We’re all so very, very tired. Seems like there are very few people you’ll chat to who tell you they’re wide awake, full of beans and rearing to go. Young, old, and everywhere in between, we yawn, or try to hide our yawns. We rub our eyes, throw eye drops into them like they will somehow be reset with a little salt water solution.
“I just need a good night’s sleep,” says someone. “It doesn’t matter how early I go to sleep or for how long, I’m still tired,” says someone else.
We exercise, we change how and what we eat, we suck up health and wellbeing vlogs like they’re a magical elixir. But none of it can turn the fatigue Titanic around. And somewhere up ahead, out there in the darkness, is the iceberg that will end it for us all.
Sorry, what now, Graham. What in the actual crap are you talking about?
What if maybe it’s not an asteroid or the earth opening up that wipes us all out? Maybe the human race is tired. Deathly tired. I mean, we’ve done a hell of a lot in the last few thousand years, evolving leaps and exponential bounds ahead of any other species on the planet. Creating and inventing and consuming and destroying. Jesus, we’ve been busy. Just talking about everything we have done in such a short space of time makes me exhausted.
We’ve done so much, mankind is fading. You know what it’s like to be tired. Shit, you’re tired right now. When you’re knackered, what happens? You get irritable, you make poor decisions, you eat all the wrong things, your personal hygiene goes to shit. You get sick, you find it hard to recover. You just want to be left alone.
Imagine all 7 billion of us feeling like this, whirling in an ever decreasing circle toward the drain of terminal exhaustion.
One night, one afternoon, we all go up to bed for a sleep or to the couch for a nap, and we just don’t wake up. Dust and our pets consume us. Then in a matter of weeks, months and just a few years, we will have ceased to exist as the plants reclaim the planet.
That would be kind of beautiful. I mean, everyone wants to go in their sleep.
Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash