Everyone is tired, and no one knows why., page 4

Just a thought to add; sometimes the answers are simpler than we think.

If we step back to look at social habits for the last few centuries, we'll notice that for hundreds if not thousands of years, people would would walk down a city street and see buildings, torches, and other people in "natural" colors.

Since the discovery of the light bulb and electricity, and with the boom in marketing and communication experienced in the last century or so, people now have to deal with vivid and "unnatural" colors, constant bombardment from sounds they were never used to hearing a few generations ago, not to mention all the billboards and their flashing lights, employing vivid and "unnatural" colors and shapes to attract attention.

Factor in the obsession with information, the way everyone is constantly plugged in on forums, news websites, podcasts, tv, movies, radio etc...

Now factor in the basic law of western economy which requires people to be productive a) all year round and b) more so with each passing year.

What you have is extremely strained people.

Remember that in our natural habitats (Europe for most of us, for the last several thousand years), during winter, life slowed down... there was no farming to tend to, and people rested.

This cyclical rest still occurs in nature, but not in people, which is also unnatural (no quotes).

Note: When I say "unnatural" colors and shapes, I mean shapes and colors which do not typically appear in the environment they are displayed in according to human habit for the last few centuries.

An easy answer to the fatigue issue would be simply that in North America, we are the pioneers of overstimulation and bombardement of the senses, and like it or not, it's hard to get used to. I'm sure that if statisticians looked into this issue, they would find that the average North American encounters several hundred times more stimuli than his ancestors did 500 years ago.

That being said, being more tired is a simply natural physical reaction to the constant strain.

Friends and relatives of mine who have been living in less developed and most importantly slowly developing countries feel no different, and I speculate that the cause of this is that the rate of increase in the daily stimuli they perceive is unchanged, unlike ours.

Additionally, a factor worth mentioning, is that "I'm tired" is a very trendy excuse teenagers use, often with no valid reason, to justify stupid and thoughtless behavior. Mix that in with the mind's power to induce effects it convinces itself of, and you could be looking at a generation of teenagers accidentally making themselves more tired by thinking it because they have no other way of justifying their immature behavior.

P.S.: I forgot to highlight; our eating habits are really not as good as we think... McDonalds, precooked meals, and other such "conveniences" cannot possibly be helping the cause. Specially with the amount of artificial add-ins we put in every food.

[edit on 14-7-2008 by mdagwd]