Episode 07: Money never sleeps
In this episode: Cressida and Joshua introduce the ideas of “sleep debt” and “social jetlag,” and meet Rob Aitken, scholar of global finance. The hosts discuss how sleep has its own economy (13:36). We turn to the moralizing language that comes up in both talk of managing your finance and your sleep (19:15), and Cressida sounds off about larks and owls. What is it to be an ethical sleeper? (28:01) Answers include Joshua’s frankly disturbing ideas about how to punish sleep debtors. Is debt unavoidable? (40:01). What does sleep justice look like? (44:05). What does “money never sleeps” mean? The answer comes via Oliver Stone with a surprising swerve into Aristotle (52:05).
Mentioned in this episode: Rob Aitken’s research profile; Andrew Ross, “You are Not a Loan: A Debtors Movement” (2014) (journal article PDF linked); Katherine Binhammer, Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel (2020); Lisa Adkins, “Speculative Futures in the Time of Debt” (2017) (journal article summary here); Revenge Bedtime Procrastination; Jonathan White, “Circadian Justice” (2022) (full journal article preprint available here); Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, dir. Oliver Stone, 2010; Aristotle, The Politics, quote on money at Book 1, section X; thumbnail is “canvas art designed for hustlers” by IKONICK, available here!
Transcript
Joshua: 00:00
I'm very excited to talk about my favorite movie, Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps. It's not really a movie, despite the subtitle about sleep. I would even argue it's not really about money.
Cressida: 00:16
Okay, promising.
Joshua: 00:17
But I'm not gonna let that stop me.
Joshua: 00:40
Today we're looking in general at how we think about sleep as stuff and how we moralize about it. In particular, we're going to talk about sleep debt and some of the parallels between how we manage our money and how we manage our sleep.
Cressida: 00:54
Yeah, it turned out in this episode that we were all talking about a lot of ideas that none of us in the conversation really believe in. So it's interesting how ways of talking about ideas linger in literatures even after they've been thoroughly debunked. So at one point I referenced zombie ideas. So the idea that a particular concept might serve a purpose for us, and so it keeps coming back, even though it's dead, even though nobody really thinks that this idea, as it stands, is actually a good idea or representative of a truth, but just keeps circulating.
Joshua: 01:32
So are we talking about zombies today, or what are we talking about in today's episode?
Cressida: 01:35
There are no literal zombies, no. Today's interview is with my colleague Rob Aitken, who does fascinating research, really, really amazing research actually on global financial markets. And I've learned a lot from Rob about debt. And at one point, I started musing, and then we started musing together about whether sleep debt is a thing that's like money debt. And it turns out that both of them are pretty sticky concepts. I mean, you might think that financial debt was straightforward, but it really isn't. There's very little literature about sleep debt, even though it seems like it's a common sense sort of concept. So basically, sleep debt is how much less sleep you are getting than you need. So how you measure that is methodologically a bit controversial, but the few studies that do try to measure it use something called the "sleep debt index," which is the difference between how much sleep you want to get and how much you do get. So notice it's want to get and it's all self-reported. So you self-report how much sleep you think is your ideal, and then you self-report how much sleep you think you got. Of course, there could be different ways of measuring both those things. Because it's self-reported, then it's not very meaningful, but it's probably better than just self-reporting your sleep duration, because we do know that individuals need different amounts of sleep. And so it's a way at least of indexing to the person. What's your sleep debt index, Joshua?
Joshua: 03:14
You know, maybe it's because I lowered my standards...
Cressida: 03:18
So that's the trouble with self-reporting.
Joshua: 03:21
Yes. Throughout, you know, that chunk of my life where I was mostly an insomniac. I'm happy to report I'm doing great on the sleep index these days. So again, I don't think like I was always told to get a healthy like eight hours sleep. And I don't know if I always do that, but I feel in general I'm very well rested. Though that could also be the like four to five cups of coffee I drink a day.
Cressida: 03:53
So also not recommended.
Joshua: 03:56
Also not recommended. So the my sleep index would probably change if I stopped drinking that much coffee. But for now...
Cressida: 04:04
Because you would feel more tired, so you would start thinking that you needed more sleep?
Joshua: 04:10
Maybe the problem is...
Cressida: 04:11
Oh my goodness, you're just not this is not the spirit of the sleep debt index at all. No.
Joshua: 04:16
But I was also thinking, even though I would self-report a very positive sleep index, not a lot of sleep debt, I do find myself doing this thing every week where if I lose an hour here and there, I mentally bracket it and say, you know, the weekend's coming. I'll catch up on that on the weekend. Okay. You know, I've been doing this for a long time. And over time, there's some fairly public surveys and studies that get published that say that's maybe not a great strategy.
Cressida: 04:52
Yes, what you're describing is social jet lag.
Joshua: 04:55
I thought it was strategic sleeping.
Cressida: 04:57
Well, it depends on your perspective. But yeah, so another term in the literature that's very closely related to sleep debt is social jet lag, which is just the idea that you try to catch up your sleep at times when you have more time for sleeping. And for most people, that's the difference between working weekdays and weekends. And it doesn't seem to work very well. So the trouble is that you can't really treat sleep in that transactional way that I've incurred a debt during the week and I'm going to pay it back on the weekends. Repetition, regularity habit is probably more important to get good sleep than the idea that it's a stuff. Sleep is a temporal process, it's not a substance. So it's unlike money in that way. Or is it?
