Tired? Overworked? Increasingly disillusioned with a system hellbent on wringing every drop of productivity from you while remunerating you as little as possible?

Then why not try a coffee nap?

A popular #lifehack that first entered the public consciousness in the mid-90s, the coffee nap is, as the name suggests, drinking a coffee then having a nap.

But not too long of a nap, mind you, somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, or just long enough to rest your eyes and forget about the crushing reality of your economic servitude.

As countless online articles have noted, coffee naps, aka the "Bulletproof Power Nap", are not only a "mum's new best friend", they also "just might change your life". Or as this particularly uninspired headline states: "Coffee naps are a thing. Science says so."

The ground-breaking insight here is that the combination of sleep and caffeine makes you more alert … quelle surprise!

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Now, as an avid advocate of the NASA nap during my undergraduate years, I cannot deride fans of the "nappuccino'' (except for highlighting that they call it a "nappuccino").

But just as my slumberous stop-gap could not overcome cramming an entire semester's work into a handful of sleepless nights, so the coffee nap cannot tackle the problem it is attempting to address.

A nappuccino won't save you

Sure, a "nappuccino" might get you through your "3:30-itis" but its very existence is symptomatic of an insidious problem.

It's no longer enough to just rest from our total mental and physical exhaustion — now we also have to drug ourselves while doing it.

That "optimising" your sleep has been so blithely accepted makes you wonder: why do we feel compelled to suppress our natural circadian rhythms?

Why are we attempting to stifle a bodily function we have experienced for millennia?

Because overwork is a thing. Society says so.

We've drunk the coffee-flavoured Kool Aid

Australians are working an average of 312 hours (or the equivalent of eight working weeks) of unpaid overtime annually. This pervasive, socially-sanctioned "time theft" totals $106 billion of work given to employers every year.

And unfortunately, we can't simply blame the fat cats, for we have drunk the coffee-flavoured Kool Aid ourselves.

As Buzzfeed's Anne Helen Petersen pointed out in a viral essay earlier this year, the increasingly precarious nature of work has compelled us to "optimise ourselves to be the very best workers possible".

This optimisation isn't confined to our professional lives, it has infiltrated our personal lives as well.

"Performative workaholism'' is entrenched in our collective psyche, from our "personal brands" to hustle culture and #TGIM (#ThankGodItsMonday).

That health insurance company Aetna felt it necessary to pay employees to sleep shows just how endemic this cult of overwork has become.

'Thank god it's Monday', said no-one

Ergomania may be a global phenomenon but we are among the worst offenders: Australia ranks toward the bottom in terms of work-life balance in the OECD.

We're working an average six hours of unpaid labour each week, up from 5.1 hours in 2017 and 4.2 in 2016.

Work has historically been viewed as a tedious necessity — convincing people to leave on time shouldn't be this difficult.

But our obsession with work shows how a neoliberal philosophy has crept into every facet of our lives. As Elon Musk puts it: "nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week." Except for the union movement, which changed the world by introducing the 40-hour week.

Is it any wonder we can't sleep at night?

There's no discounting the immense pressures being applied to workers.

It might seem sensationalist to talk of a dystopian future where employers monitor individual workers' productivity, until you realise that is happening in China right now.

And it's not limited to the People's Republic of Citizen Surveillance, just ask the workers in Amazon's Melbourne warehouse whose productivity is timed to the second, and who complain their employers resent that they're not robots.

Corporations have always prioritised profit over people and no amount of nappuccinos will make that easier to swallow.

While living costs and corporate profits have surged, we've only banked, on average, an extra $2.50 per week over the past seven years. And analysts say that's unlikely to change for at least a decade. As we work longer and longer hours just to keep up, is it any wonder we can't sleep at night?

"Sleep debt" affects 40 per cent of Australians, with one in five adults experiencing reduced workplace productivity.

A 2017 Deloitte study put the cost at more than $66 billion annually. But the very fact we are quantifying the financial cost of inadequate sleep shows the dehumanisation of workers.

Putting aside the increased risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression, more than one Australian dies each day from falling asleep at the wheel or in industrial accidents.

Society demands we dedicate our lives to our careers, and we are paying the ultimate price.

I'd originally intended to have a coffee nap as research for this article — like some milquetoast homage to the drug-addled gonzo journalism of yore.

But as I thought about stagnant wage growth, inhumane working conditions and the belligerent, neoliberal drumbeat of ever-greater productivity, I realised I was far, far too tired.

Jack Gow is a comedian and writer.

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