Oh, the needless complications of modern life...
It's as basic an act as sleeping, which is as essential to us as eating or breathing.
They take that and convert it to esoteric mumbo jumbo.
Modern lifestyles ensure that people find it increasingly difficult to sleep. Stressful jobs, addiction to screens, ignoring the biological clock, going against the circadian rhythm, faulty diets... The list of crimes that we commit against our own bodies is long.
And then we don't get sleep. We obviously think that there is a magic pill that can solve the problem. We need better mattresses, is what we conclude.
Meanwhile, we are so unfit that we obviously have back problems. We conclude that our inability to bend and touch the floor is due to, you guessed it, a faulty mattress!
Enter the mattress makers. They convince us that the answer lies in more and more "sophisticated" mattresses. And market them with such a seductive appeal that everyone gets more and more convinced that sophisticated mattresses are a necessity.
We don't realise it, but the moment we fall into that trap, we constrain our lives in several ways. Wherever we go, we need "good" mattresses to sleep on. That reduces the number of places we can go to, and it reduces the kind of things that we can do.
So we constrain our lives further and further, with an ever constricting range of activities, coupled with deep seated anxieties on that most basic of human functions, sleep.
Meanwhile, the coolie at the railway station and the manual labourer at the construction site, work hard the entire day tiring tiring their bodies out, eat a frugal meal in the evening, sleep on the bare ground, and get wonderful sleep.
Oh, the ironies of life!
Sometimes, the solution to a problem lies in going in the exact opposite direction to which the world is going. Try this:
Buy a chataai, the old fashioned sleeping mat made of coir or grass or some such material. Spread it on the floor and go to sleep.
I assure you you will never go back to sleeping on a mattress after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment