I have a confession to make. I have never watched Game of Thrones. Not a single episode. I have never read the books either.
Every time it comes up, people look at me as if I had just admitted I don’t own a fridge.
For years the series was everywhere: in meetings, at dinners, in memes, in the tired eyes of colleagues who had stayed up far too late the night before. Even South Park gave it a three-episode arc (that one I did watch, by the way). And every time a reference flew over my head, I felt a small pang of failure. As if everyone else had attended a class I had skipped, and the exam was every single conversation.
Missing Game of Thrones, I later realised, is part of a much bigger game.
In 2017, Reed Hastings, then CEO of Netflix, was asked about the competition. His answer was simple, and a little unsettling: “We’re competing with sleep.”
I keep coming back to that line, because it says out loud what most of us already feel. Our evenings have become a contest, and the prize is our time.
The funny thing is that I am a terrible candidate for saying no. I have a voracious side when it comes to books, concerts and art. I sat my final high school exam after an all-nighter at a Springsteen concert. I studied for university exams in railway stations and on trains. I have finished books at two in the morning because stopping one chapter before the end felt like a small betrayal. When everything looks worth it, time becomes the scarcest thing you own.
The turning point was my master’s year. Getting into Harvard was one thing. Getting out of it alive, with my approach to life, was another. I had to choose.
During that LL.M. year, I went to the cinema exactly once. Spectre, the James Bond film, on a cold evening with a bunch of friends, followed by cheeseburgers and fries. I remember walking out and doing the maths: it was the first film I had seen in months. It would also be the last for many more.
That year I missed series, releases, films, and every book outside my programme. It was a choice, and it had a price.
It also taught me what some people call vitamin N. N for No. (Others say N stands for Nature, which also works, but that is another post.)
Saying no is supposed to be healthy, and it probably is. What nobody tells you is that it sucks. It sucks to decline the dinner, to skip the concert, to be the only one at the table who does not get the joke about dragons. Every no is a small door you close, and you rarely find out what was behind it.
And when we refuse to close those doors, the bill usually lands on the night.
It is one in the morning. The day was full, the inbox is still not empty, and there is a book on the nightstand looking at me. Next to it, the laptop is open on a series everyone keeps telling me I have to watch. One more chapter. Then that article I saved last week. Then maybe just the first episode, so I can finally join the conversation. I am not staying up because I am having fun. I am staying up because I feel late on everything, as if sleep were a debt I could always pay later.
It turns out there is a name for this: “revenge bedtime procrastination”. The expression comes from China, and it describes the habit of staying up late, against all good sense, to take back some time after days that belong to everyone else. My version simply comes with more guilt.
Hastings was right, just not only about Netflix. Sleep is also the rival of my reading list, my inbox and my constant sense of being behind. Which might be the best argument in its favour.
Some nights I still lose. The chapter wins, the clock wins, and the next morning I pay the bill with interest.
Most of the time, though, I have made a kind of peace with it. I will probably never know who ends up on the Iron Throne. I miss references, I miss jokes, I miss the occasional cultural moment that everyone else seems to share.
I lose the plot of a few series. Fair enough. But I keep the plot of my own days. Not a bad deal…
