It doesn't matter if you're reading this now, or five years from now (hi future people!), odds are that comment still applies to me.
Ever since I got out of college, I started convincing myself that six hours of sleep is a full nights sleep, while four hours will work in a pinch.
Sleep just uses up too much of my time. Like tonight, I'm staying up to
My weekdays consist of getting up at 6 AM, getting the kids up and running and out the door, then spend eight hours not-writing for a living. After that, we spend the evening running to various high school concerts, gymnastics practices, Lego league, random errands, and so on. After that, it's bath time for the kids, and bed.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
If I had committed myself to getting a good night's sleep every night, there's no way I'd have finished my book. I also wouldn't have been able to do things like binge-watch The X-Files on Netflix or read every Marvel comic from Fantastic Four #1 to the present, in order of release date. You know, important stuff.
Mainly, it's because I know my clock's ticking, just like everyone else's. We have a finite number of days on this flying rock we call home (unless we develop de-aging technology and warp drives in my lifetime, obviously). There's no do-over, there's no restore-from-a-previously-saved-state, there's no 1-ups.
So I try to put myself in my future-self's shoes, which I assume will automatically tie themselves like on Back To The Future II, and try to figure out what he's going to regret when he hits the big Game Over. Somehow I doubt it'll be "I wish I'd gotten more sleep".
Future me's a pretty demanding, yet strikingly handsome, old man. And when we finally meet, on the porch of his future house, brandishing his stun-gun at the neighborhood kids to keep them off his genetically modified lawn that...I don't know...mow's itself or something, I'd rather not have to explain to him everything that got left undone, just for the sake of 8 hours of sleep.
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