You know who doesn’t need sleep? Robots. We might say we hate the idea of turning into them, but for many millennials, we robotize ourselves willingly in hopes of gaining that elusive stability we so desperately crave. That means increasingly ignoring our own needs, including biological ones. As theorist Jonathan Crary points out, even our “sleep” is increasingly a version of machines in “sleep mode” that’s not rest so much as “a deferred or diminished condition of operation and access.”9 In sleep mode, you’re never actually off; you’re just waiting to be turned back on again.
