As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
Also a huge difference between summer temperatures in, say, Galicia and Andalucía. Siestas make some sense in somewhere like Sevilla when temperatures top 40 degrees and it's hard to do anything anywhere that's not air conditioned, and particularly manual labour outside, but in Coruña when it's high 20s to mid 30s at most it's just not the same. (Although climate change is dragging both of those top temperatures up, so perhaps the siesta will start making its way north out of necessity...)
One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5).
Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…
For me, sleep before midnight is the most important factor. If I need my brain working well the next day, all I need to do is go to bed by 10PM. Even if I wake at 5:30, it will be fine.
BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
Same, and most of the times it’s when I sleep longer. Perhaps because there’s a lot of REM sleep towards the end of the night (as my Garmin watch tells me) and/or because I’m kind of half awake at that time.
So maybe dream recall indicates I slept a whole night
I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented.
By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
Not a historian of work, but my understanding is that one point where 9-5 started was Henry Ford when he realised that longer working days led to a higher turnover of workers in a tight labour market. There's an interesting podcast that touches on it here: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-...
>I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did.
This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?
Either you lived with parents or maybe other relatives. Or in case of agricultural labour the living space and food was part of compensation and thus someone else cooked. Same goes for lot of seasonal work cooking was shared or someone did it for larger group. Then you had boarding houses that included well board meaning food and possibly laundry. Or you simply ate in communal ways with food from vendors.
Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already.
Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
Okay, maybe partly my fault for using too broad strokes. The fridge example already suggests Midcentury prosperity and civilized employment contracts.
If we're talking deep 1800s, this becomes more complex. As a factory worker, you may not have time and money to buy or own much of anything substantial. But you do have to buy clothes and such. Putting aside extreme examples like isolated company towns, you probably aren't on any long term contract. Why would they give you that, you live in a big city with dozens of factories and tens of thousands of people desperate for work. I'd say this is midway between Uber and how we imagine industrial employment today. If you don't come, they just don't pay you, and if they get mildly annoyed, they can fire you for any reason any time. From what I gather, you would negotiate with the floormaster some very much unpaid time to do a very specific thing, being very careful not to appear "lazy" or disobedient. People did become sick and sometimes returned to work afterwards.
This is based on from I remember from reading contemporary fiction and historiography on the period. But if you think an unmarried worker bought their clothing by some other means, please enlighten us.
I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.
> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule
> An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.
I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
I thought that biphasic sleep was a fact, since there is plenty of evidence of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in doctors’ prescriptions from the pre-industrial era.
This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store.
I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
It’s not discrimination man. People (including bank and post office workers) work during 9-5 working hours, so it makes sense that these services are only open during working hours.
You're right. Why do their customers insist on working the same hours they do? You'd think they'd work different hours so they could run their errands when things are open.
With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.
1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am.
2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise.
> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon".
Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night.
This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by.
By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead.
I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night.
I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
Also a huge difference between summer temperatures in, say, Galicia and Andalucía. Siestas make some sense in somewhere like Sevilla when temperatures top 40 degrees and it's hard to do anything anywhere that's not air conditioned, and particularly manual labour outside, but in Coruña when it's high 20s to mid 30s at most it's just not the same. (Although climate change is dragging both of those top temperatures up, so perhaps the siesta will start making its way north out of necessity...)
Spaniard here. The 'siesta' is just to combat - avoid - midday heat, specially in southern regions.
We should just work less. Problem solved!
That's the true South European spirit! So many problems in life would become easier reducing the working hours .
In Germany it's a common prejudice that people in southern Europe work less. Data shows otherwise: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5). Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…
For me, sleep before midnight is the most important factor. If I need my brain working well the next day, all I need to do is go to bed by 10PM. Even if I wake at 5:30, it will be fine.
BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
Building on this, I’ve observed nightmares (I.e., particularly intense, terrifying, or otherwise challenging dreams) guarantee a good next day.
Same, and most of the times it’s when I sleep longer. Perhaps because there’s a lot of REM sleep towards the end of the night (as my Garmin watch tells me) and/or because I’m kind of half awake at that time. So maybe dream recall indicates I slept a whole night
same. but, mostly no recall lately. as I go to bed at 2:00 and sleep 6 hours max
I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented.
By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
Not a historian of work, but my understanding is that one point where 9-5 started was Henry Ford when he realised that longer working days led to a higher turnover of workers in a tight labour market. There's an interesting podcast that touches on it here: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-...
>I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did.
This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?
Either you lived with parents or maybe other relatives. Or in case of agricultural labour the living space and food was part of compensation and thus someone else cooked. Same goes for lot of seasonal work cooking was shared or someone did it for larger group. Then you had boarding houses that included well board meaning food and possibly laundry. Or you simply ate in communal ways with food from vendors.
Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already.
Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
> you would get a day off
A day off? Are you mad! During the industrial revolution as a factory worker? Only on Sundays, if you are lucky.
Okay, maybe partly my fault for using too broad strokes. The fridge example already suggests Midcentury prosperity and civilized employment contracts.
If we're talking deep 1800s, this becomes more complex. As a factory worker, you may not have time and money to buy or own much of anything substantial. But you do have to buy clothes and such. Putting aside extreme examples like isolated company towns, you probably aren't on any long term contract. Why would they give you that, you live in a big city with dozens of factories and tens of thousands of people desperate for work. I'd say this is midway between Uber and how we imagine industrial employment today. If you don't come, they just don't pay you, and if they get mildly annoyed, they can fire you for any reason any time. From what I gather, you would negotiate with the floormaster some very much unpaid time to do a very specific thing, being very careful not to appear "lazy" or disobedient. People did become sick and sometimes returned to work afterwards.
This is based on from I remember from reading contemporary fiction and historiography on the period. But if you think an unmarried worker bought their clothing by some other means, please enlighten us.
Good thing the servants didn't need food or fridges.
I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.
This is not how any class of people lived during any age of history.
we both work 9-5, and I the main bread winner and male am the one that does the shopping and cooking.
> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule
> An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.
I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
I thought that biphasic sleep was a fact, since there is plenty of evidence of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in doctors’ prescriptions from the pre-industrial era.
Apparently it was common in pre industrial Britain https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
You don't even need to go back that far. The biphasic sleep regime was still happening a few hundred years ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store.
I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
It’s not discrimination man. People (including bank and post office workers) work during 9-5 working hours, so it makes sense that these services are only open during working hours.
You’re reasoning from a presumption that ‘people’ _should_ all work 9-5. Why should they, and their customers, have the same working hours?
You're right. Why do their customers insist on working the same hours they do? You'd think they'd work different hours so they could run their errands when things are open.
Blame your boss
People working night shifts or other odd hours are not functional members of society? WTF?
Get mad at your employer. My 9-5 office jobs always allowed me to take an hour or so to run errands that could only be done during work hours.
This flexibility can exist for office jobs, but customer-facing roles typically need somebody present for the whole shift.
With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.
You learn something new every day damn
There are three aspects of solar sleep:
1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am.
2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise.
3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed.
"Here's the nap room. Don't be seen using it."
> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon".
Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night.
This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by.
By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead.
I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night.
I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
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