I keep seeing the word “privileged” thrown around, and this one, I actually understand to be right.

But if you have a mental disease or another serious incurable condition, kick like 5000 points off your privilege scale.

Money and medication don’t always help. I’m ready to give a very, very thick stack of money to anyone who can actually cure what I have. I wish I could do it.

I don't like the word "privileged". It's used completely incorrectly. The dictionary definition of privilege is very clear: "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group."

or

"a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor"

There's nothing special nor granted by being born healthy and being normal. Being normal is normal. That's where nature strives to be. In a balanced, normal distribution where most of it's evolved creatures simply don't die or struggle to live by default. So being healthy and normal never was a privilege nor luck, it's the default state where we have to stem words from. Having a serious condition doesn't make you less "privileged", it makes you rather unfortunate and it's upsetting and sad that we have to deal with physical and mental illnesses still, but it isn't and never was about privilege.

That being said, I completely understand wanting to be healthy. No matter the condition, it always suck to suffer anything...

Saddest thing of all is that most of mental problems we grow up with seems to be entirely the fault of our broken society. Developer countries have much higher rates of mental problems. Leading theory as of now I believe is that we fuck with our natural behavior patterns like sleep from an early age and that fucks us all up in different ways...

eitherway, I wish you luck with whatever you have and hopefully it will become curable at some point.. :/

Still on @Hazarth 's first point, privilege assumes relativity. It is hard to say that someone has an advantage without pointing at someone who does not.

For example, someone in a coma in a hospital bed bears huge privilege relative to people who enter a coma due to sceptic shock or overdosing and are left unattended at the side of the road.

So context is what evidences the privilege.
Naturally, some people have so much of it in every conceivable aspect that those people are privileged in almost every situation. Talking billionaires here. But those are rare.

Thus, the Down syndrome kids in a USA private school are privileged when it relates to financial security and healthcare, compared with poor public school (but otherwise healthy) kids in the same country. And all of those are privileged when compared to pretty much everyone in a Syrian conflict zone.

Thereby, "check your privilege" or "privilege scale" only ever makes sense on fairly well-defined and limited contexts.

I know the feeling. You've got to try Jesus. You don't even have to accept that the story is true. Take it as a riddle and study it.

A nice starting point might be. Everyone said "you bring words of life" . But there aren't really many mentions of what Jesus was teaching in the canonical bible. What was he saying to get this kind of reactions?

@Hazarth I've heard that theory summary before, what are the specifics on what our sleep pattern should be?

@LordPeeve Not sure there's enough space in devrant to go into all the specifics, but in short: there's two drives for sleep pressure: adenosine buildup from being awake (clears during sleep) and your internal clock. when born, the clock is still syncing up and it takes a couple of years at first to slow down. In young children the clock gets rather synced but also dramatically shifted forwards (100% of the time, seems to be evolutionary in nature) and very slowly moves to "adult timing" through teenage years up to about when you are 20y/o. This means young kids up to end of highschool naturally want to sleep at later hours, so while an adult might want them to sleep at 11~ the kids are only as tired at around 1~

also all humans have a different sleep length but only slightly, everyone is around 8hrs on a 24hr day cycle (but in reality there can be shifts up to about 20 minutes~)

so children should naturally on average sleep between 0:00-9:00 up to 2:00-10:00

@LordPeeve Now, there are 2 (technically 3) phases of sleep during a nights sleep. You have the REM and NREM sleep.

Children sleep is naturally high in NREM sleep and low on REM sleep and through adulthood you slowly gain REM and lose NREM sleep.

now NREM sleep is found to be critical for memory consolidation and learning while REM sleep seems to be more important for creativity and emotions. Also during sleep, the highest amount of NREM sleep happens towards the end of sleep, last 2 hours or so.

this all means 3 things at least

1. We actively fuck up childrens learning ability by waking them early for school, which is ironic

2. We force them to be active during period of time when they are still hazy and tired, because they are still coming off their internal clock's sleep prescription.

3. They have trouble falling asleep because we force them into sleeping 1-2 hours early, that's like an adult going to sleep at 8 when he naturally falls asleep at 11.

@LordPeeve

This means that realistically kids get dramatically less than 6 hours of sleep. And this is an issue, because there are connections between many problematic conditions to the lack of sleep, just to name a few:

1. lack of sleep directly causes the reward system to be overactive, meaning higher addictive behavior and hedonism

2. sleep regulates 2 hormones related to hunger. lack of sleep makes you crave more food and gives you less "im full" responses when eating leading to obesity

3. sleep regulates memory and emotions as said above

4. sleep clears toxins from the brain (beta amyloids, also linked the parkinsons)

5. Lack of proper NREM sleep in the womb of the mother is linked strongly to Autism (thus no drinking during pregnancy, alcohol disrupts sleep)

6. Sleep regenerates and boosts the immune system, especially the NK cells (cancer suppression) and somehow stimulates the ability of cells to deal with glucose (can lead to diabetes)

@LordPeeve Also to be precise when talking about memory. Experiments have repeatedly shown that NREM sleep is critical for not only memory consolidation, but also for "cleaning" the short term memory in general. Which means when you're sleep deprived you also lose the ability to form new memories efficiently, so not only you retain less, you also have trouble focusing and memorizing stuff the next day.

Really I could go on and on and on, there's hundreds of compelling evidence for why sleep is absolutely essential to humans and the lack of it has serious long term consequences.

One important clue for example is that everyone with mental problems has some sort of sleep abnormality as well...

oh, lack of REM sleep also screws up your fight/flight responses and makes you moody and easily upset or completely lethargic and this can greatly affect anyone with depression or bipolar. You don't want that during early childhood at all, not even in adulthood, but that's by choice...

@Hazarth Mate, I didn't expect that much info, honest I expected a link to read. But thanks so much for the effort 🙏

I can confirm many of your points even as an adult due to avg sleeping a few good hours per night for over a year (since my little one was born). It's no fun and my memory and demeanor have taken a huge negative hit.