Dangerously Sleepy

You live in a world that celebrates sleeplessness as strength. The book argues that chronic fatigue is not just a biological fact but a cultural, economic, and political system—one built by business icons, reinforced by gender norms, and sustained by weak regulation. Across American history, the ideal of the tireless worker has become a moral code and productivity metric, entrenching exhaustion as a form of virtue.

From heroic sleeplessness to systemic overwork

Since Benjamin Franklin’s injunctions against sloth and Thomas Edison’s boasts about his three-hour nights, leading men have defined success through wakefulness. Newspapers and management writers glorify this endurance as masculine excellence—Donald Trump’s four-hour routine, Lindbergh’s sleepless flight, and Samuel Walton’s schedules all reinforce the message that real power belongs to those who stay awake. This myth travels through every sector: from industrial leaders to knowledge workers, the sleepless body becomes proof of discipline and ambition.

Law’s uneven protection against fatigue

Legal structures rarely treat sleep as a right. The Supreme Court’s Lochner decision (1905) struck down labor-hour limits for men as infringements on contract freedom. When reformers argued maternal protection instead, they won only gendered exceptions (Muller v. Oregon, 1908). Public safety laws—for railroad crews or pilots—offered the few durable limits, but worker health alone remained unregulated. Later, New Deal policies substituted overtime pay for strict caps, leaving work-time largely negotiable, not biologically constrained.

Race, gender, and dignity within deprivation

Sleep deprivation mirrors social hierarchy. Pullman porters—Black men serving white passengers—were forced to function as custodians of others’ rest while being denied their own. Their union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, reframed rest as a matter of dignity and safety. Similarly, women’s early protections were later stripped in the name of equality, exposing them to male schedules without relief from domestic duties. What emerged is an unspoken expectation: your value depends on your endurance, not your well-being.

Industrial and transportation case studies

Steelworkers in the early twentieth century lived the “long turn”—a twenty-four-hour shift within a twelve-hour day regime. Their bodies were sites of mechanical fatigue, where reform reduced extremes but never cured the fundamental disruption. Truckers later repeated the pattern: balancing independence, stimulants, and thinly enforced rules. From Pullman sleepers to highways, each system converts biological vulnerability into economic flexibility.

The slow awakening of science and the limits of action

Sleep science eventually recognized fatigue as disease, with Nathaniel Kleitman’s circadian research and later works from Eyvind Thiis-Evensen and Merrill Mitler proving health harm. Yet agencies like OSHA and NIOSH struggled to translate knowledge into rules. Disasters—from Three Mile Island to the Libby Zion case—periodically reignited concern, but policy remained piecemeal and reactive. Even today, regulation prioritizes accident prevention over worker health, missing the larger biological and social costs.

A hidden conclusion

The book shows that sleep deprivation is not an individual failure. It is the result of cultural heroism, legal gaps, labor structures, and scientific inertia—all converging to make sleeplessness both profitable and socially rewarded. Real reform would require redefining sleep as a collective right and reimagining work around biological limits rather than market myths.

You’re taught that working late means strength. This section exposes how masculine virtue and performance culture turn sleeplessness into social currency. Edison’s public schedule, Lindbergh’s pilot endurance, and Trump’s bragging create a genealogy of sleep denial as success story. Psychologists and management experts amplify the myth with pseudo-scientific ideas like ‘sleep efficiency’ and ‘strategic napping,’ implying the disciplined capitalist can transcend biology.

Gendered double standards

You notice that women were told quite the opposite: sleep equals beauty, virtue, and maternal strength. Media outlets like Ladies’ Home Journal promoted “rest for refinement.” But as women entered managerial worlds, they inherited male norms—working long hours while maintaining domestic labor. This cultural shift exposed women to the same sleep loss once glorified in men, without corresponding freedom from household obligations. (Note: This mirrors Arlie Hochschild’s ‘second shift’ thesis.)