Rob: 06:01
Yeah, I'm Rob Aitken, Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. I do a bit of work on finance, broadly conceived. So thinking about the social and cultural dimensions of finance and what it means to live in a world that's often described as a financialized time.
Cressida: 06:22
And you teach a course called The Politics of Money.
Rob: 06:25
I do, yeah.
Cressida: 06:26
Can you tell us about that course? Because I'm still wanting to take it, as with so many of my colleagues' courses, probably never will, but you know, can live vicariously through your description.
Rob: 06:36
Well, it's it's a relatively new course and it's still a work in progress in some ways. But I don't know if the politics of money is exactly the right title, but it's sort of a course about the politics of our relationship to finance and the financial world. So there's some historical elements to this, but it's also thinking about finance in our contemporary moment and tries to connect, I guess, the big sort of structural dimensions of a financialized world. So global financial markets, the pressure of those markets, the movement of money in those markets to everyday kinds of practices and relationships. So we think about the links between those two different levels through various different kinds of themes each week. So it's trying to get students to think a bit about their own relationship to finance in terms of how they understand their own indebtedness, for example, or their own sense of the future. The question of risk is a big theme in the course, how they understand themselves as risk takers or their orientation to risk and the history of that kind of process. And then each week there's there's really quite specific themes about money and finance that tries to kind of work through those bigger issues across those different levels. So it's kind of a large course and a bit of a work in progress still.
Cressida: 07:54
How does the concept of debt feature into your own work?
Rob: 07:59
Yeah, so I don't know how much of an answer you want to this because it's huge. Yeah, it's huge. And actually, my thinking about that does come a little bit from teaching that course because even though this is maybe more so the case of American, the American context, our students are more indebted um every year. And so as that course has evolved, there's more and more space in it for students wanting to talk about their debt and what that indebtedness kinds of means and and how they understand it and understand what it means for the future and so on. But this relates to my own bigger thinking about debt. And if I were to put it in a like the biggest terms, my interest or work on debt is sort of situated between two big stories that are often told about debt. And the the first story is often the story about how debt over both the short term but the really long term has become more and more abstract and expansive and depersonalized. So it's a story about the increasing ways in which debt becomes organized through depersonalized networks and in a very abstract kind of form that eventually plants like a culture of caution around debt that begins to recast debt as something that is maybe from one angle like more productive, but also required. And and this results eventually in the 20th century in a kind of like full-on kind of economy organized around and reliant on debt, and that that debt becomes the basis of a whole global asset economy. So my students are actually quite interested in the ways in which their debt becomes the basis for enormously valuable assets held by investors. So this is a big story about American student loan debt, the way it has become a very profitable source of value for investors in the same way that subprime mortgages were in the 2007-2008 financial crisis. So, this is one big story about debt is like this increasing abstraction and this increasing depersonalization, and also how much more expansive debt is. The other story that I'm interested in, though, is the way in which, despite all that, there remains like social possibilities around debt. And I'm interested in the ways in which activists, artists, um, critics still think about debt and its metaphors as something that could have progressive political possibilities that have not been completely eviscerated by this abstracted kind of approach to debt, as something that entangles us all and eviscerates our future and and connects us all to this very abstract global asset economy. Sorry, maybe that was too much, but that's where I'm sort of situating myself, I guess.
Cressida: 10:42
And what are the possibilities? Well, what's an example of those possibilities?
Rob: 10:48
Yeah, so some of that for me really comes out of this work I did a while ago and been thinking about it since a moment I would say that happens after the 2007, 2008 financial crisis when debt became briefly like a moment of political possibility. So some of this is definitely connected to Occupy Wall Street and the activism around that. And so I'd worked with and interviewed some of the artists and activists connected to Occupy. And debt was a central feature of their work. So this involved, first and foremost, just speaking their debt. So a lot of Occupy begins with these debt assemblies where indebted students, artists, and so on would just sort of announce their debt publicly and try to shed whatever form of shame or or whatever out baggage kind of came with that. And that led to a whole process by which a lot of those activists began experimenting with politics around debt. Could there be a politics of debt refusal or debt resistance? Andrew Ross has described this as kind of like thinking about debt as at the point of organizing and the way in which work or the point of production would have been a site of organizing for a previous generation. This all culminates in an example that really interested me where Occupy activists eventually began a campaign to buy bad debt. This would be mainly like defaulted medical debt and student debt in the American context. And then they learned how to buy that debt in the secondary debt market for a fraction of its paper value, and they just forgave it. And this was an experiment that got a lot of attention as a way of thinking about, you know, could there be an alternative politics of debt? Could there be a way of organizing some forms of mutual kind of self-help around debt? And so those are the examples that got me thinking about like using debt as a as a political possibility or the metaphor of debt in those kinds of ways.
