There are certain things the human body was simply not designed to do, and staying awake and working throughout the night—especially on a regular basis—is one of them. 🌙
Yes, human beings are adaptable. We can force ourselves into all sorts of schedules when circumstances require it. Yet being able to adapt to something doesn't necessarily mean that it's healthy or desirable, and in my case it's neither.
The human body operates according to a roughly 24-hour internal clock known as the circadian rhythm. Light and darkness are among the most important signals regulating that clock. For most of human history, daylight meant activity and darkness meant winding down and eventually sleeping. 🛌🏻💤
Then came the modern 24-hour economy.
Hospitals, factories, warehouses, convenience stores, trucking companies, security operations, call centers, hotels, and countless other businesses now operate throughout the night. Somebody has to keep those operations going, and I have a great deal of respect for the people who do.
But just because a job needs to be done at night doesn't mean the human body suddenly received the memo. 🔗
Working overnight means fighting against the body's natural signals. You're trying to remain alert when your body expects sleep, and then trying to sleep during daylight when the world around you—and often your own internal clock—is telling you to be awake. 😳
The sun is shining, traffic is moving, phones are ringing, people are mowing lawns, businesses are operating, and life in general is happening all around you. Even when you manage to get enough hours of sleep on paper, sleeping during the daytime isn't necessarily the same thing as getting good-quality sleep at night.
Then, when most people are winding down for the evening, you're preparing to go to work. 😕
After a while it can feel as though you're permanently out of sync with the rest of society.
For some people, graveyard work may be manageable. Some may even prefer it.
I'm not one of them.
I've reached the point where I have to acknowledge that this schedule simply isn't good for me. That's one of the primary reasons I'm applying for other work. I'm not looking for some fantasy job where everything is perfect. I'm looking for something that allows me to earn a living without continually turning my natural sleep-wake cycle upside down.
And then there's the money. 💰
As if sacrificing normal sleeping hours weren't enough, there's the added insult of doing it for wages that aren't sufficient to build a sustainable life around.
That's where the situation becomes especially difficult to justify.
If someone is going to give up nights, disrupt normal sleeping patterns, work while most of society is asleep, and potentially sacrifice time with family and friends, you'd at least expect the compensation to make that sacrifice worthwhile.
When it doesn't, you eventually have to ask yourself a very basic question:
Why am I doing this?
There is also another factor in all of this that I don't particularly want to dwell on because I don't want it to become the focus of this posting: my overall health isn't the best.
I'll leave the details at that.
The reality is that I'm limited in what I can do, which narrows an already difficult job search and makes the whole situation that much more stressful. I don't have an endless list of occupations I can simply move into. Whatever I find has to be something I'm realistically capable of doing, while hopefully providing reasonable hours and wages that make the effort worthwhile.
And there is a much more serious reason I feel the need to make a change.
I don't want to be out there doing what I do for a living and wind up dying in the process.
I don't say that for dramatic effect, and I don't particularly want to elaborate on it. It's simply one of the realities I have to take into consideration when deciding what I can and can't continue doing—or whether I can continue working at all. That brings another problem with it: unemployment, and the concern that I may have no source of income coming in for quite some time. To say I haven't been sleeping well while thinking about that would be an understatement.
At some point you have to ask yourself what you're sacrificing just to keep earning a paycheck. 🤑
No job is worth sacrificing your life.
Truthfully, I'd rather not even have to work full time right now. If circumstances allowed it, I'd prefer to have more time to concentrate on my own well-being and work toward becoming a much better version of myself.
Unfortunately, financial reality doesn't necessarily give us the luxury of doing what would be best for us.
And I don't have much of a safety net to fall back on.
The one person I can somewhat rely on is my elderly mother. But she's got her own issues to deal with, and her ability to help me is quite limited. Nor do I want to place the responsibility for supporting me onto her shoulders. She has her own needs and concerns to contend with.
So simply walking away from work� without something else lined up isn’t what I want to do. But given where things stand now, I may not have much of a choice.
That's what makes the situation so stressful.
I need to work within the reality of my circumstances while simultaneously trying to get myself into a better situation.
There should be dignity in work, but dignity shouldn't be confused with accepting whatever circumstances an employer happens to offer. There's nothing dishonorable about deciding that a particular job, schedule, or wage no longer works for your life.
Work is supposed to help sustain a life.
Your life shouldn't exist merely to sustain your work.
And when ordinary employment doesn't provide enough income for an ordinary person to maintain a reasonably secure life, the problem extends beyond any one worker or any one job.
