Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Imagine a medieval king who decided their castle should be lit up like day at nighttime, hundreds of candles in mirror-walled rooms, 365 days a year, and also that the entire castle save only the bed chamber would host the finest entertainers and all the most interesting friends and strangers in the world, party games and amusements in a hundred palace rooms, and a mage who could show the king any wonder of the world in his crystal ball, and a bazaar with the finest goods on display, the best academics, et c., et c., basically on tap, and this wild best-the-world's-ever-seen carnival would never. Close. So that all the king must do is open his bed chamber door, any hour, any day, to be enthusiastically welcomed into a veritable (and sometimes literal) orgy of entertainment. 24. 7. Year-round.

Think that king might have a rather disrupted sleep schedule? It seems obviously insane to live like that, no? Instant reaction is "my god, why would you do that", right?

Consider that a totally ordinary middle class house in the West is arguably worse than that.

No wonder everyone "can't" sleep or "is just a night owl" (sure, some may actually be, not saying zero people are).

Frankly it's a miracle we get anydamnthing done, and sleep at all.

I'd encourage everyone to try candle-only lighting after sundown (or maybe extremely dim candle-temp electric lighting, though if you're just trying it briefly consider the candles, they're a bad idea for a bunch of reasons long-term but fine for a few days—you'd be surprised how little you need, I found two beeswax tapers were the minimum to read by without discomfort, but my eyes are still young-ish), no electric devices whatsoever (there's actually still a ton you can do—card games, board games, play music, read, draw, write, et c.), no whole-room lighting, just for a week or so. See if you're still a "night person" by day 7.

[EDIT] Bonus round on the thought experiment at the top: imagine the king is, despite this questionable decision, actually fairly responsible and leaves the castle to go run the kingdom during the day, most days, retiring to this ultra-carnival-home only late in the day. You'll expect that to go even worse as far as sleep is concerned, right?

That is a fun and good analogy .. that I read at nearly midnight while sitting with my laptop and external monitor at full brightness communicating with strangers in other parts of the world.

You're absolutely right. I'm supposedly a "night owl" and "not a morning person" but it's total nonsense.

I've spent considerable time in my travels in tropical nations. Two days there and I'm a completely different person.

The day starts at 5:30 AM, as soon as light arrives. And will you look at that, I'm jumping out of bed full of energy. Absolutely unimaginable back home. It's made possible because life slows down after 6PM. You eat, relax, and go to bed around 9pm. For the simple reason that there's nothing to do, and nobody else is doing anything either.

Unlimited light and distractions has made me a night owl, it's not a natural thing or character trait.

Yeah, I didn't stick with it (it's really hard to resist the temptation, including temptation to try to be productive at night) but because I tried it I do know now that I'm not a night owl, at all. I'm just a normal person in the West in this century. Which manifests as living like a night owl.

I admit my speculation that this explains at least 50% of modern sleep difficulty in developed countries is not based on hard data, but I'd say it's a pretty damn solid hypothesis. Yet everything's all "take magnesium" or "exercise more" or "use redshift" or whatever. Which is probably helpful, but seems like it's ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that we might have too much and too good always-available entertainment (and our lighting situation... after I got used to using candles, which was much faster than I expected, normal electric room lighting was shockingly bright, like I couldn't understand how I thought it was desirable or even OK before).

As evocative as this thought experiment is, and highlights the extreme difference between modern and preindustrial life, trying to appeal to the well-being of that medieval monarch seems like it's falling into the natural fallacy. The past is a completely foreign country. The ancient elites would have absolutely killed for the HVAC systems that were absent from their drafty castles. The most basic of foods we eat would have driven them mad, wars were fought over simple seasonings and spices. Not to mention the advances in medication and basic hygiene.

That said, it would be interesting if it became a fad (among the classes of means, naturally) to try to revert to premodern sleeping habits. Paleo-sleep, perhaps. It could lead to the return of biphasic sleep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907

Or, perhaps, not:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many...

This definitely wasn't intended as a "medieval kings had it great by modern standards" call to return to the past, but rather to emphasize just how much world-class, hyper-stimulative entertainment we have available, dirt-cheap and on tap, every hour of the day. Even TV stations used to shut down for the night. The shift started with electrification & recording technology, but entered a whole new phase only quite recently. When you put what we have in terms of what our everyday entertainment options would have looked like in a pre-industrial society, it emphasizes just how large a difference there is.

If anything, this is closer to a "Gods of the Copybook Headings" argument. "Too much of a good thing..." may be cliché and something only old fogeys say... but what if we're the ones making an error, in rolling our eyes at them? What if, not even that long ago, that was a bit silly applied to this particular thing (entertainment and nighttime lighting, chiefly) but no longer is?

I don't expect this problem to actually be fixed, but I do find all the casting about for "why do so many people have trouble sleeping, these days?" risible in light of what sure looks like the most obvious explanation, which never gets more than a personal-responsibility treatment ("put the phone in another room") which seems like a bad joke when you apply the medieval-king thought experiment. "Maybe the king should just not leave the bedroom, then?" LOL.

All of my lights are tunable for color temperature and brightness and everything is tuned for warm and dim in the evening. It's helped my sleep no end. However i also have sleep apnea and am unable to tolerate the machine, so all of these things are still true. (i've had some surgery - need some more, and i still do try the machine, i've just never been able to get more than a few hours sleep with it

Since you brought up apnea, I want to clarify that my post is not meant to explain all difficulty sleeping or dismiss all folks' situations. Some have sleep apnea or other medical issues. Some really might be built different in a way that makes them night owls (I was sure I was for years, as seem to be so many people). Just that there seems to be a pretty obvious explanation for probably most of the trouble when you lay out what the environment in a normal house looks like at night these days.

> I'd encourage everyone to try candle-only lighting after sundown

That means dark from before 17:00 to 8:00 and that is just too much. I can barely fit work into that.

I happen to also think we'd be, in some ways, more content and happier (and likely healthier) if we followed seasonal rhythms a bit more, including being much less active & productive in the Winter when there's the least sunlight. But that part, I am entirely aware, is completely impractical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com