Ask any person in the modern world how they are doing or how they feel in the modern world, and you will likely get this answer : “I’m tired. ”

Rich or poor, sad mad or glad, regardless of avocation or station in life, every single one of us is tired, or at least says they are.

Why is this? How did tiredness become universal? Why do we feel comfortable telling people we have just met that we are tired? And when did all this start?

Last question first. As far as I can tell, tiredness became universal around the turn of the twentieth century. From the dawn of modern consumerism, there have been universal claims of weariness, and a plethora of products designed to give you back your energy, as though it is something everyone starts off with but then somehow loses and must regain.

Somewhere in a depths of the zeitgeist, then, there is a belief that our energy is somehow being stolen, not spent. How can this be true?

Perhaps it is a side-effect of individualism. We consider energy spent doing things we would rather not do to have been somehow stolen. It is as if our strong individualist egos consider all bodily energies to belong to it, to be used expressly for its own ends, and therefore having to spend it on something which is, broadly speaking, not fun is the same thing as it being stolen.

Stolen or spent, the next question is : why is this a “safe” answer to the universal question of how we are doing?

First off, its very universality makes it safe. The fact that everyone gives that answer without serious social consequence is sufficient to make it a safe answer.

But more than that, admitting you are tired carries with it the implication that you have been working hard, and therefore is actually a statement of social virtue rather than the revealing of weakness it appears to be.

Everybody with a job works hard, and therefore everyone is tired. There is not an employed person in the world whose claim of working hard would be questioned. It is a curiously universal virtue. Our demanding inner children insist that having to work for a living at all is a supreme sacrifice, and therefore whatever it is, whether you are a practicing dentist or a professional french fry cook, it is hard work and you therefore work hard.

And working hard is the last remaining universally accepted collective virtue. Modern society has severed nearly all ties a citizen might us to feel like they are contributing to the collective as a whole, but claiming to be hard worker still manages to carry with it the deep implication that one is not just contributing a token amount to society, but all that you can.

Ergo, being tired means you are a good citizen.

But apart from the social implications of tiredness, what about the medical truth? Is it possible that everybody really is tired all the time?

I think it is, and to understand why, we have to look at the alarm clock.

Everybody knows what the alarm clock is for. It’s to get you up in the morning when it is time to go to work (or school, or whatnot).

But few people grasp that the very need for an alarm clock implies that you are not getting enough sleep.

Think about it. Left to our own devices, we sleep till we are no longer tired, just like we eat till we are no longer hungry. It’s not like if we didn’t have alarm clocks, we would just sleep forever. So clearly, if we wake up tired when the alarm clock goes off, we have not gotten enough sleep.

Add to that the many ways that modern life cuts us off from the usual inputs that regulate our circadian rhythms, and we have billions of people in the world walking around in a state of half-sleep, suffering continuously from the effects of sleep deprivation but not knowing it because to them, this is normal.

And what is our solution? Coffee. Tea. Cola. Caffeine. We simply accept that in order to function in modern society, it is necessary to regularly drug ourselves into an artificial state of alertness.

This, of course, does not solve the problem, it merely delays it. In theory, we could just go to sleep earlier and keep up that way.

But work takes more than energy from us, it drains our psychological resources as well, and so we end up staying up too late engaging in low-cost leisure activities like watching television in order to replenish those.

And that’s not even taking into account all the non-work activities we end up committed to, and all the little errands and labours required just to maintain our modern luxurious lifestyles.

So the modern citizen is, indeed, constantly tired. The various demands on our various resources always exceed our capacity for renewal, and so the modern person lives in perpetual debt to our bodies and our minds.

The modern person, in other words, lives deep in debt on more than one level.

Oh, and add in one more factor : our poor diets. Diets heavy in carbs, salt, and fat, all of which may taste great but the energy they provide is very short term and afterward, we are far more tired than we were before.

So we sleepwalk through life, drained and stumbling and needing liquid stimulants just to keep going, and then we wonder why the wonder of modern life and all the apparent trappings of success are not making us happy.

We are all too damned tired to be happy. Most modern people feel like they are barely keeping their head above water most days.

No wonder we devote entire rooms of our workplaces and entire sections of the day to the great god Coffee.

And no wonder it is hard to stir people to strive for change.

It’s almost as though the evil and corrupt stupid old men who run the world want us all to be drained and unbrained all the time.

But no… they just take advantage of this happy accident.

That’s all from me for today, folks. I will talk at you again tomorrow!

The “it”, in this case, being “making videos”.