Cressida: 12:51
They're really amazing examples, aren't they? I mean, who knew that you could find debt and buy it and trade it essentially in that way and then forgive it, right? Instead of making money on the money. So there's something very clever about doing it, but it took a certain kind of economy and a certain understanding of that economy for to even be able to conceptualize it as an option. Like it's a clever piece of activism that teaches us something about where debt lives and how how you can engage it. To me, what's interesting about the concept of sleep debt is that it's become what I would call a zombie concept, that it lurks around, it sticks with us despite being debunked in various ways. So it doesn't matter how often people who are medical doctors in the study of sleep say, well, you can't really treat sleep as if it's a debt or an investment. You should actually try to respect the process and treat sleep as something that happens more regularly. We still think about sleep in that way. And to me, that tells me something about how we think about sleep.
Joshua: 14:16
Yeah, it lingers. And because it lingers, it probably gestures to some assumption that we have about sleep and bodily functions in general. I like the uh the tagline, debt turns out not to be what we thought it was, as a tagline for like the 21st century and 20th century writ large. Yeah.
Cressida: 14:43
All finance turns out to be not exactly how we how we thought it worked or what we thought it was.
Joshua: 14:48
Exactly. And sort of like, whoops, I guess wasn't quite what we imagined it to be. But yeah, at the same time, sleep does seem to have a kind of economy. And I'm thinking about our conversation with Sarah Sharma and about the structures that were set up that allowed some people, the Liquid Man, for instance, to navigate their life and their sleep and their time because other people were waiting on them. Other structures existed that went into debt themselves, sleep debt. Thinking especially here about like taxi drivers who stay up, you know, 24 hours to be there in the parking spot waiting for liquid man to hop into the back of their car so that they can drive them away and save or rescue in Sarah Sharma's terms, the liquid man's time. Right. So it does seem to have this relational economy where some people will go into debt so that others can benefit off of their not sleeping.
Cressida: 16:01
Yeah. So sleep-like money circulates in this particular sense that some people get to benefit and others suffer because of how sleep is valuable to us. So maybe like other discussions we've had, the concept of sleep debt might allow us to think about how our individual experiences of sleep or of money for that matter are part of larger systems. So in other episodes, we've talked about structural injustices, right? Like the episode with Sarah, I think, is a classic example of that. And we've also talked about individual experience. So we've talked about how much we can control our sleep. W e've even talked at the ethical level about what it what it means to be responsible to your sleep or to the sleep of other people. And so maybe as we think about the analogies between sleep and money, we might be able to kind of get into some of those discussions again. Is this a question about really, really giant systems of finance or of sleep? Or is it a question of what decisions we as individuals make and how we manage our money or our sleep? And I think the answer is always going to be both, that both those things happen, but that they happen in relationship with each other. And it's really helpful to be able to understand that relationship. With so many things, we like to hypothesize them, an academic would say, right? Like we like to turn things that aren't things into things. We like to pretend that sleep is stuff. And we we also think of money as stuff, and I guess money isn't really stuff either, but that's how we think of it. So have you made that, have you thought about that analogy yourself between money and sleep or or financial debt and sleep debt?
Rob: 18:04
It is true that that is a term that circulates, and I don't know how long it's been circulating, but it seems like a it's a term I've often thought of myself, you know, having gone through a a period without getting much sleep, that this needs to be repaid, and so on. But the the metaphor seems to really strain in lots of ways as well. Like who is who is the like if debt is about obligation, I guess it would be an obligation to the self in this case, then, or who's collecting the burden of this of this debt, and then is someone accumulating interest, or is this a debt that's just going to disappear at some point in time? So I do wonder about like with a lot of the ways in which financial metaphors travel, I wonder how strained it gets and and whether or not it's I mean it's resonant obviously in some ways. Like I think when you when you use that term, it's sort of obvious what what we're referring to. And so there's a power to it in one way, but it also seems to strain quite a bit.
Cressida: 19:05
Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think it really works as a way of thinking about what sleep is, but it nonetheless also has a moralizing function, I think. Like you've gone into sleep debt and you need to pay it back, meaning you need to manage your time to get more sleep. So I find a lot of the discourses about sleep are about self-management and about particularly about the management of time. And so you need to make sure that you're sleeping the right way, the right amount, in order to be the right kind of person. And I sometimes say to students, you know, one of the most annoying moments in this whole moralizing and sleep thing is the way that people who get up early in the morning, so -called larks, get represented as industrious and conscientious and reliable people who are getting things done. And night owls get represented as indulgent partygoers who you know maybe they're kind of clever and maybe they're fun but they're somehow not as responsible to the world as as the lark and so that idea that you have a personality type based on your circadian rhythm is I think kind of another another example of the way sleep gets moralized and you have to manage it right.
Rob: 20:26
Do you do you think that like highly sleep indebted individuals take on the burden that's sort of similar to the the way we were describing like the the moral burden that often associated with that like one of the obvious things that debt accomplishes as a as a notion is like is a really a really kind of abstracted in individualization so that and this is something that a lot of the debt activists have thought a lot about it's how the how debt you know accomplishes this like magical almost complete kind of way of understanding their burdens as very individualized. It just doesn't allow a consideration of any of the broader conditions historical, structural etc that would make that that possible so that just basically they just all they all they are told or all they are asked to know is that they have this figure that they are carrying around this burden that they are carrying around and it doesn't matter. It's an obligation and that's where it be kind of begins and ends. So they talk about in the very stark terms that there's no it's just their burden and that there's even no way to understand really the history of it other than it's the history of their own good or bad choices, I guess.
