Life goes on whatever

I have no evidence for my opening statement today beyond suspicion, however my hunch is that one of our contributors’ most frequently-revisited themes is the propensity of the modern all-enveloping world of the internet and social media to peddle endless contradictory theories or assertions.

You know the sort of thing to which I’m referring.

This week butter is bad for you, margarine good: next week, it’s the other way around.

This week – if you want to live to 100 years of age – daily sex is a fab way to enhance your chances of doing so; next week it turns out that celibacy & abstinence is the regime to adopt because scientists in the Mid-West of the USA have just discovered that every orgasm you have takes ten minutes off your life expectancy [or was that cigarettes?].

My texts for today’s sermon are taken overnight from the website of the Daily Mail.

Firstly, here’s a piece by Mia De Graaf and a Daily Mail Reporter on the latest scientific theory that feeling drowsy and/or taking naps during the day are signs that indicate a threefold increase in a person’s likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s – see here – DAILY MAIL (1)

Secondly, I present an article by Natalie Rahhal, a Mail health reporter, on the news that either sitting in an office doing ‘mind work’ appears to make a person feel more tired than taking physical exercise does – see here – DAILY MAIL (2)

Needless to say, it is all too easy to render oneself a gibbering wreck by relating the contents of every news item and/or feature article one reads to one’s own version of life in the raw, but here I go.

For the past twenty five years I have spent the bulk of my daily existence ‘working from home’ – and by choice also spending my spare recreational time researching in one form or another – in front of a computer screen.

Since as far back and my memory is capable of retrieving – and before my readers quip it, let me say that no, it’s not the week before last (!) – I have also had some very strange sleeping habits.

I have always been an ‘early to bed and early to rise’ sort of a guy and in the past decade or so this habit has developed to the point where I tend to sleep roughly six or seven hours a day in total – but never more than four hours in one ‘go’ – yet simply, via the expedient of listening & responding to my body clock, I regularly take one or more short naps during the day whenever I feel like it, e.g. after a meal.

And feel that this routine allows me a lifestyle and cycle that works for me and/or is at the very least acceptable.

Separately, I have been told by the medics that I have apparently developed some lower back issues – and a degree of bad posture bordering upon a stoop – from sitting all day at a desk in front of a computer.

That’s my personal background.

And now to apply these latest scientific research findings to the state of my all-round health and the way I spend my time.

Taken together, these two articles seem to be advising me, firstly, that sitting at my computer all day is as (or more) tiring as going out into my local park and going for a jog, ‘working out’ and/or playing golf and/or any other sport of my choice.

And secondly, that the aforementioned regime I have adopted to occupy my waking hours these past twenty-plus years has made it three times more likely that I will eventually develop dementia.

Am I bothered? Am I going to change my lifestyle as a result of these stunning revelations?

Dear reader, I am not.

One factor about the nature of human existence is that one tends to get used to … er … what one gets used to.

The man who works four hours per day, if suddenly asked to up that to six hours per day, might find the switch a strain.

However – clearly – the man who already works six hours per day would not. This fact of life underpins every theory of sports training and a lot else besides.

I suppose it’s a case of a dilemma as to whether ‘applying oneself for long periods’ gradually and inevitably wears one’s body out, or whether the principle ‘use it or lose it’ – together perhaps with the truism that effort improves output, as night follows day – works best for the average human being.

Or even the extraordinary ones.