Sleep as moral measure

Over centuries, the moral language around rest equates productivity with virtue and idleness with sin. You internalize this as ambition. The result is a society that confuses sleeplessness with excellence, rewarding visible exhaustion in executives and entrepreneurs while punishing rest as indulgence. Once embedded, these ideals shape everything—from hiring decisions to how success is depicted in film and political biography.

When you search for legal protection against exhaustion, you find thin cover. American labor and safety law evolved around individual contract freedom rather than collective health. The Supreme Court’s Lochner decision made long hours a private affair, while gendered rulings like Muller v. Oregon created temporary exceptions in the name of maternal welfare.

Patchwork governance

Railroads and aviation saw limits because fatigue endangered others; factory and office work did not. The Hours of Service Act (1907) capped train duty; the Seamen’s Act (1915) did the same at sea. Yet even the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 preferred overtime pay to absolute ceilings. Regulation focused on wages and accidents, not circadian integrity or recovery. OSHA’s later rise brought hope, but fatigue remained outside its clear jurisdiction—categorized as too ambiguous to regulate.

Political ideology and public choice

Freedom-of-contract ideals and political fear of ‘nanny state’ interference made sleep ungovernable. Law protects you only if your fatigue threatens others, not yourself. Thus, underregulation becomes the norm: fragmented, reactive, and gendered. Sleep remains legally invisible despite its measurable social harm.

Steelworkers illustrate how production cycles rewrite human rhythms. The 'long turn'—a 24-hour shift bridging weekly rotations—forced men into circadian chaos. After unions collapsed in the 1890s, management imposed 12-hour days across continuous-process furnaces, treating time as flexible commodity rather than biological necessity.

Human costs and reform

Investigations by John Fitch and Margaret Byington during the Pittsburgh Survey documented workers sleeping in shared beds, wheelbarrows, or on factory floors. Progressive reformers described them as 'old at forty.' When change came in the 1920s—after moral appeals met efficiency arguments—it was justified through productivity, not compassion. U.S. Steel eventually ended the long turn but maintained rotating shifts that continued to distort sleep patterns.

Key lesson

Industrial history proves that partial reforms can sanitize but not solve systemic fatigue when technology and profit rely on around-the-clock labor.

The Pullman porters’ story reveals how race defines who sleeps and who serves. African American attendants were tasked with guarding white passengers’ rest, while their own sleep was treated as expendable. They lived under paternalistic discipline that counted miles rather than hours, enabling 400-hour months and back-to-back trips.

Union resistance and dignity

A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters reframed fatigue as racial injustice. Their 1930s negotiations turned hours and rest into contract language—replacing vague ‘sleep allowances’ with enforceable minima and campaigning for decent sleeping spaces. Each victory, from the 1937 agreement to later caps on service hours, demonstrated how rest could serve as a civil-rights claim.

Underlying message

Sleep isn’t only medical—it’s political. To be denied rest is to be denied status, safety, and equal citizenship.

If any modern occupation makes insomnia structural, it’s trucking. Independent drivers and weak regulation create a system where sleeplessness is a survival tactic. Starting in the 1930s, attempts to cap hours collided with economic pressure and cultural myths of independence.

Regulatory evolution and endurance culture

The ICC’s 1937 ‘hours-of-service’ rules allowed up to 15 hours on duty daily and treated ordinary drowsiness as legally acceptable. Evidence collected by safety advocates like Joseph Eastman and R.W. Snow showed clear accident correlation, yet regulators framed fatigue as voluntary rather than structural. Public Health Service studies chased physiological markers rather than real-world rest-data, avoiding definitive limits. Later, deregulation in 1980 eroded union oversight further, leaving today’s truckers caught between survival economics and circadian breakdown.

Enduring pattern

Industry treats alertness as commodity and regulation as optional. The highway landscape becomes a rolling laboratory for systemic fatigue dressed up as economic freedom.