Is it really any wonder, then, that many younger people have become increasingly receptive to ideas calling for significant changes to our economic system, including democratic socialist ideas?
I'm not saying everyone should embrace democratic socialism, nor am I suggesting that low wages are the only reason some younger people are drawn toward it.
But it's difficult to spend years telling a generation that capitalism rewards hard work while many people look around and see workers struggling with housing, transportation, groceries, healthcare, and the other basic expenses of ordinary life.
At some point they're naturally going to start questioning the arrangement.
If someone works hard, shows up when expected, sacrifices nights, weekends, holidays, sleep, and sometimes even their health, yet still can't establish a reasonably secure life, you can't be terribly surprised when that person begins looking toward an economic philosophy promising something different.
Perhaps those who want younger generations to have greater faith in the existing economic system should spend a little less time lecturing them about why they shouldn't be attracted to alternatives—and a little more time asking why those alternatives have become attractive to them in the first place.
A system makes its strongest argument for itself when the people living under it can actually see it working for them.
And there's another reality looming farther down the road that may bring these questions into even sharper focus.
Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence are steadily becoming capable of doing more of the work presently performed by human beings. 🤖
And this isn't simply about factory workers being replaced by machines. 🏭
Artificial intelligence and automation are increasingly capable of performing or assisting with tasks associated with clerical, administrative, professional, technical, and other traditionally white-collar occupations as well.
Technology has transformed employment many times before, eliminating some kinds of work while creating entirely new kinds. So I'm not suggesting that we're about to wake up one morning and discover that nearly everybody's job has disappeared.
But I think it would be equally foolish to assume that this particular technological revolution can't eventually alter how much human labor our economy requires.
While it's still a ways off, I suspect we're considerably closer than most people care to realize to having to confront that question.
What happens if our technology eventually allows society to produce tremendous amounts of goods and services while requiring substantially fewer hours of human labor to produce them?
What happens if there simply aren't enough conventional jobs—or enough working hours—to distribute income through employment in the way we traditionally have?
We can't indefinitely maintain an economic arrangement in which a person's ability to obtain food, housing, healthcare, and the other necessities of life depends almost entirely upon selling his or her labor if technological progress eventually results in the economy needing considerably less human labor.
And that's where ideas such as UBI—Universal Basic Income—become interesting.
Some of today's strongest laissez-faire, free-market opponents of such an idea might even find it considerably more alluring if the alternative someday becomes an economy capable of producing tremendous abundance but no longer capable of providing enough traditional employment for everyone who needs an income.
I'm not saying UBI is necessarily the answer.
I'm saying technological change may eventually force us to ask questions that today's economic arguments aren't prepared to answer.
Maybe UBI would be part of the solution. Maybe shorter workweeks would be. Maybe entirely different economic arrangements will emerge that we haven't seriously considered yet.
We simply don't know.
But if automation eventually allows society to produce more while requiring less human labor, perhaps the ultimate benefit of that technology shouldn't merely be producing more things.
Perhaps it should also be giving human beings more of the one resource none of us can manufacture more of:
Time.
Time to spend with family.
Time to take care of ourselves.
Time to learn.
Time to create.
Time to experience life rather than spending most of it simply trying to finance our continued existence.
In some ways that brings the larger discussion right back around to my own situation.
I said earlier that, if circumstances allowed it, I'd rather not even have to work full time right now. I'd like to have more time to work on myself and become a better version of myself.
Multiply that desire across millions of people—not necessarily people who don't want to work, but people who might prefer to work somewhat less and actually have more time to live—and perhaps our definition of economic progress deserves some reconsideration.
If technology someday makes it possible for society to produce the same amount with substantially less human labor, requiring people to continue spending the same amount of their lives working simply because that's how we've always distributed income wouldn't necessarily represent progress.
The technology should serve human beings.
Human beings shouldn't exist merely to serve the economy.
But that's a much larger discussion for another day, and one I intend to return to.
Right now, my concern is considerably more immediate.
I need a healthier schedule and a wage that makes working worthwhile.
So I'm applying elsewhere.
I'm looking for work that takes place during reasonable waking hours, pays enough to make the job sustainable, falls within what I'm realistically capable of doing, and leaves enough of the day—and enough of myself—left over to actually have a life outside of work.
I'm not looking for perfection.
I don't think that's asking for luxury.
I don't think it's asking for special treatment.
I think it's asking for something that used to be considered rather ordinary:
A decent day's pay for a decent day's work—and enough time left afterward to live your life.
Maybe the graveyard shift works for some people.
It doesn't work for me anymore.
And sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is recognize when something isn't working—and start looking for the exit.
