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Comment by hatmatrix | Hacker News Reader

"Despite near-constant headlines about the prevalence of sleep problems, Ekirch has previously argued that, in some ways, the 21st Century is a golden age for sleep – a time when most of us no longer have to worry about being murdered in our beds, freezing to death, or flicking off lice, when we can slumber without pain, the threat of fire, or having strangers snuggled up next to us."

What a wonderful time we live in!

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Not sure if your comment was partially made as a joke or not but I can certainly attest that having to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning because of lice is not ideal.

My parents live in the (Eastern-European) countryside and because of the environment (basically all sorts of animals living around the house) they started having lice since 2-3 years, I think. You eventually get used to them, one of the keys is to tuck (I think that's the word) your sleeping pants well into your socks, so that the damn beasts won't make their way up on your skin from bellow. Sleeping with the bedside lamp turned on seems to also have helped, but not sure if that was my placebo or not.

Are you really talking about lice, or do you mean bedbugs?

If you mean lice, do you mean head lice, body lice, or pubic lice?

Yeah, on second thought, and after some google image searches, I think I was talking about fleas, which I had mistaken for "body lice", I think. Bedbugs are a whole another beast which I won't wish on my worst enemy to experience.

I've had lice before, both head and body types, and they were so benign and not bothersome that I allowed them to stay voluntarily out of kindness and generosity.

They are really amazing little creatures.

Enough HN for today.

If you loved them so much what made you rid of them?

I didn't purposely get rid of them, though I stopped nurturing them as much due to human partnership. They just disappeared over time.

Could it be that you passed the lice on to your new human companions? Fickle friends indeed!

> ... I allowed them to stay voluntarily out of kindness and generosity.

> They are really amazing little creatures.

To each their own, if it's not a pet peeve then it's a pet

what, my six year old memories seem to strongly disagree with this. like an itchy rash all over your head

That might be you having a (more intense) immune response to the insect bite than OP. Or that OP is joking.

Conditions may apply. If you're homeless or living in a country with ongoing war, disease or hunger the likelihood that you have to worry about any of these things goes up dramatically.

Indeed, but being homeless(*) or living in a country with ongoing war, disease or hunger is much less likely today than at any point in history. Not only that, but if you were to be suffering those circumstances, is there any period in the past in which you would be better off than you would be today?

    (*) for a modern understanding as to what constitutes homelessness

Of course. But the fact that the norm is that one doesn't have to worry about these things still is a huge improvement.

Indeed, and since you already called it the norm, we need to ensure that everybody gets to live that way.

A norm does not make it a minimum baseline: a norm is something that's prevalent or average.

Not disagreeing with your desire to make that the baseline, just with the terminology :)

The word norm can mean either “prevalent” or “the desired state of things.” So I’m assuming the previous comment was engaging in a bit of wordplay.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/norm

We need to ensure how? Injecting money senselessly forever like we do in Africa, bringing war to those countries, infiltrating their governments to take them over...? These comments always perplex me.

Oh I agree with that.

This conclusion immediately jumped out at me: why not strive for the benefits of both?

This seems to just be an attempt to keep critics at bay.

Yeah but one could argue that it's a time of more headaches because we have it so well that we have plenty of time to think about our lives. While people of old were busy working and were more exhausted than we are today.

Of course this is the very definition of a 1st world problem but I think it holds some water in modern western society.

Ancient humans worked like 3 hours a day

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...

The article talks about hunter-gatherers. I'm not sure the word "work" applies in the same way.

Maybe they only hunted for 3 hours on average in the good time. ... But they had other more existential threats. There is a reason they all switched to agricultural societies.

Seeing your babies die of starvation will do that.

Skimming the inc.com article and the linked ft.com article, they both mention "rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week", but what "work" isn't well defined. I heard someone counter this narrative by saying that the definition of "work" used only included time spent gather food, and doesn't include other chores (eg. cleaning stuff, fixing clothes/shelter, preserving food).

I highly doubt that, first because you can just look back in time 100 years and observe people living in the country to see how hard they worked.

Secondly, ancient humans did everything themselves. Their clothes, food, bedding, house, roof, EVERYTHING. There was no global supply chain, there was no clothing industry, there was just you, your farm, and your two hands.

What's ancient? There were continental supply chains in the Bronze Age and earlier.

Of course there were but that's still a weak argument for a 15 hour work week.

For the vast majority of people most of what they needed was around them and it required a lot of work.

There were local supply chains too. For example you could have a guy who just collects wattle all day, or someone who just spins wool all day.

But that doesn't take away that it's still a lot of work. Just to get water is work.

We really did have everything, didn't we?

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