ungraceful degradation

"the ability of the human body to gracefully degrade under adverse conditions fascinates me :)"

- Kris, September 7th 2013

12 years ago. How much has changed since then.

I have just spent a whole week, barely functioning. Literally just crawling out of bed to eat and rest and eventually sleep. Cooking is about the most I've been able to muster the energy for.

The funny thing is, metabolically, my body is supposedly fine. Not entirely fine - but probably in similar shape based on medical parameters etc. But it isn't behaving the same. Has medicine not reached the level where what's going on can be pinpointed? Or is this the result of the passing of some tipping point in a slow process which was in motion years ago, maybe even before 2013? Some doctors have said it could also be the result of a brief viral infection that left me but that my body has not recovered from.

Chances are it's a combination of at least two of those things.

One thing is for sure - biohacking does NOT work long term. All those things I did to push myself, thinking I had discovered something really smart about myself? They probably had long term effects.

Irregular sleep, low quality sleep, multiple short sleep intervals instead of one full night's sleep - the impact of those is clear to me now.

Screen time is now having an impact obvious enough to be measurable on a day to day basis.

The constant input of compressed information into my head may or may not be affecting how I process information now - but I know that my ability to process information has definitely been affected.

Embracing the internet and social media (back when it seemed fledgling and world-changing) seems to have had an oversized impact on me as I have been using it for far longer than most people. It's reached the point where the measures I had put in place to streamline my usage have been blocked by social media platforms, forcing me to use them as they see fit.

And then there's random age related (yep some things are clearly age related!) things that are simply making it harder to deal with everything else.

And so, we're at this point - where I'm struggling to cope. Where the degradation is no longer graceful or even sustainable.

But I'm still alive and functioning. I can still do most of the things that I used to, but just more carefully. I'm worried about how long that will last though. That is not a day of realization I'm looking forward to.