The radio has been full of people going on about sleep & saying that we don't get enough and we all ought to go to bed earlier.
I've just worked out why I'm so bloody tired all the time.
It's not my fault. It's not because I go to bed late every night.
It is employment that does it. (and I mean employment , not work.) Just about everybody more or less works, some more than others. It is employment, being someone else's servant for money, that brings the clock into our biological cycles. Working hours are constrained by the needs of the employer, not the employee. They do not fit the ordinary natural human daily rythyms.
For as long as I can remember I have got out of bed too early every morning. Every day I want to stay in bed longer. Every day of my life (excepting alternate Saturdays - how's that for luxury?) I get up and I'm still tired. Actually I'm still tired on those days because it takes more than one day to get back to a natural sleep cycle.
I know what my natural sleep pattern is - every now and them I have no routine for a few days & I can allow my body to do what it needs to do. I get up late. I have a nap in the afternoon. I stay awake till the early hours of the morning. And every day is a little later than the day before. If I naturally wake up at 9 on Monday it will be 10 on Tuesday & 11 on Wednesday and so on, going to bed later each morning as well, until either I get right round the clock (takes over a fortnight & I have only done it once in my life because who has the time?) or else I have had a surfeit of sleep & I stay up all night one night, then go to bed early the next day. Say I have got into waking at 2 or later in the afternoon so my "afternoon nap" now falls at going on midnight - well I just turn that into a night's sleep & get up at 8 or 9 in the morning again.
That's my natural cycle. That's what I get to if I fall asleep when I am tired and get up when I am no longer tired. But it is completely incompatible with employment
It was the same at school - which is after all deliberatly designed to get people into the habits of reliable, efficient, and dutiful workers for their future bosses. Every day I was woken too early & had to drug myself awake with tea. Almost every day I was late to school. Going to bed earlier didn't help - I just lay awake or got up in the middle of the night. I still have the scars from when I nearly killed myself trying to light a fire at 3 in the morning when I was 9 years old. 3 months in hospital because I couldn;t sleep because I was sent to bed too early every day because I was tired in the morning.
I go to the office (late by most people's standards, I usually arrive between 9 & 10). For most of the morning I'm still waking up, its like jetlag. Every bloody day. Towards lunchtime I feel better. For an hour or so until the afternoon tiredness sets in.
So I sit there at my desk in the afternoon, staring out the window, falling asleep in my chair, feeling embarrassed and guilty because I am doing no work, I'm incapable of doing work, but I'm getting paid for it and people will laugh at me and think that I stayed up all night the night before (& why shouldn't I if I want to?) or that I've been boozing at lunchtime - but this still happens if I haven't touched a drop for a week. And the sleep muscle paralysis sets in so I can't even lift my hands to pretend to type on my keyboard and I'm sitting there, staring at the screen, trying to make sense of it, fugeing in and out between real sleep with its short term memory loss and that state half way between sleeping and waking where you know where you are and what you are hearing and seeing but you can't move or talk and sometimes dreams come in on the edges of perception and the place you are in is overlaid with a place in your mind like 2 films superimposed on each other - it's weird because if someone comes to talk to me, I snap out of it instantly & sometimes they can't even tell I'm asleep, even if the 'phone rings I can pick it up but it is almost impossible to move under my own volition, with no external stimulus. And you feel unpleasantly cold, even on hot days, and then you sweat and feel hot, And there is often completely inappropriate sexual arousal - the same as the so-called "piss hard-on" most men get in the morning which is nothing to do with urination but a side-effect of this near-sleep state. And I know I am asleep and it is so hard to wake up and I nod backwards or forwards and shut my eyes and jerk upright again and open them and I remember that some women's magazine told me that pulling your earlobes was the way to keep awake but I can hardly reach up to touch them, my hands feel numb and my head feels heavy...
If life was designed around our own needs and not the convenience of commerce then all this wouldn't be a problem. I'd just have a nap, a siesta. Most days, if I get enough sleep in the night, I would wake up after about 20 to 40 minutes and feel fine. If I hadn't had enough sleep in the night, I might sleep an entire sleep cycle, 3-4 hours. But that's alright because that time is taken off the time you need to sleep the next night. And if I could siesta I could enjoy those dreams and images and arousals. I could let them flow, learn from them
But you can't do this if you are employed. You are someone else's servant.
