Sleep Now

Introduction

This month, Seven Days In has already had more than 110,000 visits, although I use it mainly for commenting on the books that I am reading, usually about once a week:

If you want to check it out, it is here:

However, this post is still relevant now. I now have subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, NowTV and AppleTV as well as all the free ones, including the excellent BBC iPlayer. Series I am currently watching are:

House - Amazon Prime

Ted Lasso - AppleTV

Invasion - AppleTV

Severence - AppleTV

Orphan Black - Netflix

The Thursday Murder Club - Netflix

As well as films and quiz programs, so I always have something to watch as long as the system is working, and I always have DVDs, books and music as a fallback.

Sleep Now

A lot of this is coming from Matt Haig's book "Notes on a Nervous Planet", and it is so good that I am about to order "How To Stop Time", which I think was inspired by a page in "Reasons To Stay Alive", which is another of his excellent books. I have read others; my introduction to him was "Humans" which I gave away on World Book Night before it degenerated into commercialisation. The thing is, I'm not sure if I have read and bought "How To Stop Time" because it is a paperback book and my real books are not stored digitally, although Amazon will tell me if I've bought it before, then I just have to find it.

Anyway, one section I have come to is a short section on sleep and the fact that generally we don't get enough. We need seven to nine hours per night, and a lack of sleep does cause problems. The odd night or two is fine, especially if you are interacting with real people of real things. The problem is that people use what should be sleep time to binge-watch TV, be on their electronic device, with phones replacing alarm clocks and therefore living on people's bedsides. This is not a good idea.

The CEO of Netflix said that their biggest enemy was sleep, and it was a huge area to increase consumption of their product. I have not yet taken out a subscription to Netflix, because my TIVO Box is filling up from my Virgin subscription. I also have access to Amazon Prime and NowTV, which I can stop and start when I want it. I worked out that it will take six hours to illegally download a TV series or film, yet for £8 you get a month of Netflix or NowTV, a far better use of my time to pay that rather than steal, though we have been conditioned to think we shouldn't have to pay for digital content.

When we sleep, we cannot be consumers, so the whole commercial world hates us because we are not buying, but to buy, we need money, but we are always having credit pushed at us rather than being paid enough to actually buy without going into debt.

Another point that Matt Haig makes is to turn off notifications on your phone to give yourself control, and that is something I have always done, as I can't deal with things popping up all the time.

So it's gotta be "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" by the sadly missed Warren Zevon as the music to accompany today's post.

Conclusion

I do think that TV takes up too much of my time, but I do enjoy watching lots of films and series because they make me feel good.

Thank you so much for reading this. I really appreciate your support.