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.
This is a big part of the problem with the modern interpretation in Spain and nearby countries. It used to be that most folks lived close to their work, and could go home for lunch+siesta in-between split shifts. As commutes are increasingly common, this doesn't work at all.
Given generally low employment numbers and the widespread desire for a shorter, more productive workweek, one could hope we start being able to pay folks enough to just work one each of the split shifts, but we're obviously a ways away from that.
Similarly, the school day seems to have grown longer to keep kids busy during their parents workshifts. Where previously many kids could attend a local school in their own village, and walk home for lunch (as kids in rural France were still doing when I was a kid).
My father is a farmer and does a siesta every day of the year. He comes back at home of working in the farm every day around 1PM, then we have lunch together and he goes on to take a nap (siesta).
In winter they are shorter, 30 minutes, as the day is short.
In summer, they can go over 1 hour easily, as the day is longer and is hot between 2 and 5 PM.
Of course, my father is it's own boss and old school farmer, young farmers don't do that, and try to work on an schedule.
And is the same about school, when I was a kid no one was driving me to the school or taking me back, I walked there on my own, went home at mid day for lunch, played some football after it, and then went back to school for a couple of hours at 3PM.
I feel we are slowly drifting away from natural times and actions to forced on schedule behaviour to fit within the cogs of a late-stage capitalism productive machine.
I have no idea why they're called spaniards.
Same as people in Morocco 'working hard' for 12h per day while sleeping half of the time haha
I'm socialist but this is insanity
BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
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.
> 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?
But all the evidence from cultures which have little or no access to artificial light even today contradicts the idea of that being a natural, universal response to lack of daylight, and it arguably makes even less sense as a universal approach to daylight patterns in the relatively northern UK, where darkness ranges from 6 hours in the summer to 16 in the winter. The textual evidence is congruent with sleeping patterns being not much different to the modern day, where people also often wake in the middle of the night and go back to sleep (sometimes even getting up to make a drink and twiddle their phone in between) but just don't refer to them as numbered "sleeps" very often
People woke up in the middle of the night a lot in the past because they were so malnourished compared to modern humans. (Excluding people in very poor countries)
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.
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.
Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?
I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc.
It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...
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.
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.
Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic
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, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.
If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30.
If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day.
Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.
For myself my attentiveness and energy tend to slump later in the day if I don't so obviously I'm better off the other way around from you.
You just need to get used to it, then you will feel horrible if you miss the nap. :)
With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not.
However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible.
There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1]
But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility.
Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep.
My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired.
References
* [1] Hunter Gather Sleep study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01157-4
* Why We Nap
* The Old Way
* Keep the River on Your RightI really like this website's design. It is functional and easy to parse, more websites should be like this.
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in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff, shift worker(which shift?, split shift) et fucking cetera.
May 1st as an international day for Labour demonstrations, for example, started in 1889 after a proposal from what is now the AFL-CIO to resume the fight for the 8 hour day in commemmoration of the Chicago Haymarket massacre.
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?
Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
The vast majority of the population were farmers of some sort living in tiny villages. The market was open only rarely: perhaps every two weeks, but there is no reason to assume a regular schedule! Market days where what made sense for the village - no market when everyone is harvesting, or when the weather is bad. Everyone knew when that day was and he whole family went to market on together.
Markets were not "craftsmen" with their stalls. There were some traveling traders who worked like that. Often you just knew what you had at home to trade and were just making arrangements.
A set workday/shift is required for several jobs where one person cannot work unless someone else is working too. Assembly lines are an obvious example, which the British seem to have started development on first (though they didn't look anything like Henry Fords assembly line you can see the start of this "The Wealth of the Nations"). Shift work is also required when you all depend on a steam engine - miners can be paid by the ton and thus leave at any time, but as soon as the man running the pump leaves the mine floods and everyone else is forced to stop.
Two cabinet makers in a shop (this implies a large cities to need two cabinet makers in a shop as opposed to journeymen who travel between villages doing work) by contrast only rarely are doing something that needs two people (and often when they do they have an apprentice). They can each leave to go buy something whenever they feel like it. Most jobs would be this style, there is a deadline of when the job needs to be done (sometimes flexible sometimes not), but so long as it is done on time nobody cares when you do it.
Mens and Women's work was a thing in most culture, but it was never around cooking. (except possibly there very richest where the men would cook while hunting, but the girls would have servants do it)
Now whether we could have a better system -- Sure! I'm all for a better society. I'm just saying it's not the way it is because of discrimination or some other conspiracy.
If the customer is a retail customer in the majority of cases you are open extended hours. Your employees either work a 6-2 shift and so have the evening, or they work 2-10 and have all morning. (often they are working a shorter shift).
The final group are doctors/dentists. Every boss knows you need to take an hour off to see them every few months and makes provision. They have to have this anyway because sometimes people are sick, or die over night. Thus if it is critical for the job that you have people you have extra people around to make up slack.
Slept just 2:50h today according to the fitness tracker. Not my top form.
Many days like that are actually exceptionally nice (given expectations of the contrary).
I look at it as a low energy situation, where the regular ego train of thought gets extinguished.
Had one long, rare moment, where I genuinely enjoyed just being at work, tired. People around, things happening - just enjoying being there.
Wonder how much it had to do with me getting a couple therapy session the day before, having mum flying over to visit for 17th may festivities and listening to a good part of Ram Dass podcast where post-stroke Ram Dass was discussing sth with the host on Skype.
Is his own boss.
(And it would be “its” anyway - “it’s” is a contraction for “it is” and is wrong in this context)
Don't ask me why, thanks for the correction
Some features of languages are hard and unless one acquired an intuition early in life, they'll keep making mistakes.
What I'd really want to see is a histogram of weekly hours worked per worker for each country
For starters, it shows time spent at work. Meanwhile employees can do varying amount of work in the same amount of time. And I suppose that's what those Germans you referring to mean.
Second as the document notes: "The results are affected by the varying proportions of part-time workers across countries, in addition to differences in legal frameworks and in country-specific usual length of the workweek".
Eventually he cut his working hours in half, while actually doubling his output, because the shorter work hours required him to actually focus.
He was, of course, self-employed, and could design his work week how he liked.
I guess that's important for another reason: if someone else had been paying him by the hour, he would have experienced a 50% pay cut. Instead, his income doubled, because it was based on the actual results.
Within the tech industry, we rely on people to think things through well. Because like with other engineered systems actually changing things later has a real cost, even though it's all an artificial, massless construct and even though we do have AI to do some of the grunt work. The problem is, we are building understanding, predictability and bigger changes tend to make some assumptions obsolete. Sometimes you don't even know which exactly, unless you have precisely engineered the change - costing thinking time that is mostly invisible, e.g. people only write down the result of the thinking or the gist of the straightened path to that result if you are lucky. Almost nobody writes down the paths not taken and the reasoning for those decisions along the way. All of this is the proof of work that's missing or that's hard to verify, if it was created honestly and not inflated artificially.
So yes, measuring work, efficiency of spending time doing work and agreeing on compensation are the hard parts, especially if we cut trust out of the equation.
A day off? Are you mad! During the industrial revolution as a factory worker? Only on Sundays, if you are lucky.
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.