For a change, I hadn’t looked on Instagram for a whole day and during dinner it turned out that I had immediately missed crucial information: Arie Boomsma’s sleep routine. My dining group twirled a fork into the spaghetti, pricked a shrimp and, meanwhile, quoted with delight from the list Boomsma had shared. In a photo of his terracotta-colored bedroom, the gym owner had listed in nineteen points what he does to optimize his sleep. I can’t remember exactly, but it was like doing 12,000 presses by the glow of your e-reader, juggling for 45 minutes in an ice bath with tractor tires, and in a dark room alternately stub your toe and say what you’re grateful for. Anyway, it sounded like a lot of work.
With such a watertight sleep routine, Boomsma would not have lost sleep over all the sneering reactions that appeared on social media, ranging from ‘just chill, dude, sleep is not an Olympic sport’ to ‘some people just don’t want to be happy’. For the lesser gods, stepping into the gym every now and then is already quite an achievement. They don’t have a boho farm full of gym equipment, no ice bath on their estate, or they would have lacked willpower.
Also difficult, by the way, to combine such a program with a screen time of thirteen hours a day. Although you can also call scrolling through social media with a little good will ‘continuously intensive exercise’, item 8 of Boomsma’s list for the digitally active may seem the easiest: ‘No laptop or telephone in the last hour of the day.’ Matter of stopping what you’re doing, right? Just put that thing away and go do something else.
But turning your back on the crowds on social media is more difficult than it sounds, as can be seen from all the tricks that are invented to relax online. Following trends like cottage core and silent vlogs, which both mean that you can dream away on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram with people who pretend to live without technology, the digital rest stop, a resting point to recover from all the stimuli. The phenomenon was interpreted this week in The Washington Post and maybe you’ve stumbled upon it while scrolling: serene images of a babbling brook, a tidy house where the sun shines cozy in or a turtle that goes about its business. Then the encouragement to take a break by looking at those serene images for as long as you want. Everything to be able to be away without having to log out.
The question is whether it is just as relaxing as actually watching a babbling brook, but if so, then that might also be good news for anyone who longs for a night’s sleep à la Arie Boomsma, but cannot muster the associated effort. On social media, it is almost impossible to avoid images of people fanatically working up a sweat, dipping cheerfully in ice water and taking fresh and varied food so seriously that it involves squeezed celery.
Boomsma’s efforts also seem to have an effect on his followers, as witnessed by Elly’s reaction under a video in which he swings from a rack: ‘I’m already tired when I look at you.’