Longform GQ article on “The Business of Sleep” has some perspective:
If you want to isolate a time when the idea of wellness began to dominate our culture, you could do worse than point to the 2008 financial crisis. In a few short months an entire generation felt their grip on the future slip. Jobs became scarce, before scarcely becoming jobs. Zero hours became the new nine to five. Suddenly, nearly everyone needed a side hustle and nearly everyone else needed to be told what one was. Property became a pipe dream. Social media showed them what they didn’t have. Generation Anxious was born.
and
One upshot of the 2008 financial crisis, he says, was that, in the following years, “It wasn’t cool to sleep four hours a night any more, you know? There used to be this whole banker culture, crushing it at work, 100-hour weeks, let’s brag about how little sleep we get. And we started to turn the curve on that. When we started in 2014, our goal was to think about people sleeping better. People resting more. We got people to start thinking about sleep.”
But then you have addictive design from social media and streaming video services, with quotes from Netflix’s CEO like
“When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep.”
contrasted with Apple, which built the elegantly designed Bedtime night-and-morning alert feature into iOS, a feature I have used every day since it was released. This makes it
And so, when you are sitting there wondering if you should keep watching or scrolling or simply go to bed, chances are you’re making a choice between the largest companies on earth: Netflix (£127bn value), Amazon (£789bn), YouTube (owned by Google: £583bn), Facebook (£375bn) and Twitter (£21bn) on the one hand and Apple (£789bn) on the other.