What would you do if you didn't need to sleep? What would happen to the world, if our body wouldn't cry out for us to turn off our devices and hit the bed? First, FarCon would be far less taxing.
Joke aside, what would you do if you didn't have to sleep? I'm guessing you are mentally running down your long list of side-side projects and getting excited about the prospect of finally finishing them. Or you frenziedly opened your bucket list of travel destinations after realizing that not needing sleep = no jet lags. Imagine going from Token 2049 Dubai to FarCon-Tokyo to Consensus to ETHPrag without that dreary feeling of dislocation and head-in-the-clouds.
Doesn't it sound like the solution to all of our problems? Not needing to sleep means we gain a ton of hours. Well, six in my case. It has been 14 years, 3 months and 1 day that I'm trying to sleep more, but I'm unable to average more. But still, six more hours to complete work, to spend time with friends, to read books. That's a big chunk! It's a dream come true, isn't it?
It's a lie.
You gain the hours, but beyond time you gain nothing. You'll be worse off. You'll be doom scrolling more. You'll be procrastinating more. You'll end up accomplishing less in 24 hours than in the 16 hours or so you have now.
The answer to any problem isn't more, but better. Just ask any new parent who suddenly realize that with another human in the house, the lack of sleep and time forces them to prioritize. It's in the trade-offs that battles are won and lost, not in the abundance of resources.
By the way, check out what Naomi's wrote about silence. It inspired this post. Without sleep there would be no silence, no moments of reflection and pondering the choices we made.
