In this fifth video in my Christmas series on light, I explore the relationship between light, healing and health — and why modern work patterns deny people access to the very conditions they need to recover and thrive.
Light regulates sleep, hormones, mood and immunity. Yet long hours, commuting, shift work and poor housing mean many people barely see daylight at all. Artificial light cannot replace what we lose.
Hmm.
We suffer from a lack of sunlight if that is something that isn’t available to us, and shift work also creates this suffering, and commuting steals our time outdoors. The way that we work, the way that neoliberalism demands that we work, has consequences. In fact, you can say that capitalism steals light from us. Time is extracted, rest is minimised, daylight becomes scarce to us.
Capitalism and neoliberalism have shortened working hours. Dramatically over the centuries and still not, yes, in recent decades.
Productivity is prioritised whilst health is secondary
Productivity being defined – defined, note – as producing more in the same hours, or producing the same in fewer hours. And this is also why working hours have been falling – it’s normal for humans to take some of the benefit of rising productivity in shorter working hours.
Which leaves us gawping at where Spud gets to. Assume he’s right, we all need more sunshine and so on, fewer working hours would get us to this. Increased productivity would do this for us, wholly naturally but increased productivity is the very thing Spud rails against.
Sigh.
More pontificating from someone who’s presumably never worked a shift at anything. Some people prefer shift work, some don’t. Glad to see he’s in favour of NHS reform though. Can’t have them working those neoliberal shifts can we?
Some people prefer shift work, some don’t
This. Personally, I have difficulty sleeping during the day, but I’m also a night owl. Give me four nights in a row and I’m happy. Work the night, have a few drinks and dinner between sunrise to midday, rinse and repeat. One off nights hurt a bit, I don’t deal with that as well as I used to.
What he doesn’t realise is that shit has to get done, and the time chooses you.
What might be fun would be to restrict work on the model trains to the same times that would apply in the real world. “Nope, you can’t occupy that track until 2200 and you have to be off by 0400. Make sure all your paperwork is in place before reopening” 🙂
When commies close businesses they can claim its for the employees’ health.
Let’s see what no food does for their health.
Spud wants the proles getting their sunlight outside doing forced labor.
Spud, of course, gets to live a life of leisure and get his sunlight the way he wishes.
Yes. His utopia is one where the peasants toil in the fields to fulfil a Central Plan dictated by R Murphy from his sun lounger.
And, thanks to video number five, he has proved that he would in fact be doing them a favour.
When Carl Heneghan is not running the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine he works as an out-of-hours emergency GP. This, from is newsletter today:
“You want the Crisis team,” says the call handler.
“This woman is in a critical state and is likely to pass within the next 48 hours. I have administered pain relief and arranged for a syringe driver, but it is essential to secure crisis care immediately. She is currently in the upstairs bedroom, and her daughter is the only person available to help care for her, including turning her. Prompt assistance is critical.”
“The problem is the crisis team has no capacity,” says the lady.
Hmm, sounds familiar, I think to myself.
“So, what you mean is when there is a crisis, there is no crisis team available,” I say.
I can’t help but think that the crisis team needs a name change.
“Yes, unfortunately,” comes the reply.
Obviously, illness doesn’t work neoliberal hours, and neither does the Crisis team.
The ‘Crisis Team’ might be a call center line. Nothing behind the answerer. At least no Hindi accent.
Like BBC complaint department. They have one only so they can claim they have one. They don’t actually do anything with complaints.
He’s not the only one out there who idealizes a world where peasants worked from sunup to sundown and presumably had nice tans. It’s why there is far more admiration for Cuba and Venezuela than either place warrants, though only by buffoons who’d never actually live there.
People with well paid jobs in poor but sunny countries often tend to keep out of the sun as much as possible so they don’t get sun tans hence look like peasant workers.
Even the peasant workers often cover themselves up, but even with a hat their faces are apt to tan.
But yes, I’ve spent enough time in South America to have heard a number of westerners gush about how picturesque poverty can be.
I thought he was signed into an MLM scheme for ‘daylight health lights’ ans was waiting for the buy it now point in all that turgid guff
“Yet … shift work … mean many people barely see daylight at all”
What? At the moment in England, sunrise is not much before 9am, and sunset is just after 4pm.
So someone working a standard 9-5 indoor job Isn’t going to see daylight during the week.
But someone working other shifts will.
It’s the complete opposite of what he says; working shifts or non-standard hours makes you more likely to see daylight at this time of year, not less.
Or has the power of the Great Professor’s blog made the earth change its course around the sun?
It depends, someone doing an email job will still have bright sunlight streaming through their window and lighting up their desk/office for the whole eight hours.
So yes it’s not strictly *shift* work, more the kind of jobs you do on shifts (retail, hospitality, medicine, manufacturing, logistics, etc.) tend to be done in the bowels of some big building, where there’s no desk, no outside wall, no window, and no one-hour lunchbreak in the park.
Aye, that’s true (so long as your desk is near enough to the window, and on the right side of the building). Good point.
But the broader point is true – Murphy’s point is still nonsense – it isn’t working shifts that would make you see less daylight.
He doesn’t know what these words mean.
To him ‘productivity’ means ‘how much you produce’. To everyone else it means ‘how efficiently you produce’. The productive worker gets more done during working hours. No one considers a guy that takes 15 hours to do 125% the work of someone working 8 hours is ‘more productive’ – they just work harder and produce more total even if they produce less/hr.
Spud probably thinks that vitamin D supplements are a cunning neo-liberal conspiracy to enable shift work…
Having worked shifts for over 20 years, I much preferred it to days Shorter commutes with little traffic and the ability to use the hours off to greater advantage .The only time I received less sun was on winter night shifts as I was asleep during the day as opposed to being shut in a building all day. One wonders about sailors on Nuclear subs, submersed for 6 months at a time.