A movement called Slowave aims to redefine the way we see sleep and rebrand sleep as an essential experience, according to New York magazine.
“A well-rested society is a healthier, more productive society,” Sean Monahan, member of K-Hole, the art collective who brought us normcore barely two years ago, said in an email. Monahan is the force behind a trend called Slowave, which he wrote about extensively (in partnership with mattress company Casper) on a site called SleepSleepSleepSleep. Slowave is a word-of-mouth movement that intends to rebrand sleep as “an essential experience rather than a dead loss.” Slowave is an opportunity to redefine and recalibrate the way we see sleep. Slowave wants to take back and demand more bedtime.
Monahan came to the idea as a result of his interest in the trend of polyphasic sleep, in which people sleep “in a series of short naps dispersed throughout the day, rather than one long spell at night.” “Slowave came out of a search for another answer to the question: What is the future of sleep?” he says. “We’ve tried eliminating sleep through drugs, hacking sleep through behavior modification regimens, and optimizing sleep through data collection, but all these responses seemed to presume that sleep itself was a problem.” People have begun treating sleep like a pest or an unnecessary nuisance; if only we could truly “hack” it to our whims, we could be free of it. Then we could optimize our daily lives, running on how ever many hours of dozing we deem absolutely necessary. Four? Three? Two? Sleep is the biggest thing getting in the way of pure, unadulterated productivity, after all.
So Slowave’s commitment to getting a good night’s rest feels like its own kind of radical act. When we’re all working so hard to try to reduce our need for sleep in order to stay more connected, be more active, live life more fully, the person who revels in a solid ten hours actually seems kind of punk. That person is a disciple of Slowave.
