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Comment by Vox_Leone | Hacker News Reader

In our relentless quest for longevity and a richer life experience, one profound consideration emerges: the role of sleep in our daily lives. Sleep, which consumes approximately one-third of our existence, represents a significant barrier to maximizing our time and productivity. If we could find a safe way to eliminate the need for sleep, we would theoretically unlock vast reservoirs of hours previously devoted to rest, transforming them into opportunities for personal and societal advancement.

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> Sleep, which consumes approximately one-third of our existence, represents a significant barrier to maximizing our time and productivity.

"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." — Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky (1943)

That question was solved by social media.

I have a hard time imagining this will ever become a reality; the need for sleep is fairly deeply hard-coded in how our brains operate, and I believe it's also needed for some more basic cellular functions.

It's not binary I guess (sleep "once a week" is less than "sleep once a day"), but even some incremental improvements seem very far off.

One also has to wonder if it's actually desirable to have less sleep and be "on" with fewer or no breaks.

> If we could find a safe way to eliminate the need for sleep, we would theoretically unlock vast reservoirs of hours previously devoted to rest, transforming them into opportunities for personal and societal advancement.

While in practice, what would happen is that we’d be doing more of the same. Bosses would be demanding more time in the office, people would be spending more time doomscrolling, nothing would change. It’s a pipe dream to think that if we had more time in the day we’d suddenly start using it more respectfully and responsibly.

On the plus side, this would solve the housing problem too. Without the nuisance of sleep requirements we would move to the offices and live, ahem, produce there 24/7. Much like cattle.

This is the great future the visionary OP envisions for us.

we currently spend about half our waking hours during the day at work during the week. if we got those 8 hours of sleep back then presumably we would get 4 more hours of non-working awake time.

seems decent to me. I hate sleeping, the problem is i get tired and cant avoid it.

One of my favorite science fiction novels deals with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain

What a fascinating book series that I've never heard of. It looks like it sort of takes a middle ground between Le Guin and Rand?

It doesn't preach so much as it explores. The author strikes me as being more economically literate than Rand or LeGuin, but not as good a writer as the latter.

The real and staggering excellence of the series is the speculation - it's not such hard SF that it explains the mechanisms by which everything happens, and there are real characters who do more than stand as cardboard observers to technology, but it's crunchier than most.

Read the novella and skip the novel.

The current thinking is that Alzheimers and dementia are caused by the brain’s waste disposal system malfunctioning and results in an accumulation of proteins in the brain that damages a lot of important functions. This waste disposal only happens during sleep.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-the-brain-flus...

Not suggesting anyone try this but some people claim to sleep only two hours a day with this approach: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/polyphasic-s... "Uberman Sleep Schedule: Six 20-minute naps are spaced evenly throughout the day, totaling two hours of sleep per 24-hour period."

A book on sleep and how important it is to learning and health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep "Walker spent four years writing the book, in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia. ... The values of sleep and the consequences of sleep deprivation are also brought up in the book. One particular research conducted in the past, where people volunteered themselves to sleep for only six hours in a span of 10 nights, is brought up by Walker. This resulted in the volunteers being "cognitively impaired" along with their brains being heavily damaged, regardless of the three week eight-hour sleep schedule they received later."

Hopefully it doesn't go like the X files episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepless_(The_X-Files)

I'm all for getting rid of sleep, but given how society is structured I worry that the extra time will just end up being used for longer commutes and more zoom calls. Hardly advancement.

Have you ever considered that sleep can actually make your life richer in interesting experiences?

For some reason I would feel disappointed if sleep was a solved issue. I feel as though perhaps I need that daily break from being conscious for my own mental health.

Enter cocaine

Micro dosing cocaine might have positive impacts over long time periods.

We really don’t know and have made it nigh impossible to study. Obviously governments are trying to hide something.

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