I started again on Saturday, and I am going to keep on making one a day for the foreseeable future. Here’s the three I have done so far, starting with Saturday’s.

Yup, I’m back. Note the casual, handheld style. Totally an artistic decision, and not just because it’s easier to record videos lying down in bed.

Next, I use Netflix as my inspiration and do a review of above-average action film Solomon Kane from back in 2012.

I was really surprised when this turned out to be over seven minutes long. time flies when I am enjoying the sound of my own voice, I guess.

And finally, today’s vid, in which I talk about Wonder Woman.

You know…. like I do.

And that is where I will begin today’s actual blogging because I have finished the Wonder Woman documentary and I have more thoughts on it.

It was a great documentary. But a few things in it disturbed me.

One was that, despite being launched by psychologist and weirdo way ahead of his time William Moulton Marston as a very firmly feminist (and feminine) heroine who showed the world that women could be strong and brave and such, after the boys came home from World War II and all the ladies who had been working in factories and doing all the jobs of men were told to go be housewives ^[1] now, the same fate befell Wonder Woman.

Suddenly she was way less interested in fighting evildoers and showing men the power of peaceful conflict resolution and way more interested in trying to marry Superman. Her previously action packed comic turned, seemingly overnight, into a romance comic, and at one point they even stripped her of her powers and all her cool accoutrements and turned her into a spy-action hero.

It makes total sense that this happened, but I still find it incredibly depressing. Where are Gloria Steinam and Betty Friedan when you need them? Wonder Woman is not supposed to be domesticated. She is supposed to be a free, strong, brave, loyal, and steadfastly idealistic fighter against the forces of evil.

In other words, like I said in the video, she is supposed to be the female equal of Superman. Notice Supes doesn’t get married either?

I can only imagine how crushed little girls (and certain little boys) who were Wonder Woman fans precisely because she was such an awesome figure of heroism felt when their favorite heroine suddenly stopped kicking ass on villains and started kissing ass on Superman.

I will give you a moment to get over that image in your head.

It must have been a very confusing time for women and girls in general. It wasn’t simply the men that told them they had to go back to the home when the war was over. They had told themselves that all through the war. I am sure most of the woman who had husbands overseas kept themselves going through the war with a rose-colored vision of how wonderful life was going to be when her husband came home, swept her off her feet, and took her away from the grimy grunting disgusting world of the factory and put her back where she could be dainty and feminine and yes, even subservient again.

The problem was, this Other Thing had happened. They had experienced the same burdens and freedoms of men, they had proved to themselves and the world that woman could live independent of men and do the same work as men, and despite their rosy dreams of domesticity, they could not just forget that and go back to what they had been before the war, no matter how hard they tried.

Back to WW. Luckily, eventually Steinem and Ms. magazine did come around and start hounding DC to restore Wonder Woman to her previous glory, and while, according to the documentary, Wonder Woman didn’t quite become the feminist icon she was before, she at least got her powers and her accessories back, plus a black sidekick.

The other thing that bothered me in the documentary came from something I had sort of known about but never really thought about, namely 90’s feminism.

I only saw the ugly side of it at the time (political correctness, anti-male hostility, and so on) but the truth of the matter is that the 1990’s contained the third wave ^[2] of feminism in North American culture.

Women and girls were publishing zines, joining punk rock bands, and there was a rise of powerful female heroes like Xena, Buffy, and my fave Scully in the media.

Far fuckin’ out, man. The disturbing bit is that, in 2001, all of them died.

Buffy came back, Xena died heroically, and I don’t remember Scully dying, but apparently a whole slew of others also got killed off that year, and that bugs the hell out of me.

Worse, it lead to a whole era of women being allowed to be only one of two things in the media : power-bitch sex fantasy ass kicking chicks, or totally passive vengeance objects who get killed in awful ways with a sickening regularity.

That bothers me even more. I consider myself a feminist (in that I am a humanist, and women are people) and it infuriates me to imagine this terrible ebbing of the positive political tide in a realm which I hold near and dear, namely genre media.

And that leads me to this very era, where women get sick bastard nerds posting the vilest and more hurting things their piggy little brains can think of on public forums, attacking any woman who dares to have an opinion on anything fannish.

It all leads me to the conclusion that despite all the progress made by women in the last 100 years, the struggle continues, and it is the duty of all decent people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, to roll up their metaphorical shirt sleeves and get in there and push.

It’s not over yet, folks, but the end is in sight. Women are breaking through the last level of the glass ceiling and soon, we may even have parity in the highest levels of political power.

And then we will REALLY see some changes.

That’s it from me. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.