Losing the Night to Day

Sleep. It's something most people value highly, and they rightly should; we spend on average about one-third of our life doing it. And one common theme in movies, TV, and pop culture is the snooze button.

"Five more minutes, Mom!"

I'm begging to theorize that in today's fast-paced life, the snooze button allows a certain sense of self-control over the inevitable. When you hit the snooze, you're saying, "Yeah, that's right, I'm in enough control over my life that I can afford to toss an extra nine minutes out the window with no problem." However, it also implies that you don't really have that much control over it otherwise you would have set the alarm for 10 or more minutes later.

So, hitting the snooze button is the first opportunity in the day where you get to exert a little self-determination in a life that is already fairly well defined without your help, long before you wake the first time.

Of course, you can gain even more self control by training yourself to wake at exactly the same time without the need for an alarm clock. But then by doing that, you're denying the evolution of technology and how it must infiltrate our daily lives. And I can't get behind that. ;)