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I’m Spending the Next Four Months In Variations of Sleep

On Capitalism, Spirituality, and Sleeping for the Foreseeable Future

I saw a photograph of an outdoor eating structure in New York City that had a roof and four walls. It was outdoors only in the sense that all buildings are outdoors, as in they are not inside other buildings. I’ve been thinking about it for hours. It reminded me of the pre-pandemic time in which I once heard someone suggest that it would be more efficient if shared Ubers, instead of driving around from house to house, just picked up riders at a pre-determined spot…a “stop” if you will. It took me a good ten seconds before it occurred to me that this person had just re-invented busses.

The notion of innovating and adapting, of trying to accomplish an end that satisfies competing and incompatible aims, only to arrive at an innovation that is just the original idea you threw away — this strikes me as uniquely human, and uniquely capitalist. Both of which are ways of saying uniquely stupid. And yet it is how we do. We are uniquely stupid sometimes, though I suppose if all of us do it then it’s not unique. We develop ways for produce to be inorganic, then we develop impressive ways to grow and sell organic foods. We turn childbirth into a medical emergency, then we make natural childbirth a luxury item. We cram ourselves into cities, then we capitalize sleeping under the sky into a wildly expensive, heavily fortified recreation. So much…