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Living Enhanced by Technology

I’ve been think­ing for some time about what it is that I am doing with this exper­i­ment to reduce the amount of time that I spend sleep­ing by using technology.

I’ve been mean­ing to share that I have heard about some­one who used polypha­sic sleep­ing although I don’t know what their sched­ule was, but I do know that they were the cap­tain of the USS Carl Vin­son and that my friend, who was in the Marines with me, shared about how he used to do these cat­naps but he was always on his post. I think it’d be great if the US Navy did more research on polypha­sic sleep because if a ship’s cap­tain can do it, then it would dra­mat­i­cally reduce the num­ber of peo­ple needed to do one job and would also reduce the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of a fight­ing force if it is awake all day and only nap­ping occa­sion­ally. At night, a mil­i­tary instal­la­toin goes dark while some peo­ple stay up on 3rd shift watch­ing the base. What if they could all be awake all day and nap­ping occa­sion­ally instead? What could they get done with fewer people?

Any­way, the rea­son I men­tion this is that the cap­tain of the ship may or may not have used a clock to wake up, which is basi­cally what many polypha­sic sleep­ers do with­out. They have trained their minds to wake up after a short rest period which is pretty cool.

But is what I am doing the same thing? Because I’m using tech­nol­ogy to do this, does it make it any less use­ful or valuable?

Well, you would have to be a Lud­dite to believe that. You’re using the inter­net right now to read this, so your life must in some way be improved by tech­nol­ogy, even if it is for pure enter­tain­ment alone. If you use Microsoft Win­dows or Apple OS, then you prob­a­bly use pro­grams such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and any other host of soft­ware to get stuff done. If you use anti-virus soft­ware, then this is proof that you want to pro­tect your abil­ity to get stuff done.

Do you drive a car? Take pic­tures? Lis­ten to radio, watch movies or have a cell­phone? Do…you…use…electricity…?

The ques­tion is really not “Does using tech­nol­ogy com­pro­mise us as human beings?” but instead is “At what point does the use of tech­nol­ogy not let us be inde­pen­dent of technology?”

I think that peo­ple who are not in some Third World coun­try with­out elec­tric­ity know the dif­fer­ence between life with­out tech­nol­ogy and with and they pre­fer with. Even home­less peo­ple use the bus to get across town.

But then there are the Amish, right? And Lord knows what a soft spot I have for them in my heart after heaing the incred­i­ble dis­play of Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples at the Amish school shoot­ing in 2006. Not only does it make me glad to call myself a Chris­t­ian, but it also makes me ques­tion whether or not I should become Amish and aban­don tech­nol­ogy. They are clearly doing some­thing right.

And yet I know that there is detri­ment in excess, but I can’t say that hav­ing more time can be an ill of excess. The only con­cern that I have is for my own health. How­ever, I run at least three times a week, I am eat­ing a largely raw food diet and my only seri­ous nutri­tional flaws are caf­feine and shar­ing a bot­tle of wine with my wife at least one day a week (with the intent to only have it one day a week) and per­haps the monthly or bi-monthly fast food visit. I’m cer­tainly not at the right weight as I am tech­ni­cally over­weight but not obese; how­ever, I’m track­ing my progress to lose the extra weight using our new Nin­tendo Wii.

But wait a second…

I’m using the Wii to track my weight loss and my wife uses it for exer­cise (as do I on occasion).

When I go run­ning, I use an inter­val timer on my Timex Iron­man watch.

This means that I am not only using tech­nol­ogy to get less sleep, but I am also using tech­nol­ogy to improve my health.

Based on every­thing that I have read, I can’t see that get­ting less sleep is as much of a prob­lem as not exer­cis­ing, so I think I’m going to be just fine doing this.

Thanks for listening.