Labor organizations both shielded and failed workers’ sleep. The Teamsters initially defended rest—requiring two drivers for long runs and forbid forced cab-sleeping—but wartime demands and deregulation diluted their stance. By the 1960s, union contracts omitted hour limits, tacitly accepting overwork as inevitable.

Pullman Porters as counterexample

Unlike many peers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters insisted rest was dignity. Through A. Philip Randolph and Milton Webster, they made fatigue part of labor and civil-rights rhetoric. Their endurance proved unions could redefine rest as justice rather than productivity tool.

Racial contradictions within labor

The Teamsters’ own racism—blocking Black drivers from safer long-haul work—reveals how exclusion often accompanied reform. Sleep, like freedom, wasn’t equally distributed.

Scientific breakthroughs proved fatigue’s harm long before policy did. Nathaniel Kleitman’s circadian studies in 1939, Paul Mott’s research in the 1960s, and later Merrill Mitler’s sleep-lab results all confirmed that disrupted rhythms cause measurable bodily damage. Yet translating evidence into regulation proved glacial.

Agency inertia

NIOSH symposia and OSHA proposals in the 1970s–80s emphasized fatigue but lacked enforcement authority. After crises—Three Mile Island, Challenger, Exxon Valdez—Congress briefly discussed hours reform, but complexity and lobbying froze change. Even medical education reform after the Libby Zion case shows how action happens only when outrage combines with clear institutional blame.

Chronobiology versus bureaucracy

Scientific consensus demands 24-hour scheduling aligned with human biology. Yet ICC’s 18-hour rule and later FMCSA concessions ignored rhythm entirely. The result is the paradox of modern safety: knowledge grows, but policy remains narrow, reactive, and industry-shaped.

From mid-century onward, stimulants compensate for institutional failure. Amphetamines—Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Methedrine—circulated through truck stops as silent tools of endurance. Wartime supply chains and tolerant enforcement fostered dependence among drivers trying to meet impossible schedules.

Investigations and denial

FDA inspectors like Robert Palmer documented five-day runs with mere hours of sleep. Despite such evidence, ICC refused to tighten hours. Industry materials treated drug use as driver moral flaw, not structural symptom. Enforcement rarely followed.

Core cycle

Stimulants sustain overwork, barbiturates attempt recovery, and bodies oscillate between artificial wakefulness and failed rest—a mechanical imitation of Edison’s hero myth turned pharmaceutical.

Gender politics transformed but never equalized rest. Early protections for women used maternal logic to justify shorter hours and night-work bans. As equality laws advanced, these specific protections vanished without compensation for unequal domestic responsibility.

From fragility to endurance

Title VII rulings in 1969 eliminated gendered laws, enabling women to work sleepless shifts once reserved for men. But cultural expectations of endurance transferred to them too—producing a dual burden. Media icons like Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart embody the new version: feminine success expressed through self-imposed sleeplessness.

The unfinished balance

You see a paradox: formal equality increased work strain because domestic divisions persisted. In the sleep economy, liberation often meant fatigue without freedom.

Solutions exist—but they demand reimagining rest as collective right. Napping policies, fair scheduling, and technological enforcement can alleviate harm if combined with legal and cultural shifts.

Workplace and union strategies

Military and NASA research show controlled naps restore alertness. Employers that institutionalize nap rooms or timed breaks—such as initiatives modeled on Arianna Huffington’s advocacy—demonstrate measurable safety gains. Unions can enforce rest facilities and schedule design, resisting the normalization of overwork.

Policy reforms

Statutory workweek limits, electronic log enforcement, and national recognition of rest-day rights could align law with biology. NIOSH proposes integrating epidemiological data and economic incentives, showing feasible paths. To fix the deep roots of sleeplessness, you need multi-level action: cultural, regulatory, and organizational.

Final truth

Sleep becomes political only when society admits exhaustion is structural, not personal. Redefining rest as a shared human right would undo centuries of treating fatigue as proof of worth.