I share your suspicions but I’d go further. The bed industry has always struck me as an obvious scam that plays on people’s nebulous health anxieties and also on the tempting cognitive fallacy that, since an 8-hour night is the same amount as an 8-hour workday, the exact physical makeup of your bed is somehow as important as your career or something. It all strikes me as almost completely irrational. People slept for aeons on straw and somehow survived. A bed is a soft flat object, any other abstract properties are just marketing IMO.
Absolutely. The 8-hour sleep is probably just a marketing invention, related to modern electric light. In pre-modern Europe it was common to get up and do housework in the middle of the night.
I share your suspicions but I’d go further. The bed industry has always struck me as an obvious scam that plays on people’s nebulous health anxieties and also on the tempting cognitive fallacy that, since an 8-hour night is the same amount as an 8-hour workday, the exact physical makeup of your bed is somehow as important as your career or something. It all strikes me as almost completely irrational. People slept for aeons on straw and somehow survived. A bed is a soft flat object, any other abstract properties are just marketing IMO.
Also, eight hours is a modern invention! Throughout most of human history we slept several times a day, rather than just once.
I’m really liking siestas these days and can’t go back to a single eight hour block.
Absolutely. The 8-hour sleep is probably just a marketing invention, related to modern electric light. In pre-modern Europe it was common to get up and do housework in the middle of the night.