Wake Up, Sleepy Head

Enoch B. Mnisi, DD2022 · Day 202 min read

Therefore He says: "Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light."
Ephesians 5:14 (NKJV)

Imagine that you had the entire twenty-four hours of every day to do and to be your best. You may think your life would be better than it is now if you had more time, but that is only half the picture. It is not really the availability of time that makes the difference; it is what is done and achieved with it. It does not matter if you have all the time in the world: if you do nothing with it, your life might be far worse than it is now. In a sense, having fewer hours in a day actually saves some people from speedy destruction.

I have been doing some calculations on the average human being's sleep over a lifetime. There are 8,760 hours in a year, and at an average of eight hours a night, about 2,920 of them are spent asleep.

My own reading time averages around 672 hours a year; reading four hours a day, that amounts to less than six months of days. So most people actually spend more of their lifetime asleep than doing any other single thing. To make up for our sleep, we would have to do twice as much productive work, reading for example, every day, just to reach half of our sleeping time.

Another vanity to observe is that the average person spends more time each year in leisure than in productive work, and the productive work does not reach even half of the time spent asleep. Add up the time spent in leisure, including the leisure taken during working hours, texting, chatting to colleagues and surfing the internet, and it is roughly as much again as the time spent asleep.

So we are in leisure mode for most of our waking days, and on top of that we sleep more than we do anything else. No wonder most people are poor. "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep; so shall your poverty come on you like a prowler."

Taking all this into consideration, the sleep and the leisure together come to roughly 2,920 × 2, or 5,840 hours a year spent really doing nothing. That leaves 8,760 − 5,840, or about 2,920 hours a year that people really have for meaningful work. It means that on average we spend:

about a third of the year sleeping;
about a third of the year doing nothing;
and at most a third doing meaningful work, and in practice, once the rest of life is accounted for, far less.

We need to wake up.