Light sleep

Today is a milestone in my personal history: I got paid for doing nothing!

Before my work-life came to a sudden end, I had a schedule, which, according to a few, was regimented.  "Live a little," people told me. 

In that schedule, I typically woke up at about 5:30, which prompted a former neighbor with whom I ceased interactions more than four years ago to ask me why I woke up that early as if I had cows to milk.

Now that I get paid for doing nothing, 5:30 is no longer a target.

It does not mean that I sleep for many more hours than I did in the past.  No siestas either.

I wish I slept like a baby.  Well into middle-age means that I no longer sleep for seven or eight continuous hours, unlike when I was younger when no amount of caffeine nor noise could keep me awake.

Decades ago, during the wedding of a cousin (who tragically died young,) a much younger cousin, who was perhaps five or six years old then, fell asleep while seated right next to the thundering thavil.  An older uncle commented jealously about the kid sleeping in that noisy setting. Only now do I truly understand his feelings!

But did adults always have uninterrupted sleep?  As I noted in this post more than six years ago, there is plenty of evidence that people had segmented sleep.

The forgotten practice of ‘segmented sleep’, memorably described by the historian A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Night-time (2005), meant that people generally slept at night in two equal intervals, spending up to two hours awake between their first and second slumber. In the long, dark winter months, when the labouring classes may have spent as many as 14 hours in bed, broken sleep was regarded as routine and natural and only disappeared in Europe with the advent of artificial lighting.

We humans were regulated by the availability of natural light.  Artificial light, which we now take for granted and even assume is some kind of a fundamental right, was expensive for the most part of human history. 

Back in the prehistoric era a person would have to gather, chop and burn wood for roughly 10 hours a day for six days straight in order to produce the equivalent light of a modern lightbulb shining for about an hour. Today, the same amount of labor could light a room for over 50 years.

In relatively modern times, artificial lighting continued to be expensive:

Around the year 1800, you could get about 10 hours of modern-equivalent lighting from animal fat candles for 60 hours of labor. Not too shabby, if you didn't mind the smell of burning animal byproducts. 

Around this time, none other than George Washington estimated that the cost of burning a single candle for five hours each night worked out to about 8 British pounds a year, or well over $1,000 in current dollars.

When we were kids, grandmas' villages suffered from power-cuts (load shedding) and even when the electrons flowed, lights were barely brighter than candles.  Weddings, therefore, always had Petromax lights.  A wedding procession in the night included workers carrying those Petromax lights on their heads.

Now, the abundant electricity has made artificial light remarkably inexpensive, which has also altered our daily schedules.  So different is contemporary life from how humans lived until very recently that students (and even middle-aged adults) boast that they are night workers who produce their best when most of the rest are asleep.  

I have no idea what the long-term impacts of our altered night lives will be.  My suspicion is that this cannot be good for our personal well-being.

On my part, I will continue to think about such issues, and collect my monthly reward for not working!