so i’ve only ever talked about this with a handful of people before so for some reason it’s making me nervous to put it out there EVEN THOUGH IT’S NOTHING REMOTELY BAD. but i’m hoping to connect with people who know what this is about and since whenever i talk about this, i always find people who say “SERIOUSLY, THIS IS A THING? ME TOO!” then maybe this might help someone.
for most of my life i’ve told people i “have chronic insomnia” or that i’m “not a morning person” (which is a euphemism, at best). i’ve described myself as a “night owl” since i was a very young child, but i’ve learned in the last year or so that i’m actually NOT an insomniac at all – i have chronic severe delayed sleep phase disorder.
insomnia is difficulty falling and/or staying asleep; i have no trouble whatsoever falling and staying asleep. but no matter what I do, i physically cannot fall asleep before 2-3AM. i’m actually happiest going to bed somewhere between 4 and 5AM. i actually have no trouble at all staying up until sunrise if left to my own devices. usually somewhere between 3 and 5AM, i start to get tired. if i try to sleep before then, i toss and turn for hours regardless of how tired i am, and going past 5AM is always pushing past my limits, but i have no trouble at all falling asleep within that time frame.
if this sounds like you, i want you to know something: you’re not like this due to laziness or a failure of willpower. i say this as someone who’s tried for the better part of two decades to change my circadian cycles and nothing has made even a minor difference. this is normal for people with dspd. we’re just wired this way.
according to what I’ve been reading, there’s a strong genetic correlation to specific genes and your sleep-phase type, and people with DSPS especially in the severe form like i have tend to have an abnormality in the way that their brains process daylight and evening light. for most people, daylight wakes them up and evening light suppresses alertness. that isn’t a thing for me and that’s why i’m writing this at midnight and trying to decide which tv show i’m gonna watch on netflix for the next few hours 🙂
also not helpful: self-induced sleep deprivation (tried that over and over – i just spend weeks at a time miserable and exhausted); sleep aids – i hadn’t realized that was a thing for most people with DSPS – they just make us groggy and dizzy but don’t actually make us sleep. We are perpetually misdiagnosed as having primary insomnia or some kind of psychiatric disorder. Excellent bedtime routines don’t help. Meditation, nightcaps, having no devices, caffeine boycotts – not a shred of difference.
the bad news is that it’s permanent and incurable. both personal experience and the collective body of current medical evidence points to the fact that it’s VERY hard to even make a dent in your natural sleep phase cycles and the best you can ever hope for is a small dent (e.g., if i work very hard at it for the rest of my life – cause y’all know frequent relapse is a thing here – i may be able to move my bed time to 2:30AM instead of 4AM).
the good news is that people with DSPS can live totally normal healthy lives – if they can find a job and a lifestyle AND FRIENDS that accommodates our preferred sleep patterns which – hey, look at that, I HAVE ALL THAT! hence why i’ve been working from home for most of my adult life. the best jobs i’ve ever had have been graveyard shifts. we tend to gravitate toward those. for example, people who work overnight in emergency rooms tend to categorically be dspd folks. lots of us are self-employed and happy and successful that way. (my favorite clients are aussies. 1AM skype meetings= GREAT!)
evolutionary biologists have a theory that us night owls are descended from a long and noble line of early ancestors – basically, that one guy amidst our cave ancestors who got night duty. basically, while the rest of the tribe snored away, that one guy had to stay up and make sure the fire kept going and keep watch so that the rest of the tribe wouldn’t freeze to death and no giant sloths or prehistoric dingos ate the cavebabies. be proud; our species literally couldn’t have survived without night owls like us.
so if you’re a chronic night owl, embrace who you are because you are okay. it’s not inherently healthier, wiser, or in any way better to be a morning person. so don’t beat yourself up because you don’t/can’t get up at dawn to exercise (exercise still counts if you do it at night – god bless 24-hour gyms). plan around it if you can. pick careers that let you sleep in until noon. don’t sign up for morning hikes or crack of dawn college classes or deprive yourself of sleep in order to exhaust yourself into magically morphing into a morning person. take it from personal experience. it won’t work.
you’re just wired that way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Let me elaborate on that last reblog, just to make it clear for people who haven’t worked at or near minimum wage.
My last retail job paid $10 an hour, one of the highest starting wages for a entry-level retail position in NYC at that time (and still higher than the current NYC minimum wage of $8.75). I had the occasional forty-hour week, but mostly, I worked thirty-two hours. If we assume that as the standard week, it’s $320 a week.
Between state, federal, and city taxes, at this level, you end up paying around 26% of your wages in taxes. If your paycheck for two weeks is $640, you actually take home $473.60. Your yearly pay after taxes is $12,313.60, or $1,026.13 a month.
You find an apartment to split with three roommates. Your individual rent is $700. That leaves you with $326.13 for the month. You collectively decide not to get cable and only get internet, so your bill is $75 split four ways–$18.75 for you. Your power bill is around $100 and your cooking gas bill is around $30–$32.50 between the two. That’s $51.25 for bills. That leaves $274.88. You get a cheapo phone plan and pay $50 a month. That leaves $224.88. You get an unlimited MetroCard because individual rides make no sense with you working nearly full time, especially if you go literally anywhere else in your week besides work and home. $116.50 per month. That leaves you $108.38 for the month.
