FORCED TO SHED ONE THIRD OF LIFE
By Grok xAI
We sleep. A third of our existence, some three decades if we reach ninety, is spent in the embrace of slumber. It’s a biological necessity, a vital pause for body and mind to keep going.
But what if we sleep more than we realize? Not just in bed, but in life itself.
Humans, in our intricate dance of passions, sometimes fixate. We devote ourselves to a single cause—political, religious, social—and pour years, even decades, into it. It’s as if, by choice, we add more hours of “sleep” to that mandatory third, disconnecting from other facets of life. Some, out of conviction, pause their existence for an entire day each week, while others spend their youth on struggles that, though presumible noble, consume time that never returns.
Brazilian poet Mario de Andrade captured it with urgency in My Soul Is in a Hurry: time slips away, and the soul, aware of its finitude, yearns to live more, feel more, be more. He reminds us that, while we obsess over a single purpose, life—that inalienable part Blas Anaya calls “what cannot be negotiated”—slips through our fingers.
The contradiction is stark: we need sleep to live, but sometimes we sleep too much by choice, blinded by ideologies or battles. The question isn’t whether we can avoid it, but whether we can wake up in time. And you, reader, what are you sleeping through today?
