Seoul Holds Competitive Sleeping Event - Rest of World Jealous

SEOUL — Hundreds of South Koreans gathered beside the Han River on May 2 to participate in a city-sponsored competition requiring contestants to lie down and successfully go to sleep, officially transforming being fucking exhausted into an organized recreational activity.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government staged its third annual Power Nap Contest as part of the city’s spring Hangang River Festival. Participants gathered at Yeouido Hangang Park, where the city’s official festival schedule listed the sleep competition alongside outdoor libraries, kayaking, concerts and other activities normally performed while conscious.

Admission was free.

The sleep deprivation had already been paid for.

Organizers imposed several requirements on aspiring competitive sleepers. Contestants were instructed to arrive tired, arrive after eating and dress as either a sleeping beauty or sleeping prince, resulting in a riverside lawn populated by people wearing costumes while preparing to lose consciousness in public.

At least one participant arrived dressed as a Joseon Dynasty monarch.

Another wore an enormous koala onesie.

One participant photographed by Reuters wore a Minecraft costume, demonstrating that humanity has finally created an athletic event with an appropriate character-selection screen.

The contest began at 3 p.m.

Eye masks descended like racing flags.

Officials circulated among the sleepers measuring heart rates, looking for stable readings associated with deep, peaceful rest like the quietest pit crew ya ever done seen.

There are moments when bureaucracy achieves poetry. The East does it best.

A municipal employee crouching beside an unconscious man dressed as royalty and taking his pulse to determine whether he is winning sleep is one of them.

The event was comedic by design, but the exhaustion underneath it was very real.

Reuters described Seoul as a city of 24-hour shopping, intense competition and iced Americanos, and noted that South Korea remains among the more overworked and sleep-deprived members of the OECD.

Twenty-year-old university student Park Jun-seok told Reuters that exam preparation and part-time employment often leave him sleeping only three or four hours each night, supplemented by naps at his desk.

He entered the competition dressed as a king.

This is either whimsical civic culture or the opening scene of a workers’ uprising.

Twenty-four-year-old English teacher Yoo Mi-yeon, who said she struggles with insomnia, entered dressed as a koala in hopes of borrowing some of the animal’s legendary ability to sleep.

Humans once prayed to gods for rain.

Modern workers now dress as marsupials and request eight consecutive hours.

The competition’s winner was a man in his 80s.

Thirty-seven-year-old office worker Hwang Du-seong finished second after reporting that he was routinely exhausted from work, frequent night shifts and job-related driving. He said he had arrived determined to recharge beside the river.

Thus an octogenarian defeated a field of younger competitors in unconsciousness.

Experience matters.

The joke practically writes itself, but South Korea’s interest in public rest events reflects a serious national conversation about working culture, quality of life and the limits of productivity.

OECD statistics measure actual annual working hours across member economies, including regular hours, overtime and additional employment, because how long people work remains an important indicator of labor conditions and social wellbeing. The organization cautions that methodological differences make simplistic country-to-country rankings imperfect, but long working hours remain a major policy concern across industrialized economies.

That policy discussion becomes rather more tangible when several hundred citizens voluntarily enter a contest where the prize goes to whoever can become unconscious most successfully.

Industrial society has spent more than a century pursuing efficiency.

Machines became faster.

Communications became instantaneous.

Computers automated paperwork.

Smartphones eliminated the need to physically enter an office to receive work correspondence.

Humanity achieved the extraordinary technological ability to carry the office inside its pants at all times.

Somehow this did not produce more free time.

A mystery.

Instead, societies increasingly manufacture products and services designed to repair people just enough to return them to productivity: energy drinks to remain awake, sleep trackers to confirm they failed to sleep, meditation subscriptions to teach breathing, standing desks to compensate for sitting, noise machines to drown out the anxiety, smart watches to announce stress and an entire pharmaceutical industry standing nearby like:

“You want something for that?”

The Power Nap Contest takes this logic to its wonderfully absurd endpoint.

Rest itself becomes scheduled.

Organized.

Measured.

Scored.

Branded.

Hosted by the municipal government.

Sleep has finally entered the gig economy.

There is nevertheless something genuinely lovely about the event.

Hundreds of people gathered in a public park beside a river, deliberately stopped producing anything and collectively acknowledged that they were tired.

No networking.

No professional development.

No personal optimization.

No hustle.

For a little while, the correct thing to do was absolutely nothing.

And because modern civilization apparently requires formal authorization for that behavior, Seoul provided judges.

The oldest competitor won.

Everybody else got some sleep.

By contemporary standards, that may qualify as revolutionary.