From: John Blanco-Losada (jbl@clark.net)
Date: Fri Feb 14 1997 - 13:20:20 MST
(moving this over to the main list from the ExI-East list)
Phil Goetz wrote:
>> Here's hoping that someone finds a way to reengineer our species so that
>> we no longer need sleep, a la Nancy Kress' "Beggars in Spain"...
>
>It seems appealing at first, but I have thought about it and decided
>it woudl be terrible. The need for sleep gives an excuse to stop
>working, to have a home, a family. When I fast I find that the workday
>is more oppressive and depressing than usual because it isn't broken
>up by breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (I usually work 9AM-10PM.)
>If I didn't have to sleep, I wouldn't bother to even rent a room in a
>house. The resulting lifestyle would be terribly disorienting.
>Plus, when would I ever stop working?
>
>If you didn't need to sleep 8 hours a day, rest assured that market
>forces would guarantee you would soon be working most of those hours,
>at lower hourly wages than you do now. When work can be made pleasurable
>that is a good thing, but most people besides writers and scientists
>don't live to work.
You're probably right that some "Type A" personalities who already spend
most of their waking hours working to get ahead would simply extend those
hours to fill the remainder of the day. Which might cause many of the
rest of us to follow along in an attempt to keep up. But the big
difference, in my opinion, is that at that point a person's decision to
work longer hours would be voluntary. Right now, by contrast, I have no
choice but to spend a third of my life in a useless dormant state.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Blanco-Losada "You must be the change
jbl@clark.net you wish to see
http://www.clark.net/pub/jbl/jbl.html in the world." - M. Gandhi
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