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!