Then, more quickly than it came, it goes. This is the best time of the day for work, I'm on the ball, I'm interested, I've finally remembered what it was that I was meant to be doing that day, I can program, I can write. But it's 4pm already and other people are starting to leave already. If it's a day I'm fetching Abigail from school I'll have left already. Sooner or later, I leave. If it is a college night, sooner, maybe 5pm. If not I might stay till 8 or 9m catching up on work missed in the day or (lets be honest) reading web sites or teaching myself new programming techniques or printing stuff that's nothing to do with work.
And then I get home - or more likely I go out, I go to college, I go out - anyway I get home & it is late. Never before 7pm, rarely before 8pm, usually 10pm or so. I want to eat - I want to cook - cooking is fun - that takes an hour or so. I want a bath. I want to put my feet up & watch a film. I want to read. I want to write these web pages. I want to get on with college work. I want to do the daily reading from the Bible. I want to go to the pub. I want to start that novel I never wrote. You can't do all those things between 9pm and 11pm The sensible good-little-boy thing to do would be to go to bed. But I don't want to go to bed at 10 or 11 pm, I don't need to go to bed at 10 or 11 pm, I don't have time to go to bed at 10 or 11 pm - all day I've been doing institutional things, things for other people, now I want to do what I want to do. Anyway, I'd never sleep at 10 or 11. And even at 12 or 1 when I'm tired again - like I am now - I still don't want to go to bed. Going to bed is boring, it is much more fun to stay up.
So most of the things I want to do don't get done, never mind the things I don't really want to do. The flat never gets tidied, the shelves never get put up, the garden never gets dug, the tax forms don't get filled in, the bills don't get paid, the shopping doesn't get bought. All those regular routine duties are squeezed into about one Saturday afternoon a month. Most weekdays I am at work or I am at college or I am getting on with something more fun or I am just too knackered to do those sorts of things. Most evenings I couldn't do them - they are below the threshold of arousal needed to keep me awake.It's not the number of hours you need to sleep in a day, it's the cycles. Everyone is different. But the pattern demanded by employers suits almost no-one
It is so ingrained into us, this habit of employment. We fantasise about working for ourselves, about jacking in the job, but that hardly helps. Our friends who call themselves "freelance" advise us to follow them - but they are usually no better off (except financially). Most of these contractors & consultants who say they are working for themselves, who claim to be "self-employed" are speaking nonsense! They are employed, temporarily by the same big organisations that employ most the rest of us. They aren't working on their own account, they aren't working their own hours, the only difference is they are on a fixed term contract & calculate their own tax payments. (And they get paid more). They actually usually have to turn up for longer hours than the permies!
Now we are all supposed to be wage slaves why do we call someone who doesn't work for a wage "self employed"? And what sort of a word is "self employed" anyway? As if employment, being someone else's servant for money, was the normal condition of life & anyone who isn't employed, anyone who isn't a servant, has to have some sort of excuse. In slavery times we didn't call free men "self owned". When someone is released from prison we don't say they become "self jailed". So why "self employed"?
And working in a small company doesn't help much either. The smaller the company the smaller the buffer, there is actually less flexibility for taking time off when you are sick or your kids are sick or you really need to be at home because someone is coming to install or deliver something (if they ever turn up, of course) because there are fewer people to step in & do the work you would have done. And in a smaller organisation the random loss of business or production from sick leave & so on has a perceptible effect.
And why is it called "taking time off"? As if time was a substance that could be taken or left, bought or sold, as if it was owned by the bosses and owners and you had to take it, to steal it, to remove it from them in order to use it for yourself.
The way we live now doesn't support our basic needs.
OK, for millions of people it doesn't even supply enough food. But I'm talking about the rich here, us boring office workers in our boring offices. We work so hard (& most of us do - although not nearly as hard as people in shops or farms) to get the things we need or want but we can't supply ourselves with the most basic neccesities. We all know that employment as it is practiced denies millions decent human companionship, affection, respect. Those are other rants
But it also denies such simple biological needs as sleep.
And then the BLOODY GOVERNMENT GOES AND PASSES A LAW TO MAKE US ALL GET UP AN HOUR EARLIER IN THE SUMMER! WHAT THE HELL HAS IT GOT TO DO WITH THEM?
Oh god I'm tired.