“How are you?”
“Good, tired and busy, but good.”
The Netherlands is tired. We spend less hours in bed and the quality we do obtain after a night’s sleep is decreasing. The cause isn’t unequivocal. Some say that it’s caused by the increasing number of electronic devices and the light they shed. Others surmise that the Netherlands is breaking down upon a 24-hour economy.
Regardless of the cause many people seem to want to share this state of well being with the people that surround them, why? Lifestyle magazine Grazia wrote last year that tiredness is a new symbol of social status. Could it be that the complaint is a new equivalent of the fancy car we bought from the money we had earned. Is being tired the new criterion on which we measure one’s social or economic prestige?
(commissioned by Vrij Nederland)