You have $3.60 a day to feed yourself, clothe yourself, do anything for fun, deal with medical emergencies, and so on. And that’s at a full $1.25 above city minimum wage, or $2.75 above national minimum wage.
What 16 trillion dollar debt? I have no idea how my free stuff is going to appear. I just know I want it.
He’s raising taxes on the rich
He’s planning on stealing more from people… ok that makes sense. Just because *They* are rich doesn’t mean those people deserve to have more of their wealth stolen from them.
Yes because the wealthy billionaires that steal and undervalue labor, and companies that scapegoat paying taxes are really hurting
why even bring up the national debt if you don’t want people to pay taxes
I’m on the phone half asleep, but yeah, Thank you for real
I don’t think OP understands what rich people are. Like they literally won’t even notice the taxes. It will make no impact on the wealthy at all. You could take literally 50% of the income of the top 10% and they would have to make zero changes to their lifestyle.
Money to them is just a high score. They whinge when you take them down a bit but it makes literally no difference because they’re still winning the fucking game.
They do actually 100% deserve to have their money taken. People are starving to death because we think disability payments shouldn’t be enough to live on and minimum wage should be half of what you need to survive so yeah, I think millionaires and billionaires deserve to have a tiny fucking fraction of the money they could never spend in a fucking lifetime so I can fucking EAT AT ALL.
I also don’t think people understand actually how much a billion dollars is. Like. it’s such an enormous number.
We think of numbers that big like a set of stairs, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million, a hundred million, a billion.
With each jump just being another step on the staircase and not realising HOW FUCKING HUGE each step is, and how vast the gap is between each of them.
Aside from the fact that even a million dollars is far more than you need, a billion is disgusting excess. There is no conceivable way one person could justify needing a billion dollars when you know HOW MUCH that is.
To put it in perspective: a million seconds is 11 and a half days a billion seconds is 31 years and 9 months.
Another example would be Warren Buffett: He made $US12.7 billion in 2013. That was his yearly income, not his total worth. Just his income for 2013.
That’s $37 million per day; $1.54 million per hour; $25,694 per minute
How much do you get per hour? Is it enough to live on? the minimum wage in america is $15,080per year That man makes more money per minute just for being alive, even in his sleep than most of you do in an entire year.
also, just using seconds for reference again
15,080 seconds is just over 4 hours. 12.7 billion seconds is 402 years and 4 months.
Can someone please make a staircase graph with dollar amounts?
I have discalcula and have a hard time conceptualizing numbers. I feel like that’s a great analogy and would help me.
Ok so I tried and the number differences broke the weird little graphing thing I was using.
so here we have one thousand (1,000) not showing one million (1,000,000) at one pixel
and one billlion (100,000,000) is the big pilon there.
I added fifty million in to show because that graph goes in increments of 50 million.
So how much is 50 million compared to a million though, it’s only one pixel?
so smol. But still we’re trying to get down to a thousand, (which is ten hundred-dollar-bills.)
So what does a million look like compared to a thousand?
oh. We broke it again. It will only go in 50 thousands. So we got to look at how big 50k is compared to our wad of hunjies.
ok.
This is why i like using the seconds instead of graphs… But I won’t give up here.
the reason it’s so so hard to process is because a BILLION is an enormous number. there comes a point with numbers where we can’t actually process them and its just like…a lot. And more than “a lot” is still “a lot”.
So we need visual representation. Lets use pennies (thanks megapenny)
Imagine a penny. Just one.
Ok, you get a thousand pennies a week, and you end up with 52 thousand in a year. If they were dollars that’s a nice paying wage.
with me?
now this is a thousand pennies.
this is 50 thousand pennies (1 square foot solid of pennies! COOOOL) It’s roughly how many pennies you would have in a year if you got a thousand pennies a week.
This is a million pennies
And this is a billion pennies
(Which is 5 schoolbuss sized blocks of solid pennies.)
that is so many.
.
The problem with numbers is that we see them written like this
1 100 1000 1000000 1000000000
And we kind of subconciously go “well… it’s only increasing a little at a time, like a staircase. When the progression is more like
And so on. which is not a staircase I want to climb because it starts off reasonable and then jumps to building size, then mountain size.
We ‘add a zero’ which is confusing because it’s timesing (x) not adding (+).
to make ten thousand dots, I would copy all the dots in my thousand pile, and paste them ten times. to make a hundred thousand, I would copy all the dots in my ten-thousand-dot pile and paste them ten times. thats what “times by ten” means.
That’s what adding a zero is, it’s multiplying (x) the last number we had by ten. (i also say timesing: as in copy and pasting it ten times) try it with a word document and see how many pages it takes to get you a billion dots, and how many it takes for 15 thousand (minimum wage anual)
hopefully this was at least somewhat useful.
Anyway, the point is that if we imagine them as dollar coins, and one square block is established as good enough to live by a year, there’s no reason one individual deserves 5 bus-worths.
Omg this is excellent! Thank you so much, that does really help! The pennies in particular
Check out this awesome visual representation of how messed up our society is, everyone!
In conclusion, there’s absolutely no reason why the rich people need all this money and taxing them more is a very very good idea
