Complex Numbers

Snooze Button

https://aeon.co/essays/its-time-to-celebrate-the-humanity-of-the-communal-snooze...

American work culture, seeping around the globe, threatens to ruin the pleasures and benefits of public, communal sleep

The article opens by describing the culture shock some Americans felt in China when everyone else took a one-hour nap.

Thing is, communal sleep wouldn't work in the US, not just because we run screaming in terror whenever someone uses the adjective "communal," but because there will always be the one asshole who thinks it's funny to take a Sharpie and draw willies on the faces of the sleepers.

In fact, in the US, it is not only sleep that invites judgmental responses. There’s smoking (anything); food (how much, or how little, and its role in one’s health); alcohol (too much, of course, and who can abide the abstemious, the judges of judges?); and exercise and sex, with names for people who are seen as too active, and other names for people who aren’t active enough. Yet those judgments are founded on ideas about health and moderation. Part of what makes them obnoxious is that they’re not altogether wrong, and the intrusion touches a nerve.

I've been railing against this shit for years. The US was founded by people who were too uptight for British culture. Really think about that for a minute. These Puritans' attitudes shaped our social fabric - for good and ill. Mostly ill.

We’d all be better off dropping the moral judgment, and the policies that inevitably follow from it.

Much as I admire Ben Franklin, the whole "early to bed, early to rise" quote mentioned in the article has always annoyed me. And it's out of character for him. I'm pretty sure it was satire, trolling, or some proto-performance art.

There is an evolutionary argument for the staggered types of sleep across cultures. According to the psychologist Frederick Snyder’s sentinel hypothesis of 1966, for most of human history, sleep left people vulnerable to animals, other people and environmental dangers – not to mention the wrath of the spirit world. So, a community with varied chronotypes ensured someone was always alert to keep watch and sound an alarm.

Okay, look, I have an admission to make here. Whenever I see any sort of evolutionary hypothesis shoehorned into an article about any kind of human activity, my inner alarms go off (not the ones that wake me up, but the ones that warn me about bullshit). Most of these are just that: hypotheses. The first one I remember reading was an "explanation" for why boys carry their books swinging by their side, while girls carry them up against their torsos: "It's because the males were hunters, and that's how they carried spears, while the females carry babies like that." I was raised on a farm, so I know bullshit when I smell it. I suspect it's more to do with the well-known and noncontroversial observation that the average male has greater upper-body strength than the average female, followed by peer pressure to follow the crowd.

But even that is a hypothesis; the only thing that makes me like it better is the fact that I came up with it myself, which makes everything superior. My point is that we can't always know how our ancestors lived; and besides, such hypotheses ignore the 4 billion or so years of evolution that preceded the whole upright-ape tool-using food-cooking big-brain thing, which most of these stories focus on.

And they are stories; most of them lack evidence of any kind.

In this case, however, the evolutionary hypothesis doesn't detract from the basic thrust of the article, which I read as "stop fucking sleep-shaming," which I've been saying for a while now, so I don't need to say any more about it.