There’s something very accurate about the expression “calling it a day” when retiring to bed. It means you have to call it, you have to actively decide that enough is enough, the credits are rolling on the movie called My Day, and it is off to bed. I am hopeless at doing this. I feel I need to pay somebody to come round to my apartment and stand over me until I get into bed (scratch that, it sounds creepy).
If my day was a movie it would be The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King. This was a movie that didn’t know how to say goodbye, having almost as many codas as it had extras in its battle scenes. And whilst we’re on the Tolkein theme, just as Hobbits have breakfast, second breakfast and elevenses, so it comes to pass that my late evening often consists of bedtime, second bedtime, and well-past-elevenses.
I tried to turn this around by downloading an app called Sleep Town. This rewards me with a virtual house built for each night I get to bed at my preferred time. The aim is to build a magnificent town, presumably not just with houses but maybe libraries, a town hall (when you get a particularly good night’s sleep?), places of worship, schools, police stations (when you oversleep on a weekday?) and various other lovely civic facilities. I don’t actually know if that’s how it works, because my town is currently a field awaiting the council’s planning permission. I mean, they’re not even close to sending out the tender to the building contractors.
It’s as if I can’t bring myself to draw a line under the day because there’s always something more that could be gained from it. Something I could do to squeeze a bit more productivity out, to allow me to declare this day, and me, a success! Like watching YouTube videos on…productivity.
And there is always time for the 27th video paraphrasing the doctrine of minimalism, or the 17th video comparing the Ipad Pro and the Macbook Air (because the 17th video might have that key nugget of info that the previous 16 videos overlooked). Or reading an article, without any sense of irony, on the benefits of sleep. There are no prizes for guessing when I wrote this blog post.
I assuage my guilt by telling myself I’m not frittering away my time watching videos for entertainment, such as cats being flummoxed by cellophane blocking doorways. No sir. I’m developing myself to be the best human I can be. And that is worth staying up for. And right now, at this late point of the evening, that requires me to watch this video on finger safety when chopping onions.