Sixteen Minutes
context: i’ve been experiencing writers block recently, so tonight i decided to just freewrite until i felt satisfied. this piece is entirely unedited. not a particularly sophisticated work, but it felt good to write. read at your own risk lol
my aversion to sleep is deeply intertwined with my fear of death.
how much of your life will you spend asleep?
doctors recommend no less than 8 hours per night.
8/24=1/3.
one-third of your life will be spent unconscious. does that scare you?
we all know time is the one thing you can never get back.
i don’t experience dreams, or at least i don’t remember them. to me, that’s effectively the same thing, because they don’t make it into what i consider my “lived experience”.
sleep to me feels like a timeskip. nothing more, nothing less. i close my eyes and wake up with a faint understanding that the world is a little different than it was before i went to bed.
thus, a healthy sleep schedule would mean reducing my capacity to experience the world by 33%.
sleeping less than that might degrade the QUALITY of my waking hours…but I don’t notice. studies demonstrate that this is true. while sleep deprivation has compounding negative health effects, you don’t feel any different mentally.
unfortunately, lack of sleep also decreases overall life expectancy. that should probably factor into my decisionmaking, but i’m not a particularly long-term thinker.
additionally, the experience of being asleep is somewhat parallel to death in my eyes.
sleep = a lack of consciousness = a lack of experiencing = death.
do you recognize the dilemma here?
total writing time: 16 minutes.