Cressida: 21:46
As you were talking you used several what I would call moral words. So you talked about students feeling ashamed of their debt and guilt perhaps about having gone into debt in particular ways. In the debt assembly there's maybe even a confessional moment, right? Where you you announce your your sins of being in debt in order to be absolved from them. And so I wonder how much you see that even in students or any ordinary Canadians. Like do people feel bad about their debt?
Rob: 22:22
Well yeah that's a really interesting insight because I think that was a powerful part of that activism. And the interviews I did with those activists, they they all kind of returned to this moment where they they found what what they would describe as courage to to sort of announce their debt or just describe its conditions or its amount and and so on. And that struck me just because you know the the cultural history of the debt often suggests that we move beyond this kind of Victorian opposition to debt or this kind of idea of thrift and so on that that we now indulge in debt. But I think there still is this obvious kind of shame around it or guilt, as you were saying. So I do have my students read a piece by one of those activists and it's interesting because the reaction is maybe a little bit different than that prior generation of debt activists. So they they'll say something like on one hand yes it is embarrassing in a way to take on this debt but it's also just like they'll talk about a language of requirement like this is just what's required now. Like we understand this is what we need to take on this the burden that is unavoidable. This is what the system requires of us we understand it changes intuition and in the economy more generally require us to take this debt on but there still is an element I think of that of that shame and and guilt. They do seem really interested in talking about it though because I think that that sense of debt and what that means for their sense of a future is kind of interesting. So I tried to expand that part of the course each time I've done it because it seems like that's a an issue they want to talk about.
Cressida: 23:58
We still have lots of moralizing stories I guess about how you got yourself into debt and how you can get yourself out. But what you're saying suggests that people maybe sort of understand those to be ridiculous stories to the extent that they're individualizing like not what did you do wrong, but what structural conditions forced you into a circumstance where you had to accumulate this much debt. They're not exactly thrown into debtors prisons, although I think you know prison for debt is not absent from our world there's a sort of punishment attached to a decline whether it's an intergenerational decline like you Gen Z have more debt than your parents did and Gen X has more debt than our boomer parents did and so this idea of cross-generational decline through the accumulation of debt but also yeah that's that's really interesting sort of insights and I there is a sense that I think students do some of them anyways increasingly feel like this is just the conditions in which they exist now and they don't have much agency over those conditions.
Rob: 25:08
It's linked to all sorts of other concerns they they they sort of you know lived their whole lives in this moment of austerity and the possibility of like markers that a previous generation might point to home ownership for example are more elusive for them this relates to a piece I have them read by the Australian social theorist Lisa Adkins around time in debt and she argues that for this generation there's something qualitatively different about debt in the future maybe she overdraws the case a little bit but she suggests that a previous generation at least for like certain kind of middle class individuals anyways debt was something that was at least over the course of a lifetime more manageable and for the current generation debt is something that is that there is no escape from it. There is no eventual repayment so this is what she calls the move from the probables of repayment to just the possibles of payment that all these financial mechanisms want is for indebted individuals to continue to make payments. They don't want even that debt to be retired. The whole kind of asset economy requires that those debts never be retired like a middle class 1960s mortgage would eventually be so that this kind of like constant stream of income generated by these debts becomes the raw material for wealthy asset investors who can own that debt and the perpetual income streams that come from it. My students read that and some of them agree with it and and make the case that they are facing a more burdensome future maybe even no future Adkins goes so far as to say that that debt means the future is eviscerated for that population. I'm not sure they all agree with that but it's an interesting argument to take on the I think that's a similar process happened with some of the activists that I had interviewed around the Occupy Wall Street experiments because they had to learn how these secondary debt markets worked like they knew nothing about them. Like this amazing process of like becoming an agent in those markets themselves. And the more they learned about those markets, the more ephemeral they realized their debt actually was like it was hard sometimes to even trace the ownership claims around that like who actually owns this debt after it's been traded across jurisdictions multiple times and disaggregated into like sophisticated investment mechanisms and so on. And as they learned more and more about these layers of abstraction around debt and this dispersal across the globe they just became just like really tired of any kind of moral argument around around debt like understanding it as part of this much larger really opaque kind of system.
