If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.”

In a society dominated by the values of consumer capitalism, “sleep is a big problem,” he told me. “If you’re asleep, you’re not spending money, so you’re not consuming anything. You’re not producing any products.”