We're All Doomed: We're Going To Keep Ourselves Awake To Death

I’m a digital native and I don’t sleep much anymore and those two things are absolutely related.

I live on the internet, I’ve grown up on it. I was using a dial-up connection via my monthly Earthlink subscription to steal mp3s off Kazaa, only to discover the songs I downloaded didn’t fit on a floppy disk. In 6th grade I built a Sonic The Hedgehog fan site on Geocities, and you can bet your goddamn bottom dollar that it was the best damn Sonic the Hedgehog fan site this side of the Internet. In 7th grade I would make anime music videos on Windows Movie Maker and put them on Kazaa. Ever see one of Kingdom Hearts set to “Little Things” by Good Charlotte? That was me.

I love the internet. I think it’s a magical, beautiful place powered by people that are like me: hyperactive, cynical, and mean-spirited, but also people who can appreciate a good cat here and there.

But the internet doesn’t really sleep. And the people who rely on it for their livelihoods (most people nowadays) don’t really sleep either.

Sleeplessness is probably the most common side-effect of being on the internet too much. There are others sure, like a general wearing down of sensibilities that begins to happen once you really, truly immerse yourself in online culture. In a way, the internet is an epically large, digital collective consciousness full of every human thought all at once. There’s going to be some gross stuff in there. Like a lot of gross stuff. Mostly gross stuff. Reddit’s Spacedicks or 4chan’s /b/ board are just digital equivalents of looking at an old woman on the subway and accidentally wondering what she looks like naked. Everyone does it. Right?

The internet also makes you feel a little detached too. It makes you a voyeur, sure. But it also kind of makes you an asshole. For instance, while writing this column, I took a break to make this:

Why did I do that? Why did I think that was a necessary and important use of my time? Sometimes I get drunk and force people to watch Mr. Hands, the video where a guy let’s a horse mount and have sex with him. And that’s not even the darkest part. It’s reported (by whom, I have no idea) that the intrepid Mr. Hands died a few days later from a ruptured anus, which he was too embarrassed to go to the hospital for. Which is completely reasonable if you ask me. Talking to doctors can be awkward.

These are things I know about only from spending the last decade of my life staying up late on the internet. And I’m very worried, as I typically am, about the future of the human race because nobody sleeps anymore and everyone uses the internet. And that’s a future where everyone could end up like me. And that’s a future that I don’t want to live in.

In high school a friend of mine told me something his dad said that has always stuck with me. His dad says to him he says, “sleep is the new sex, everyone wants it and no one can get enough of it.” And it’s true. I’d much rather sleep than have sex most nights, that is unless there’s some kind of device that allows me to have crazy, acrobatic sex while being completely asleep. Also, chicken wings would have to be factored in there somehow. And it’d be cool if it could all take place on a motorcycle or something.

Anyway, here’s a list, in no particular order, of the things people are doing to keep from falling asleep.

• Adderall – Great stuff. I’ve messed with this bad boy a few times, most recently, instead of getting any work done, I just stayed up all night drawing out a graph of the plot to the movie Die Hard. Also, it no longer is believed to cause sudden death, so let’s all just take this stuff forever, shall we?
• Breathable caffeine.
• The military is making caffeinated beef jerky.
• Gamer Food – a brand of high energy peanuts made specifically for staying awake through marathon gaming sessions. Oh, unrelated, but I guess kind of related, this guy played so much Starcraft in one sitting that he actually died.
• Whatever new and terrifyingly amazing follow-up the FOUR Loko guys have cooking.
• And good old fashioned energy drinks, which apparently aren’t universally considered Italian-American nightclub promoter fuel. Who knew?

We’re rapidly hurtling towards a future where our sleep schedules aren’t going to get better, they’re going to get way worse. We’ll either become cracked-out supermen or brain dead meme-zombies. Let’s take a trip down scenarios lane.

We’re all highly-caffeinated, amphetamine-fueled supermen, like some kind of mildly-hallucinatory Randian nightmare race of obsessively tweaked out business-monsters. This is the good future by the way. We design beautiful works of technological might and travel the universe on coffee bean and crystal meth powered spaceships, politely shaking hands with our relatives because the drugs we’re all on make it impossible to express love.

We’re all highly-caffeinated, amphetamine-fueled goblins, who look like H.R. Giger-esque monstrosities: pale white, sun-deprived techno-zombies that stay up for weeks on end, constantly feeding data into machines that thoughtlessly run the world. Our hands, from years of over-use on keyboards, have curled inwardly, resembling vulture-claws. We regurgitate cultural detritus that we find on the Internet, emailing and pinging each other with random, meaningless images. Our currency is a picture of the rapper Xibit riding a cat that’s riding a cat. Rebecca Black is president because it’s hilarious. And worse yet, everyone shops at Peapod. On the bright side, they bring back the original FOUR Loko. So things aren’t so bad.

I need to take a nap.

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