Cressida: 28:03
So we hear in that conversation with Rob that there are still judgments about debt and I think that they are pervasive even though some people have talked themselves out of the moralizing about debt. There's this language in both in law and in various kinds of ethical languages of the "honest and unfortunate debtor." So you can be absolved of at least moral responsibility for your debt if you got into it through some mechanism that's not your fault, you genuinely tried, you really thought you were going to pay the money back. So situations like where you buy a house and then the housing market crashes, which is something of course that in the last 20 years has happened to a lot of people, suddenly you're in negative equity, you owe more on your house than your house is worth that kind of situation seems like a classic example of the honest and unfortunate debtor that the market conspired to make your bet a surprisingly bad one. And so we have in in Canada and in other countries too "consumer proposal" which is where you go to a trustee and you say I've got all these debts and I just can't cope. I can't pay them back. And the trustee helps you to consolidate them so that your creditors then get a certain amount paid back on an interest-free timed basis, but they don't collect all of their debts. And what's interesting about that process is that it's baked into the system. So there is an assumption on the part of all institutions that lend money, mortgage companies and banks and so on, that they won't get a certain amount of that debt back. They assume that some people will either pay none of the debt back or only a small proportion of it because of things like crashing housing markets that happen to people all the time. But of course there are ways of being clearly being a dishonest and not at all unfortunate debtor like if you're a fraudster. So if you deliberately set out to rip off the system then you can't use some of these mechanisms because what you've done is criminal. And so we're still drawing that distinction which I think is interesting. And then I started wondering about sleep debt and I thought if you just if you go into sleep debt or if you're just not sleeping well, there's sometimes a moral language you've failed to manage your own sleep. So what is it to be an ethical sleeper?
Joshua: 30:28
Well I definitely see the connection between the moralizing around financial debt and the moralizing around sleep debt. Like I think when people are regularly tired and exhausted or they show up to work or they show up to class in in our case and they're clearly exhausted and unable to perform the way that they would like to and the way that maybe we would like them to. If there's any indication that they are that way because they were just doom scrolling all night or because they weren't properly taking care of their you know sleep hygiene and getting the right amount of rest, then I think there's a moralizing that we do where they're not being good ethical subjects in the sense that they're not allowing themselves and taking the steps that they should be taking to show up well rested, right? And I think that's one extreme the same way that the fraudster is an extreme. But then you're a sleep fraudster. Yeah you're a sleep fraudster yeah you know you you pretend that you slept and that you're trying to get sleep but really you're sabotaging yourself all the time to to do that. And then I think the the flip side to both of those which is that you know there is the ways that we go into debt intentionally or unintentionally and then there's the ways that we are forced to go into debt or the way that it is baked into the system. Your example were like this is baked in mathematically into the economy, right? That some people are just not going to be able to pay back their debts. That's just assumed.
Cressida: 32:08
So and that some people will have to go into debt.
Joshua: 32:12
And that some people will have to go into debt. And I think that's the that's the catch right there's this and this is a consumer policy right the the assumption that this happened to you by accident. This is no fault of your own and really you you can flip it and say like you might have found yourself in this circumstance by accident but it was intentional in so far. But somebody would find themselves that somebody would and so I think what Rob's talking about the way that these activists like find their debt to be far more ephemeral than they thought it was I think that treating sleep like a thing and treating money and debt like a thing conceals the way that it is like structurally prepared for us. Yeah. The way that it is structurally defined. And once you realize the way that oh my debt is actually related to all these different structures my financial and my sleep debt it opens up new possibilities for how you think about that debt and and live with it.
Cressida: 33:18
Yeah if you understand both of them as an economy things that flow, that circulate that are traded and you think about the relationships between different institutions, agencies, people, groups of people, then you think about it really differently than if you're thinking about money and sleep as stuff. When you said we're sabotaging ourselves, right? If you show up constantly sleep deprived and say, oh I just don't understand why I'm so tired all the time.
Joshua: 33:47
Right.
Cressida: 33:48
That that might be self-deluded rather than really trying to trick anybody else. But it reminds me of the concept of "revenge bedtime procrastination" which was very much in the listicles not that long ago and I had a terrific student in my politics of sleep seminar who did a presentation about the concept of revenge bedtime procrastination. It's sort of used almost exclusively to talk about younger people there's no obvious reason for that. And the idea is that you know that you should go to bed at 11 o'clock, let's say, but you've had such a long day of doing work things, things for other people, things you didn't want to be doing for whatever reason that you stay up usually it's usually used to describe like binge watching streaming services or scrolling on your phone watching videos. It's I think activities that are being a bit judged in the language. And you sort of waste your time as a revenge against the day that somebody else forced you to waste. Yeah. You're thinking well they forced me to spend the whole day in that office and I hated it and now I'm going to get my time back by staying up later than I should and then I'll be sleep deprived and tired tomorrow morning. And all the listicles and the little Buzzfeed articles and everywhere tries to talk you out of doing it.
Joshua: 35:16
Right.
Cressida: 35:17
That says you shouldn't do this. It's bad for your sleep you know just give yourself a regular bedtime and get off that phone or stop watching Netflix. And that might not be terrible advice for some people but the student really took umbrage which I enjoyed and said this is actually just a way of making this seem like an individual rather than a structural problem. And I think if you want to take revenge by scrolling on your phone that we shouldn't use judgmental language to describe that. And I thought oh that's that's really interesting.
Joshua: 35:50
Yeah okay that is really interesting yeah so there has been this long rich tradition of punishing people for their financial debt. And so let's say we do take a moralizing position on revenge bedtime procrastination. If if we used to throw people into prison for being in debt what's the equivalent for the person in sleep debt? Do we need to build mandatory sleep facilities? Should we punish sleep debt similarly do we need a sleep debt prison?
