We cannot rest under capitalism

According to Columbia Professor Jonathon Crary, work culture is degrading our ability to recover and rest.

Photo by Merielen Espino/The Barnard Bulletin

By Fiona Hu

April 9, 2025

Society must stay awake to keep consuming and producing, as Columbia Professor Jonathon Crary in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explains that sleep resists commodification — it offers nothing of value for capitalism to extract or profit from. Because sleep lacks capital value, we slowly degrade sleep and try to demonize rest. As members of our capitalist society, we are rendering rest, recovery, and sleep as useless and undesirable. We place ourselves into a 24/7 world with a non-stop market: we have workers taking shifts in the factory to constantly produce, the global stock market is expanding to operate 24/7, and apps like Robinhood and Interactive Brokers are allowing for 24/7 trading. 

Columbia is not immune from this issue, as 24-hour libraries, free Red Bull trucks, signs at Liz’s Place saying “Coffee. Sleep. Repeat,” have all revealed a phenomenon on this campus: sleep is undesirable and is only a stepping stone to continue production, especially in a world designed to keep us working and busy. 

The 24/7 Butler Library

Columbia’s own Butler Library, open 24/7, places us into a system of non-stop work. With illuminating streetlights on campus, Butler Library and our campus disrupts the system of day and night, prolonging the work day. In an interview with The Bulletin, Professor Crary reflected that “during the Industrial Revolution, the possibility of non-stop production and work, of factories operating around the clock emerged alongside new lighting technologies.” The concept of light and work did not necessarily mean the destruction of sleep, but rather, the creation of shifts, allowing for 24/7 factories constantly producing. According to Crary, this constant production was “simply not a reality [before the Industrial Revolution],” meaning disrupting the night and our rest aided in the development of capitalism. 

Today, we have production, communication systems, and stock markets that need constant attention. We have learned to devalue sleep, as Crary stresses in the interview that people are not literally being denied sleep, but rather that sleep is “never prioritized so that human beings are never given that opportunity for regular restoration.” 

In his book, Crary writes how “[t]he homogenizing force of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent structure of differentiation (…) any notions of sleep as ‘natural’ are rendered unacceptable.” Taking the example of “sleep mode,” a feature on our devices to reduce notifications as we rest, this method proves ineffective; Crary writes how “the number of people who wake themselves up once or more at night to check their messages or data is growing exponentially.” Our phones having the designation of “sleep mode” suggests that sleep is a condition needed for operationality. Indeed, Crary writes, “it supersedes an off/on logic (…) nothing is ever fundamentally ‘off’ and there is never an actual state of rest.” Through our increasingly digitized and increasing work culture, we are now slowly eroding sleep. 

The Free RedBull Truck

In front of Columbia’s gates, a Red Bull truck often stops by, handing out free energy drinks. Student’s favorite free Red Bull truck upholds our nonstop world, as we enhance ourselves with manufactured energy to stay awake for our midterms, homework, clubs, and internships — for our work. Because Red Bull knows their target audience is tired students, the truck preys on tired, overworked, college students desperate for a method to gain more energy. By having enhancements to stay awake, we disrupt our sleep cycle so we can work for longer. 

For Crary, this mirrors our history of warfare, where “​​during World War II, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts, exhausted soldiers were supplied with amphetamines to keep them fighting.” Without concern for the health of the soldiers, we boosted them with supplements, hoping for no time to be wasted. This use of amphetamines mirrors our consumption of energy drinks — we need to stay awake, to keep fighting for capitalism, to keep producing, and to keep consuming. 

Just like the soldiers of war, we are drinking energy that could be dangerous to our long term health, all for the sake of production and work. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) finds, “the potential health risks associated with excessive consumption (…) include cardiovascular problems, nervous system disorders, and the potential for addiction.” The Red Bull truck is beyond a marketing scheme — it is hooking our students to energy and devaluing sleep. 

Barnard: A Campus without Sleep

Barnard’s campus is not immune from the anti-sleep rhetoric either. From bragging about low sleep hours to drinking three cups of coffee daily, we have placed those who do not rest on a pedestal, pushing a narrative that sleep is shameful. “A lot of people at Barnard pull all-nighters,” according to Aparna Parthasarthy (BC ‘28). “I think they do this to keep up with work, especially during midterms and finals because a lot of classes have harder grade scales and assignments often are due back to back.” However, there was a time where rest and recovery were valuable. 

In our conversation, Crary recounted how premodern societies were mainly agrarian and organized around rhythmic cycles. These systems are based on balance between rest and work, as Crary reflects, “whether the seasons, of day and night, of work and festival (…) [these] cycles (…) have become irrelevant.” This careful balance has been destroyed, as the night, sleeping, and carnival and festival are all times of rest and recovery where we do nothing productive. Now, we have rendered these opposites useless, because we cannot generate anything off of rest and recovery. For Crary, the incompatibility of rest and recuperation for human beings and ecosystems is one of the devastating impacts of modernity. 

The Impact on Our Society

This destruction of balance between rest and work is also apparent in our communities, as we not only stress our mental health, but our ability to be vulnerable through the degradation of sleep. This concept of vulnerability allows us to have empathy towards friends, family, and society at large, as Crary explains in his book that “an individual cannot be understood except in relation to what is outside them, to an otherness that faces them. Only around this state of vulnerability can there be an opening onto dependencies by which society is sustained.” 

Speaking with Crary, he described sleep as a time of defenselessness, predicated on having a caring community that allows one to fully rest and go into a “state of vulnerability.” Absent our ability to be vulnerable — we lack empathy, placing unhoused people, non-able bodied people, etc., as disposable in our system. According to the AMA Journal of Ethics, “people experiencing homelessness access primary care less frequently because they are often uninsured.” In the United States, insurance tends to be tied with employment. We leave jobless people as disposable, with society viewing the unemployed as “lazy” and thus deserving of their suffering. Indeed, these people are considered “lazy” because they cannot produce, and they do not have the means to consume. As a result of leaving behind unhoused individuals, the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that “[unhoused] individuals face 3.5 times the mortality rate of those who are housed.” 

Our generation is a testament to the lack of empathy stemming from our destruction of vulnerability, as our politics become exponentially polarized. Republicans and Democrats over the past decade increasingly view each party as “Very unfavorable”, revealing our inability to listen and compromise. Indeed, we are unable to practice vulnerability effectively, as Gen Z faces a new problem: floodlighting. The term was coined by Dr. Brené Brown, and refers to “a method of quickly accelerating intimacy between friends by sharing numerous personal details (…) [R]ather than building genuine friendships, those who engage in floodlighting may be testing their new connection to see if it will endure.” Essentially, we overshare, loading all our problems onto those around us. This phenomenon reveals that our friendships do not know how to properly be vulnerable, causing an inability to connect and feel empathy with others. Our inability to know how to properly “feel" stems from the degradation of skills viewed as vulnerability. 

Ultimately, in our 24/7 world, there is no time to rest and no time for empathy. As students in the city that never sleeps, that doesn’t mean we cannot rest. Thus, as students, we must all slow down, recover, and sleep to escape our capitalist society. We need to rethink our systems by using sleep, rather than frowning upon it. As Crary ends his book, “sleep, which at the most mundane level of everyday experience, can always rehearse the outlines of what more consequential renewals and beginnings might be.”