So I was thinking about how we perceive the concept of being tired, exhausted, sleep-deprived, and so forth.
When you see someone in the morning (be it at school or work) and you ask how they are doing, they are invariably going to either say "I'm fine, how are you?" or "Oh, I'm just tired" if they cannot muster themselves to smile.
But what does that mean? To be honest, I really do not know that many people who would ever answer, "Oh, I am feeling very well-rested and ready to face this new day!" or anything even resembling those words.
And really, who is well-rested? I know many people who can sleep for 10-12+ hours and wake up and feel "tired."
So what does this mean? Well, I posit that it has several meanings. Having done this myself, I know there arise occasions when one cannot pretend to be happy when they are feeling down and "Oh, I'm just tired" becomes a rather strong yet subtle way of saying "I'm feeling bad, but I don't want to talk about it."
Or it can mean the person has been burning the candle at both ends and sleeping like 2 hours a night for a few days in a row.
Or it can imply that one is currently fed-up with something/someone/some situation. "I'm so tired of this/you/that." This can either be a sudden, frustrated exclamation "I'm tired of this movie," or a mental weariness that builds over time... like someone who stays in a bad relationship longer than they should "I'm sick and tired of how you ____."
Fuck, I'm almost always tired. When I was a little kid, the saddest part of my day was bed-time. I didn't want to stop whatever it was that I was doing. It's funny how things change as we grow older.
Fatigue is a vital part of our society. I am one of the only people I know that doesn't drink coffee or energy drinks. Sometimes I think that planes would fall out of the sky, power outages would ravage the world's power grids and governments would collapse without stimulants. There are 22 Starbucks in Berlin. Coffee is like cigarettes or alcohol, both the cause and solution of a self-contained problem... though certainly drinking a cup of coffee is far less self-destructive than smoking a cigarette or doing a shot of vodka. ...Right?
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About Me
- sammyblade
- Berlin, Germany
- I'm doing a M.A. in History at Humboldt University in Berlin.
2 comments:
Sanuel,
A good person to ask about this is Mike. He went ages 15-18 by answering the question, "Mike, what's wrong," by saying, "*sigh*...Nothing, I'm just tired." It was terrible in it's clock-like regularity.
This is true. I have never been a fan of confrontations, and when people get on my nerves I usually don't say anything. I just get let responsive. When asked what is wrong, I used to say "nothing. i'm just tired."
But I think, from reading your post, that you were probably pretty tired while writing it. I think being tired is sort of like being depressed -- when I am depressed I think that depression is the "normal" state and that I have small, infrequent excursions to the land of the happy. When I'm happy, it is reversed. I guess it is really difficult to try to make correct objective statements about innately subjective things like that.
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