Cressida: 36:22
Wow okay maybe that would that maybe not a bad idea that that suddenly provoked all sorts of thoughts. I mean what would that look like would it be like rows of beds where people were forced to sleep? That sounds pretty great.
Joshua: 36:36
Yeah I think they would have to be locked to the beds yeah I mean because otherwise they might revenge procrastinate. Absolutely yeah so I think maybe this is a isolating solitary confinement sort of situation because they also can't talk right like it's like pressure cooking sleep.
Cressida: 37:02
This is getting really dystopian really fast.
Joshua: 37:05
Well but desperate times for desperate measures and you know we have a sleep crisis and we need people to to sleep better and to sleep more and so we are gonna like force people to sleep.
Cressida: 37:20
I think that's really interesting. We don't I mean obviously we don't do that but I think that maybe we should maybe I think it's worth thinking about what each of us does that supports other people's sleep. Right. And that's usually phrased to us as a kind of a positive question you know in fact I saw a review of Black Power Naps which is this art installation that we've talked about before on the show and one of the reviews of that concluded by saying "ask yourself what have you done to enable Black people to rest?" And I thought that's a what a great question, right? Like not how are you enabling Black people or any marginalized group of people to do more stuff, to do more things, but how are you enabling the rest of others, right? What habits, what practices, what forms of political action are you a part of that give other people that kind of space? And so that would be a sort of positive way of posing the challenge. But yeah I think generally speaking we're not very good at disciplining sleep even when failure to do so has really dire consequences. So the thing that comes to mind is the health and safety regulations that people like long haul truckers or pilots are subject to. And it's very difficult to force people to sleep. Mostly what you can do is regulate a space around sleep and then tell people that they have to sleep in it. But if you say to a pilot, you know, you've been working for however many hours and now you have to clock off and you have to have a break of another so many hours so that you can get sleep you can book that person a hotel room and you can give them the time but you can't stop them going to the bar and getting hammered and then having a terrible hangover. Right. I mean you can you know take pictures of them in the bar and report them to their employer, right? You can discipline it maybe but it's actually really difficult to force people to sleep. And so when it's regulated what we tend to do is just organize around sleep and then only I think in situations where we really think that something terrible would happen if somebody was sleep deprived if it's just somebody who has a baby or a student who's working two jobs then we don't really do all that much to support those people let alone to try to regulate their sleep
Joshua: 40:03
Rob, in the beginning you were talking about the way we understand debt as necessary to the global economy. And I'm wondering if there's a parallel between those expectations contained in the global economy, that we go into debt, that we have to go into debt. And if there's a parallel with sleep debt there as well, a sort of expectation that in order to keep up with the pace of work or the pace of a social life, you're required to go into sleep debt.
Rob: 40:42
Yeah, that that could be a really interesting parallel. I mean, people who write about the necessity of debt write about it in a couple different ways. So that first of all, as I mentioned, like the idea of living in an asset economy requires debt. Like assets and debt, these are just relational versions of each other. There is there are no assets without debt in a way and or without obligation imposed. So that's just it's there needs to be debt in order for that asset economy to operate. So they have to come from from somewhere. But in more like concrete terms, a lot of people write about debt as necessary. So for certain groups in particular, like for those who are not risk capable, for those who are precarious or vulnerable, for often for racialized groups and so on, they're confronted with an economy that's that has no other option other than debt. So that it's, you know, this is a story about austerity, declining social supports, about the conditions of work that are more contingent and casual and and burdensome and so on. So that all of those, both the austerity and those declining work conditions just require debt to allow those populations to exist in a certain way. So their existence is this kind of bare life, so to speak, of debt. There's no other option out of it. So those are the ways in which financial debt is understood as being like necessary to this economy. I'm wondering what the parallel then would be with necessary sleep debt. And it's like maybe Cressida, you could I don't know if you have any way of picking up that point?
Cressida: 42:21
I guess that for people who are under certain kind of sleep duress, like maybe caring for a baby is the classic one, but also holding down several jobs, you know, like maybe you're taking classes at college during the day, but then you work a night shift as a security guard to make money to pay for those classes, or so those people who are under temporal pressures to to fill up their time, or at least not to have unbroken periods of time in which they can sleep.
Rob: 42:54
Is there a sense that the those kinds of sleep debts could ever, those accounts could ever be settled? Because if not, then that I mean that's sort of the way in which a lot of yeah, a lot of like people interested in cultural economy debt now talk about the kinds of debt that burdens certain vulnerable populations now. These are not these are not arrangements that could ever there's no account here that could ever be settled or reconciled.
Cressida: 43:19
Yeah. I mean, it could be that individuals manage to to settle their sleep debt because they manage to retire, for example, or do something radically different in their life. But at a structural level, I think we've got an economy where there will always be people occupying the position of the sleep-indebted subject. So even if even if some individuals manage to shift things for themselves, there's still a cadre of people who are inevitably and chronically in sleep debt because of the way we organize our our working worlds.
Joshua: 44:05
So just going off of that last clip, what would you say sleep justice would look like in practice?
