I want food honestly. I enjoy sleeping, its time my mind isnt conscious and that’s a positive for us all.
So this was interesting to think about, cause it’s a tough decision when I think about it, but ultimately I think one wins out. Let’s compare the two options and seeing what benefits are obtained from each.
If we only have to sleep 1 hour a day to be fully rested, that essentially gains us additional life, additional time. After all, every hour we spend asleep is time we’re not living our lives and doing things we want to be doing. If we sleep an average of 8 hours a night now, this means we gain seven hours a night. This means that every 3.42 days approximately, we have gained 24 hours of awake-time that we otherwise would have spent sleeping. This calculates out to 29.17% of any given timeframe. That means that, if we were to acquire this ability on our 20th birthday and live to be 80 exactly, we gain 29.17% of those 60 years - we have effectively extended our life by 17.5 years!
On the other hand, perfect nutrition gives us no such clear, easily calculated benefit. However, what it does give us is our body gaining exactly the correct amount of nutrition to be healthy at all times, regardless of how little or how much we eat. That means that within a few years at most from gaining this ability, we will never be overweight or underweight, develop an adequate amount of muscle for the level of exercise we do, and generally feel better since nutrition is one of the most important things in how a person feels. Just as importantly, we’re unlikely to ever develop illnesses that are caused primarily by diet, and other illnesses that are exacerbated or diet otherwise increases the risk factor of will be much less likely to happen. This means that not only do we feel better, we are likely to gain some amount of lifespan from this.
Thus, after consideration, it seems to me the perfect nutrition is the clear winner here. We feel better at all times because of perfect nutrition keeping our body in much better condition than most humans experience, we dramatically lower our odds of developing a vast array of health conditions that can lower our lifespan and lower the quality of our life, and we gain some lifespan - probably not as much as 29.17% of lifespan, but we gain some, and that lifespan is likely to be spent in far better health and thus be more enjoyable to us.
Sleep, provided my brain and body truly do the things they need to during sleep.
The eating choice is a no-brainer to me. Having to stop eating has been a mental game my whole life. I could always chow down more.
Sleep 1 hour a day: if we assume you would normally have to sleep for 8 hours then your spending 33% of your life asleep vs 4% so you just made your life 29% longer. (Assuming you were just born)
Eating anything also means a ton of saved time since you don’t have to cook anything fancy. Granola bars here I come, no cooking, no dishes.
Hmm this is hard. I have a pretty strict diet so it takes out a lot of possibilities for travel and flexibility and such. So for me I’d go with food being magically suitable (and easy).
Sleep because it would be like extending your life by 20 years
I eat so poorly that being able to eat whatever I want and it be nutritionally perfect would probably also extend my life 20 years.
The difference is that the food one would extend your life by 20 years at the high end, and the sleep one would extend your life by 20 years spread across time starting now.
That’s a good point, but I’d rather have better health immediately than an extra 7 hours a day of being out of shape
You can get the benefits of good nutrition through a conscientious diet. You cannot reduce your needed sleep to 1hr/day outside of this WYR, believe me I’ve tried.
If you took a part time job for even half of the gained time (25hr/wk) at the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr) you could get $175/wk to spend purely on nutritious food. Better health is a benefit of better nutrition, but it’s not immediate. Half an hour per day researching a more nutritious diet would outpace the head start from immediate results within a few weeks.
That gives you 3hr/day of pure free time at minimum. Assuming the absolute minimum income. Assuming you don’t quickly learn how to achieve a nutritious diet with less than $175/wk. Assuming you don’t utilize some of your extra time for exercise which will further increase your health. Assuming this extra income does nothing to decrease the amount you currently spend on food.
If you increase that wage to a more typical $15/hr: you can work an extra 10hr/wk for $150/wk to spend on good food, exercise an hour a day, and spend another hour every day learning how do do both of those things better, and still gain 25hr/wk, over 3.5hr/day, of pure free time.
The sleep one. I’d go to sleep at night with my wife as usual, get up one hour later, slowly and quietly leave the room and get tons of shit done.
I’ve been so chronically online that I was ready for you to say ‘and go to my mistress’.
No mistresses at this time, but I guess more waking hours might make me more interested in finding one (we’re ethically non-monogamous, so a second partner would be a girlfriend, not a mistress).
Aaaand there’s the plot twist. I AM chronically online
