When this happens to me – the hour or so I'm awake in the middle of the night is not a peaceful relaxing time – the night has this pessimistic quality to it: the assignment I'm working on is impossible, I'll never get it done, I'll lose my job, that pain in my side is likely cancer, etc.. with that on my mind I drift back into a turbulent sleep after a while, but when I wake to daylight all those problems seem trivial and I'm able to get up and cope with the day. If anyone else experiences something similar that's probably why medicating a full night of sleep is so widespread...
A while back I trained myself into the habit of sleeping in two cycles each night. I’m a night owl, and thought it would be a good way to get a full night’s sleep and still have the night owl lifestyle. After several months, I found myself feeling detached from the world.
The hour or two you get is literally between sleep cycles. During that nighttime, my mind would race and worry about the most useless things. The dreamlike state wouldn’t shut off cleanly and I could not concentrate, so that hour was never productive like I usually am during the night hours. It was impossible to learn anything, nothing would be retained. The second sleep cycle was always turbulent and I found myself waking up several times throughout. During the day, it felt like my emotions were muddled, like I was an automaton. That hour or two morphed into my only personal time, and the day became mindless, numb.
I considered this a failed experiment and re-trained myself back to a single sleep cycle. It was harder going back than it had been to split in the first place. After several months of ‘normal’ sleep I was back to having deep peaceful sleep. I was myself again during the day. I could learn and keep knowledge. The world was interesting again and I was engaging with it.
These were my experiences and expect it would be different for each individual.
Which talks in detail about the "informative" and "affective" connotations of words (it's a lot more entertaining than it sounds). Only slightly related, but I was just reading in the book how we have the terms "light meat" and "dark meat": because ladies and gentleman in 19th century Britain couldn't bring themselves to say "leg", "thigh" or "breast" – even of a chicken!
Isn't that a real thing though? I thought that slant drilling from Kuwait into a disputed region in Iraq was one of the claimed causes of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
I'm 35, been together with my wife for about 8 years and we're finally expecting our first kid in about 1 month. We were both always firmly in the "no kids" camp, the cost/benefit ratio just never seemed to add up. So what changed our minds? Partly it was peer pressure: everyone I know by this time has had kids, people who I respect, smarter people than myself. But mostly it was two slow realizations I've had:
1. It is part of the lifecycle, it is part of being an adult. The link at the top is mislabeled, you can't be an "adult" and not have kids. Yes it's grueling and miserable, but discomfort grounds you and gives you perspective. People that never leave their comfort zone never grow... they don't "grow up".
2. I personally believe it is the key to immortality. I'm not talking reincarnation or ancestor worship. Just a mental image I have every being that lived and died since the beginning of time to create me (or you), like threads in a fabric, and then you don't procreate and it's like "snip" and that thread ends.
I agree with you - absolutely. The potential for growth and perspective as a human being is innate - some people have more of it than others. Though those people with greater potential - an awareness that our experiences can change us - are exactly the kind of people who leave their comfort zone more - versus the author of the linked story who writes: "But when I thought about what it took to get there, the diapers, the soccer games, the braces, the tantrums, the whole enchilada, I knew that it wasn't for me." That was the kind of person I had in mind.
That's pretty much my stock answer when, after complaining about how much my kids eat out of me, I get the "you-chose-to-have-them" look. Having kids forces you out of you comfort zone, forces you to constantly adapt, evolve, go with the flow of life. As painful as it may seem sometimes, I believe it's all worth it.
You also hit the nail on the head with your second point. Without going to the extreme of living vicariously through another being which can never be healthy for either party, looking at your child grow up and go through the fascinating steps of learning life (steps I've long forgotten), I can't help but feel a little bit of myself feel that amazement myself.
When you have a kid, that kid isn't you. At all. So the kid is not your immortality. The kid is their own individual. It isn't fair to make your kid into an extension of yourself.
Sigh. That wasn't at all what I was trying to say. I'm not my father either... but a piece of his generic code is in me. He was the final link of a countless chain of beings, and I am a continuation of that chain, and my daughter will be too. I hope that makes it clearer... unfortunately I'm not enough of a poet to express this sentiment any better.
Good answer. Adding to your #1, having kids matures the parent in ways a non-parent probably never get to experience (patience, working with extreme distractions, keeping one's eye on the big picture, long-term thinking, etc.)
FB - how much ever they make it look like email and function in a compatible manner, I don't think its used the same way email is(talking user behavior). It is just an asynchronous text messaging system. It is closer to chat/IM than to email in the way it is used. FB's bid to make it email-like seems to be an effort to move more of your messaging to FB or have the "unified inbox".
Is it really tough to imagine that 10 years from now we won't use "email" for more than 5% of our communication? And that subsequent generations will probably not use it at all?
I totally see this as the future of photography. Good pictures are all about timing (luck) - i'm pretty sure you could give a monkey a digital camera with enough storage and come up with a World Press Photo of the Year. I think about how different I take pictures now (snap snap snap and sort/discard) versus with film (every shot in the roll of 12 or 24 was precious). I see this as an extension of that. I'm pretty sure the future a camera smart enough to understand composition/color in order to know when is the right moment to capture a nicely framed image... and maybe to take more shots when there is a lot of movement or even to react to your body (higher temperature/heartbeat might indicate change in emotion/excitement so should capture more/continuous images). I'd actually like for this to be in a hat form or maybe glasses to capture images at eye-level. Damn, is this just where Google Glasses is going?
And at about 3:35 when they're showing the step-by-step driving directions and I was like WTF:
Super attention to every detail, state-of-the-art everything, and then that scratchy godawful synthesized computer voice comes on and it's sounding slightly worse than my Amiga back in the 1980's... srsly Apple...