Cressida: 44:13
Yeah, that's an important question, I think. There's a an article by political theorist Jonathan White about this that was published recently, and he argues several interesting things. One of them is that sleep deprivation is what he calls a "corrosive disadvantage." That is, it's being sleep-deprived affects so many different areas of your life, including things like your civic participation. So people who are sleep deprived have less time for voting or participating in demonstrations or political actions or for writing to their MP, or, you know, what at whatever level you you want to understand political engagement. So it's not just that sleep deprivation makes you tired, it's that the consequences of being tired in that way extend into all sorts of other things that you that you don't do or do less well that disadvantage you in this kind of cascade of consequences. The problem of sleep deprivation, of sleep injustice, he ultimately argues, comes in the form that sleep is too short. So people who just don't get enough sleep, but also sleep that's irregular. So some of the ways that we, in particular, organize shift work conspire to make people not be able to develop a circadian rhythm where they go to bed and get up at the same time. And then sleep, this is an interesting one, sleep that's desynchronized. So he has some discussion of how there's a sleep injustice that happens if you're forced to sleep and wake on a cycle that's not the time zone that you're in. And that's becoming more and more common as people in call centers is the big example in the global south are expected to take calls from people in the global north during the global north's working hours. And so those people have to be awake at night or at some time that is not the time that the rest of their family are awake or that their society is going about its normal rhythms. So the desynchronization as a global phenomenon of sleep seems to be becoming more and more extreme as work becomes globalized. So we'd really have to change a lot, I think, about working conditions and including some of these global relationships to balance out who has control over their sleep. So if we think of being able to manage your sleep or being in a society where that's considered to be something that it's valuable for you to be able to do and it's supported, then we've got actually an enormous challenge on our hands. Of course, that's true of I think any question about justice. It's like, oh, it's a really, it's gonna be really hard, you know, because of where we are now. So I think there's a lot to do, but I still wonder what a politics of resistance to sleep injustice would look like if we want to do some things to end sleep injustice. What do we do?
Joshua: 47:14
Yeah, I I really liked one thing that White mentions in that article. One of the corrosive disadvantages is that you miss out on a lot of social time. You miss out on spending time with friends and family if you are working while they're asleep and then sleeping while they're awake.
Cressida: 47:32
Yeah.
Joshua: 47:32
You miss out on all these important moments. And to that, he also says on the flip side, when we're talking about that civic participation and building those political networks and possibilities, they also have like those who work at night, uh, those who suffer from these structural injustices related to sleep, can build solidarity with other people who are suffering from that kind of sleep irregularity, that kind of sleep deprivation as well. So there's like this this like community of the sleepless that could that could form, right? On the one hand. And then the other thing that he says, I think very similar to other kinds of social injustice that we could talk about, there's a potential or one way to address this would be those of us whose lives depend on other people working while we sleep and sleeping while we work. We could collectively try to necessitate that less, right? So there is this sort of if our lifestyles depend on exploiting other people's sleep, then maybe we should try and change our lifestyles to rely less on exploiting other people's sleep.
Cressida: 49:01
The idea that you could take your political action and use it in the service of creating the the time to rest, the time to do nothing, is both a bit paradoxical, but but interestingly radical, I think. Like I'm not campaigning against unfair work practices so that I can be more productive in other areas of my life, but just so that I can I can rest in general or sleep maybe specifically. And so it's yeah, it's a different kind of politics of refusal.
Rob: 49:37
Yeah, no, and it it definitely like so much of has been written about like what a financial subject is and how it understands and projects a certain kind of future, a future that needs to be calculated and accounted for in its kind of completion and totality and so on. So I think there's definitely a link, but that refusal I think would speak to a link with certain critical veins around that. Is there tension then between those who would see sleep as a kind of something outside of that kind of economy versus those who would see sleep as a precondition for acting in that economy as an effective productive?
Cressida: 50:13
Yes. I I mean I think that that's that that's right, that there's this sort of track in sleep studies of people who are thinking about sleep as a good in itself and not something to be governed that one of the joys of sleeping, one of the values of sleeping is that it is ungovernable and are content to sort of let that be, whatever it is. And then there are people who are really into managing sleep. So making so gamifying sleep, making sleep productive is a whole industry. There's this kind of real schism opening up between people who just who want sleep to take them, who want to be they want to be the subject of sleep. And then there are people who want to be subjects while they sleep. They want to make sleep theirs. That's a kind of subtle difference, but it's really important, I think.
Rob: 51:12
Yeah, that's really that's really interesting. I've been thinking a bit about this whole growing, well, it's been growing for a couple of decades now, of area of like ethical or responsible investing. And some of that comes from quite radical currents, like comes from like anti-war activists in the who were opposed to the Vietnam War, for example, or even earlier, you could trace roots back to kind of like abolitionist positions and so on. But a lot of it is quite not quite as radical, and it maybe even reproduces the very norm it's kind of concerned about. So that there's a sense that well, to be an ethical investor might just be to express your real self through the investing choices you make. So, there's like a whole industry of like workbooks and exercises and weekend retreats that would allow you to think about what really is your true self and how would that be expressed in what you what you invest in. And so on. So there's really interesting parallel connections, I think.
