It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.