Baofuxing Aoye: Procrastinating Bedtime for Revenge- Chinese
Is sleep the black sheep we need to get harsh on? When the guilty are actually out there on the loose...
Sufism and mysticism, which represent Rumi's tradition, believe that sleep is a stage in which a person's soul leaves the body and watches themselves from the outside, identical to death.
Sleep is the closest we come to death.
A regular disappearance. A threatening frequency of journeys into the waters of the unknown.
When we sleep, we are drown in our subconscious mind, which functions like an entity independent of us. In the morning, after all we’ve lived a night long, we awake as if we have just returned from our second life, the night ride. Who literally knows what happens each and every night?
Sleep is not a part of our act of living; how can it be? We have the least control over life when lying down unconscious, as if we pass the reigns of our willpower to another unknown force, even while we breathlessly struggle to make the most of our unique resource: time.
We strive to live the fullest life possible. Living by doing. Feeling, acting, affecting and being affected, thinking, and running. This is what our soul needs, and naturally, we tend to confront anyone who seeks to take away our minutes.
We procrastinate sleeping because we don’t want to procrastinate life.
Not only do we sleep, but there are also more competitive activities to devour our time. The most eager occupier is "work,” where we spend almost half of our lifetime. Not only physically spent time at work but "living to work," spending every awake moment thinking about work, coping with work-related psychological challenges and contradictions, and possible alternatives of the current life. Putting work at the top of your life and whirling around it as if it’s your sun. This is how most of humanity experiences life today.
The anti-humanist work order is the biggest thief with its toxic work culture, whose poisonous influence cannot be mitigated by happy hours, team activities, and the like, and it is the sinister exploiter of almost all of our time.
In terms of extreme work, Far Eastern culture is undoubtedly merciless. Being ultra-productive is above all else in this culture, which skillfully keeps a thousand contradictions alive in parallel. There are many words that, like Karoshi, do not have a good reputation in this regard. One of them is Baofuxing Aoye.
This word, which you've probably heard before, means taking revenge by sleeping late at night, delaying going to bed, and shortening sleep time as much as possible, even if you have to get up early the next day. Not only because sleep steals hours from our lives, but also because sleep is the so-called time consumer we have relative control over. So you don’t sleep on time, instead, you do whatever you weren’t allowed to do during the day even if you wanted so much.
We cannot steal time from work; we are not allowed to take revenge on it. We're not allowed to, nor do we have the power to. But sleep is our domain. If you don't perform poorly at work, no one cares about your sleep. Even if you are slowly killing yourself by sleeping half an hour a day while you are still productive, go ahead. If possible, don't sleep at all.
I observe that whatever is annoying about life, whatever gnaws at us, somehow touches the toxic work order. I personally don't desire to write about work anymore, as if it’s the only subject in the world. But not writing about work life and avoiding thinking about it is like ignoring the huge elephant in the small room but looking at the butterflies happily playing around.
If, as many social scientists argue, the political and social stage we have reached in the world strongly forces a change in the world order—in other words, if a new world order is to be established in some way, "human work" and "production" concepts must be reshaped.
The cure is obvious yet not easy to reach.
Being conscious of ourselves as well as our surroundings and living in search of balance is what we desperately need.
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Have a great week. Take care of your time; don't let anyone steal it from you. Not sleep, not anyone else.
Till next week,
— Gulsun