Cressida: 52:23
So we've organized the episode around debt, but of course, we're also talking about how sleep and finance are interconnected in much bigger ways. And we've called the episode Money Never Sleeps, which is the subtitle of the sequel to the Oliver Stone blockbuster Wall Street.
Joshua: 52:41
It's no Demolition Man, but it is a fascinating movie about greed and Wall Street and Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf. A nd what I think is fascinating about this phrase like money never sleeps is that it has, I think, a fairly normal meaning. Like I think most of us understand what that phrase means in normal parlance. You know, that money is circulating in financial flows 24-7, and that even when we sleep, the sort of flows and circuits of capital just keep on going. And that is not what Michael Douglas means when he uses the phrase in this movie.
Cressida: 53:24
That's very confusing.
Joshua: 53:25
It's extremely confusing. I I just genuinely think that Oliver Stone likes the phrase and thinks that it was a cool add-on for a sequel. I don't think he cares about the meaning of the phrase at all. All right. The movie has a lot more to do with family dynamics between Michael Douglas, his daughter, and Shia LaBeouf, who is marrying his daughter.
Cressida: 53:48
Who's the son-in-law? Prospective?
Joshua: 53:50
Exactly. This is important context for the conversation that Michael Douglas has with Shia LaBeouf, where he mentions that money never sleeps. So he starts off as saying, so what about money, Jake? You like her? And then Shia LaBeouf says that he's not all that familiar with thinking about money as a she. And then Douglas continues, she lies there in bed with you, looking at you with one eye open. Money never sleeps, and it's jealous. And if you don't pay close attention, you'll wake up in the morning and she might be gone forever. And so extremely bizarre interpretation of what the phrase money is.
Cressida: 54:33
Money's watching you.
Joshua: 54:34
Money's watching you.
Cressida: 54:35
Money, this this feminine, this feminine lover is watching you, and she's awake all the time while you're asleep, which is a twist on things that we've talked about before. Yeah. Yeah.
Joshua: 54:45
And I think what Oliver Stone is trying to evoke with this monologue is less so that money is this act of shaping empires and going around the world in these global circuits, and more that uh the desire for money is restless, and that the the greed that is quite central in the movie never sleeps. And that like you can never walk away from the Wall Street game, right? You have to keep at it and you have to keep you have to keep going into debt and you have to keep spending money. And the minute that you stop, money will go find a new lover, right? Who is going to who is going to fawn after them.
Cressida: 55:33
Yeah. I mean, in a way, it's the opposite of what I thought it meant.
Joshua: 55:36
Yeah, me too.
Cressida: 55:38
Which is that money is always working because money, in at least in capitalist economies that have markets where you can invest and trade, money is always making more money. And there's this very famous part of Aristotle in the Politics where he talks about how making interest on a loan, which is often translated as "usury," right? This kind of early modern word that really is has a kind of negative connotation, that if you lend somebody some money and you say give it back with interest, it's usury. It's like a kind of exploitation, that it was the most unnatural way of making money, because you know, money is not something that should breed. Animals breed, livestock breed. They reproduce, but money is not the kind of thing that should be reproducing without any intervening labor or product. So it is true that if you invest money well, I guess, the amount of money that you have simply increases without you doing any work or without you seeing anything except more money as the product. So there's a question about why that is even possible. At least there was for, you know, a very, very pre-modern person like Aristotle, who just thought, you know, the idea that that your money grows is the most kind of ethically gross, but also unnatural, like against against the way things are supposed to work, seems like a very old-fashioned view. But I think it is one of the things that people kind of like about money. And they wish that they were more like money, like all these people who are like, if only I could never sleep, if only I could just, without actually making anything or doing anything, just sort of grow myself.
Joshua: 57:25
I think it's really interesting that the feeling that Michael Douglas is expressing is the total opposite of that, right? And I'm not, I don't want to just make the easy comment that like this is just he just missed the point of, you know, money never sleeps. Uh, what I want to do is say, like, I think it reflects a changing anxiety towards money, right? That for Aristotle, the weird thing was that like you wouldn't be doing any work, and yet this value would be growing, right? There's this disconnect between you're not putting in any more work to create the value that of this thing that is growing. And then in the movie, it's like you have to be keeping an eye on that money 24-7. You have to be hustling 24-7 to make sure that the stocks are growing, to make sure you're making the trades that you need to make, to make sure that you're staying one step ahead of the game. Otherwise, money's gonna leave you. Right. And the difference between like, I have this money that's gonna grow on its own, and money owns me. And the minute that I stop like paying attention to it, yeah, I'm gonna be alone is is a very different relationship.
Joshua: 58:47
And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to Sleep is the New Sex. We'll be back next week, December 23rd, with a short bonus episode in which we all marvel at the amount of work Santa Claus, the elves, and the reindeer get done while everyone else is sleeping.
Cressida: 59:03
You can find Sleep is the New Sex on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website sleepisthenewsex.ca, that's C A for Canada, which also includes show notes that will connect you to everything referenced in the episode. Stay tuned at the end of the next episode as we'll tell you about our plans for the holiday break.
Cressida: 59:25
This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Niisitapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudonosonee, and Anishinaabe, lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognise the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations.