Fascinating stuff. Reminds me of the decreased sleep need associated with hypomania—something attributed to historical figures like Alexander Hamilton or contemporary ones like Elon Musk. I wonder if there’s a shared neurobiological mechanism here, perhaps involving orexin pathways. If so, exploring this overlap might unlock even more interesting avenues for research and therapies.

If they could capture the energy and joy from hypomania without the disconnect from reality they'd have a winner.

I've always thought there's a third variable: something causes the lack of sleep, and the lack of sleep causes mania. Disturbed sleeping causes a wide variety of different psych symptoms in different people. An acquaintance was almost committed for schizophrenia - but sleeping pills fixed the night horrors and they avoided commital.

I both want and worry about this. I genuinely hope this does not become as effectively mandatory as having a smartphone.

I had a similar discussion, half-jokingly, about a legal ban on coffee in workplaces. Drinking it is optional, but non drinkers get disadvantaged and really need to join to keep up.

Why? Coffee is nowhere near effective once you're taking it everyday.

There is a social aspect. I think there was a Friends episode where one of the characters got left out of business advancement because she didn't smoke cigarettes and wasn't in the smoking area socializing with the boss and another employee was.

Can’t you just drink something else?

Nope, it's not the same. Different vibe.

What about decaf, who would know?

I really hope that this eventually becomes a thing but I am super sad that it won't any time soon. It really sucks to learn that some lucky people just don't need nearly as much sleep and that I'm just not one of those lucky people and will never be able to achieve that.

If everyone gets it, no one is lucky. It becomes the new normal. It could make the world a lot worse in many ways.

Perhaps. Technology, instead of giving us more free time, caused us just to fill that free time with different work.

> Technology, instead of giving us more free time, caused us just to fill that free time with different work

Technology gave us more free time. It also gave us more things to do with that time. You don't need more than a few tens of thousands of dollars of savings to basically retire somewhere remote-ish and live a 19th-century lifestyle. Most of us don't do it because want air travel and internet and modern medicines.

And the free work we do is exactly for the platforms dominating us, we do all the curation of data for their machine learning to train on, getting paid in scraps of dopamine to get addicted and perpetually perform work on data.

Data is the new oil, just better since there's a never-ending cycle of creating more of it.

Absolutely, it would mean 16 hour work days for everyone.

I do not like having to sleep so much. I understand the argument that it could become normalized like e.g. caffeine, but I personally would like to spend closer to the third of my life that is considered "normal" than to the half or over-half of my life that sleep currently seems to be.

Excellent, now we can justify working more hours per day because our employees need less sleep!