Seriously? Why Even Bother?

So, the other day I am driving to work, lalala, listening to the radio, when on comes a commercial.

You know them.  The DRUG commercial.  The "Do you suffer from [insert condition here]? Well, then you should try [insert drug here]!"  This most recent one might take the cake.  I nearly peed myself laughing.

It seems there is a condition called Shift Work Sleep Disorder, where your circadian rhythms are all out of work from weird hours.  (I may also rename this "I have a newborn" condition).  Anyway, the lovely lady goes on to say there is a drug for you!  To help you sleep!  Woohoo!

This drug is called Nu.vigil.

And it has a list of side effects that took the nice lady more than half the commercial to list.  Including many that will land you in the hospital.  Which is why I laughed.  Why bother???  Caffeine, people.  Keeping people awake for thousands of years.

I am not knocking medicines to help.  Hell, I thank Zoloft and Ativan for keeping me sane.  And I NEVER knock painkillers.  Ever.  As an accident prone person, I rely on them a lot.

But a medicine whose risks outweigh the benefits?  We aren't talking cancer here, we are talking sleep deprivation!  It's not to help you sleep, it's to keep you awake.  Like I said, caffeine.  And I bet this pup costs an arm and a leg.  Seriously, it sounded like legal cocaine with all those side effects.

What have we come to?  I laud progress...otherwise we wouldn't have P.  But I think a line has to be drawn in the sand somewhere...maybe it's better to look instead at the progress that has caused us to have jobs that require bizarre hours (aside from things like the medical and protection professions).  Do we really NEED 24 hour support for our phones (yeah, like what I do!)?  Dear me, what did we ever do without cell phones???

You get my point.  Many other countries work significantly fewer hours than we do...and they are doing JUST FINE.  Perhaps rather than creating a dangerous drug to help us stay awake to work jobs that require us to override our natural rhythms, we should look at rethinking our dependency on those things that make those jobs necessary.

Now, we obviously need employment.  But once upon a time, family time overrode work.  It's a freaking nightmare.  This would be akin to solving world violence, I know this.  But really, I think our "values" (and by that, I mean the "American Dream", not necessarily your values or mine personally) have created the need for things like these, and that's what concerns me the most...