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o the list of #firstworldproblems American elites are unnecessarily eager to solve, we can now add . . . sleep. The New York Times recently published a feature on the well-appointed bedroom of new-media doyenne Arianna Huffington. Sitting “like a very relaxed queen” on a “throne-like bergere chair covered in brocade Fortuny fabric” amid the Venetian plastered walls of her “vast apartment” in New York, Huffington held forth on her latest crusade: improving lives through improved slumber.

In a new book, Huffington calls sleeplessness “a specter haunting the industrialized world.” According to recent Gallup poll data she cites, “40 percent of all American adults are sleep-deprived.” Tethered to our electronic devices and fearful of losing our jobs, Huffington argues, we compromise rest for the sake of productivity and forget that sleep is (in Huffington’s rendering) the ultimate “performance enhancer.”

Huffington confesses that she once got by on very little sleep. These days, however, she practices a half-hour-long “transition to sleep ritual” that includes making entries in her gratitude journal, soaking by candlelight in a bath, and “changing into a silk nightgown to greet sleep with respect”—a respect that’s likely easier to muster when one lives in a lavish apartment in SoHo with expensively soundproofed windows. The Times describes Huffington’s home as “something between a papal chamber and the Oval Office.” For Huffington and her fellow elites, there is no need to pop a Tylenol PM (or something stronger) to eke out a few hours of rest between underpaying jobs. Sleep now comes to them as a restorative pause on their climb to success. Arianna even gave a TED talk on the subject. “Sleep your way to the top,” says the cross-stitched message on a pillow in her boudoir.

But lest you think the message for us proles is Let them eat Ambien, Huffington thinks we should all be enjoying better rest (even if, alas, we cannot all afford to do so on 1,000-thread-count organic cotton sheets). That is why she titled her book The Sleep Revolution, Bernie Sanders–style. And she knows just the social policies that should be enacted to ensure this happens. “A lot of things need to be done in terms of providing better jobs, in terms of increasing the minimum wage,” Huffington told New York magazine. Indeed, a recent study by the CDC revealed that the elite already enjoy more sleep than other groups: “Nobody sleeps better than white people,” NPR noted in their summary of the study. Part Marie Kondo, part Karl Marx (who himself lamented the lack of proletarian shut-eye in Das Kapital), Huffington and her ilk are calling for a restructuring of the workplace to bring better sleep to the masses.

Their cri de coeur harks back to a preindustrial age. A recent essay in the New York Times Magazine encouraged readers to consider embracing segmented sleep, which was evidently common in earlier eras when workers slept and woke with the natural rhythms of nature rather than the harsh dictates of capitalism. “In the preindustrial West, most people slept in two discrete blocks” of time during the night, the essayist noted, which freed them up for all kinds of good old-fashioned (non-capitalist) activities. “Having sex was popular,” the writer notes of this form of “polyphasic” sleep. “Benjamin Franklin liked to ‘take cold-air baths,’ a fancy way of saying ‘open his windows naked.’” And just like Arianna, “many people wrote in journals or interpreted dreams, which feel more proximate at 3 a.m. than in daylight.”

Huffington is not the first person to see in sleep a useful opening for a critique of capitalism.

Labor historian Alan Derickson’s 2013 book, Dangerously Sleepy, is about “Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness.” If Manly Wakefulness sounds like a Trump-inspired brand of multivitamin, you’re not far off; business tycoons are Derickson’s favorite villains, and he cites as evidence multiple statements in Trump’s business advice books where Trump claimed to sleep only 3 to 4 hours each night. In Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, Trump claims, “If you love what you are doing, you are probably not going to sleep more than three or four hours.” For her part, Huffington told NPR that Trump exhibits the hallmarks of sleep deprivation, including “difficulty processing information, paranoid tendencies, mood swings.”

A larger conspiracy against sleep is imagined by Columbia University professor Jonathan Crary. In his polemical book 24/7, he predicts a future ruled by avaricious employers who seek to maximize profit while minimizing workers’ opportunities for rest. In this No-Doz economy, “non-sleep products, when aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option,” he argues, “and eventually, for many, a necessity.” For Crary, sleep is the last bastion of resistance against the all-consuming power of capitalism. “The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of stimulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism,” he argues. Sleep is one of the few things that “cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability.”

Crary evidently hasn’t met today’s sleep activists. Huffington has launched several synergistic partnerships with corporations to promote her book, such as giving away access to her “sleep paradise” apartment for one night on Airbnb. According to New York magazine, the package includes a Greek dinner (not made by Arianna), a sleep consultation, and a hot bath. She’s encouraging “sleep fairs” at colleges, and she has joined forces with JetBlue to peddle her books in-flight. And then there’s K-Hole, the “art collective” that recently announced Slowave, which according to New York hopes to “rebrand sleep” as “an essential experience.” K-Hole’s sleep advocacy is done in “partnership” with Casper—a mattress company.

Huffington and her fellow advocates perform a neat trick. While critiquing capitalism (and employers) as the bad guys in the sleep world, they are commodifying their own message about improving sleep (and simultaneously calling on government to solve the supposedly systemic problems causing sleep deprivation). This is in keeping with our era’s unique style of self-improvement, which offers people “branded” strategies for self-management combined with intervention by the state to create the new, improved you.(Remember the Obama administration team that vowed to bureaucratize the behavioral “nudge”?)

Huffington notes that other cultures have words to describe death by overwork (such as karoshi in Japanese); in English we do not. What we do have is Twitter. And the Internet. And Game of Thrones. Left unsaid in all of these critiques of our sleep habits is the real reason so many of us aren’t dream-journaling and soaking in lavender-scented bathwater: We’re binge-watching our favorite TV shows and scrolling through Facebook—often at the same time, and very late into the night—instead. And we have capitalism to thank for that as well as for the fact that we do so in the comfort of homes that are far safer (from fire, pests, and the extremes of temperature and weather) than in earlier eras.

Elite theories about sleep deprivation are inadvertently funny—but not harmless. What can be declared a social problem can also be regulated, often badly (see the current transgender-bathroom-access fiasco for an example). “Problematizing” sleep invites greater scrutiny and regulation of a deeply private act: what you do in your bedroom at night with the lights off. Keep self-appointed sleep revolutionaries out of it.