some thinkers have warned against the desire to erase all human limits—fatigue, illness, even death.

Michael Sandel, in The Case Against Perfection, argues that refusing to accept our limits can weaken humility and solidarity. If we could remove every “flaw”, we might lose the very conditions that make care, compassion, and shared struggle meaningful.

The essay uses sleep as a clear example of this. Many transhumanist dreams imagine a life without sleep, where we stay efficient around the clock.

But ask yourself:

• If we never got tired, would we still feel relief?
• If we never had to stop, would rest feel precious?
• If nothing in life were at risk, would love still carry the same weight?

Martha Nussbaum argues in The Fragility of Goodness that many central human values depend on risk, need, and limitation. Love matters because it can break. Friendship matters because it can be lost.

In that light, sleep is not a stupid design flaw. It’s part of our animal condition.

All animals with brains appear to sleep in some way. Even dolphins that keep half their brain awake still put the other half to rest. That’s nature’s equivalent of saying, “No, you cannot just keep going forever.”

When we sleep, we’re not someone’s project, or profile, or brand. We’re simply animals in the dark, living on a planet that turns, under a sky that changes from day to night and back again.

We love sunrise and sunset precisely because they mark that cycle. If we refused to sleep, we’d also erase half of that daily rhythm.

What is “circadian justice”, and why does it matter?

The essay cites political theorist Jonathan White, who argues that sleeping in sync with our natural circadian rhythms is a matter of justice, not just personal wellness.

He points out that:

• Poor sleep often tracks socioeconomic inequality
• People with multiple jobs, precarious hours, or night shifts pay the highest sleep price
• Bad sleep erodes your ability to cope with hardship, worsening existing disadvantages

He calls for “circadian justice”—a rethinking of work and social structures so people can align their schedules better with their own body clocks.

That would mean things like:

• More flexible work hours
• Less pressure for 24/7 availability
• Fair pay that doesn’t force people into extreme shift patterns
• Urban designs that respect darkness, silence, and rest

Here’s the key move: even in this political argument, sleep is often praised for its instrumental value. If you sleep better, you’re more productive, more resilient, more “functional”.

Important as that is, the essay invites us to push one step further:

Sleep is not only useful.
Sleep is good in itself.

Even if we somehow invented a flawless rest pill that repaired every cell and kept our minds sharp, something would still be missing: the slow rituals, the shared bed, the surrender, the vulnerability that makes care meaningful.

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How Can We Reclaim Sleep As Pleasure, Not Just Fuel?

What if we treated bedtime like a daily ritual, not a chore?

Let’s get practical for a moment. How do we live all this in ordinary life?

Here are some ways to re‑center sleep as a daily experience, not just an energy refill:

• Protect a small bedtime ritual.
  It doesn’t have to be elaborate. A 10‑minute sequence—shower, tea, a few stretches, dim light—can signal to your body that it’s safe to slow down.

• Curate your senses.
  Think of smell, touch, and light: clean sheets, a favorite pillowcase, a consistent scent. These small details are the canvas of your everyday aesthetics.

• Respect the transition.
  Try not to scroll until you literally drop your phone on your face. Those hazy minutes before sleep are some of the most delicate, creative moments your brain has all day.

• Honor your preferences about co‑sleeping.
  Some people sleep best alone; others feel safer with someone nearby, even at the cost of slightly poorer sleep. Neither is wrong. What matters is recognizing that sleep is woven into our relationships.

• Treat naps as human, not lazy.
  The essay’s author is a devoted napper and mentions “power naps” of 10–15 minutes that refresh without grogginess. That’s not weakness; it’s listening to a body that still shares biology with other daytime-resting animals.

Can rest itself be a form of quiet resistance?

The essay connects this conversation to a broader cultural critique. Poets and writers like David Whyte, Octavia Raheem, and Tricia Hersey argue that true rest is more than body maintenance. It can be a soft rebellion against systems that expect us to be permanently available.

Whyte describes rest as a “conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be”. It’s not laziness, and not mere preparation for the next round of effort. It’s part of a more honest life, one where value isn’t measured only in output.

Raheem and Hersey go further, framing rest and self‑care as ways to challenge exploitative systems and imagine a more humane society.

The essay we’re reading agrees with their goals, but shifts the focus slightly:
Rest and sleep are not just strategies to repair us so that we can fight again. They are goods in themselves, worth defending even when they don’t lead to higher performance.

So when you close the laptop, silence notifications, and head to bed—even if emails remain unanswered—you’re not just “recharging your batteries.” You’re quietly insisting that you are not a machine at all.

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What Do We Lose If We Stop Sleeping?

Let’s gather the threads. We began with a simple worry: in a world obsessed with productivity, is sleep just an obstacle? The evidence tells a more interesting story.

From biology, we learned that:

• Humans still need around 7–8 hours of sleep per night on average
• Total sleep deprivation harms mind and body at every level
• Chronic short sleep builds a silent debt that strains health and mood

From experience and aesthetics, we saw that:

• Bedtime rituals are full of sensory pleasures—smells, textures, light, warmth
• The borders between waking and sleep carry their own magic
• Co-sleeping weaves intimacy, safety, and trust into the quietest hours of our lives

From politics and ethics, we discovered that:

• Work and inequality carve deep scars into people’s sleep
• “Circadian justice” invites us to redesign schedules and structures so bodies are not at war with clocks
• Philosophers like Sandel and Nussbaum remind us that limits and vulnerability give meaning to love, care, and solidarity

And from the essay’s personal vignettes, we felt that:

• There really is “value in oblivion”
• Not having to decide, not having to be “on”, can itself be a relief
• Wanting a pill that erases sleep might mean wanting to erase part of what makes us human

Here’s the big aha:

If we somehow removed sleep from our lives, we wouldn’t only gain more hours.
We’d also erase:

• The nightly retreat from noise and choice
• The tender rituals that bookend our days
• The trusting act of sharing a bed while unconscious
• The feeling of being an animal in sync with a turning planet

We’d trade a deeply human rhythm for a mechanical one. We would be “plugged in” all the time, and lose the sweetness of unplugging.

Sleep, then, isn’t just a medical requirement or a tool for productivity. It’s a daily reminder that we are vulnerable, finite, and alive. That reminder hurts sometimes, but it also gives our love, our projects, and our relationships their weight.

So tonight, when you slip under your blanket, maybe pause for a second. Feel the fabric, the temperature, the small sounds in the room. Notice who, if anyone, is breathing near you.

You’re not wasting time.
You’re participating in one of the oldest, most shared experiences on Earth.

This post was written for you by FreeAstroScience.com, which exists to explain complex science in simple, human language. Our aim is to spark curiosity and defend the light of reason—because, as Goya warned, the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

Come back any time you want to question your habits, rethink a “normal” part of life, or just enjoy the strange beauty of being a thinking animal under the stars.