Eddie, you hit on two things that are front and center in my mind lately and I'd like to contribute to the body of knowledge and continued development of the ideas. There is no TLDR version, and these two strains of thought are part of a doctoral thesis I'm working on. (maybe someday, it will all be refined to the point of being useful and actionable)

1. - Sleep. What I'm writing is the summary of about six months of research through classic literature, medical science archives, and discussions with numerous specialists. I've recently started shifting over to what's called segmented sleep. Stop and think: since when has insomnia, mental illness, diabetes, and the full range of sleep related disorders been such a huge problem in history? Never. It's all new and coupled with poor diet and lack of excercise, our "modern" civilization is driving itself off a cliff by going against several million years of evolution. Our medical science is not even close to being advanced enough to counter what we're doing to ourselves. Not sleeping enough is the equivalent of drianing the oil out of a car engine and humans will die after 10 days of no sleep. Also: prolonged lack of sleep actually stunts the brain permanently much like certain drug addictions and is directly observable in CAT scans of neural pathways. So what to do?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

The invention of the electric light has very obvious upsides: we can do stuff after dark. The major downside is the disruption of the circadian rythm regulating our natural sleep pattern. Note that the upper classes changed over much earlier, and their incidence of insanity and dysfunction skyrocketed. Right up until about 150 +/- years ago, the natural sleep cycle was very deep sleep from 8PM to midnight or so, then a period of waking up, and then a second sleep cycle from 2AM to 6AM. The period in between saw very high endorphin and prolactin production, and if you read the classics there are many mentions made of it. Somehow, this facet of sleep has quietly slipped out of our collective concouisness...but it's still in the background. People in undeveloped areas of the world are still on this schedule (with variation of course) and people in studies will revert to this schedule when artificial light is removed. I'm on week two of this and although my hours are a bit different than the pure old standard (obviosly because of my work schedule), I can already feel a HUGE difference. Remember how good you felt the first day you got a good night's sleep after a period of prolonged exhaustion...it feels like that every day and I'm getting a whole lot more done now that I'm more alert. If this goes well longer term, I'll write about it in more detail. Think about it this way though: what actual quality stuff is the average person accomplishing at 10PM besides watching crappy TV they can record on Tivo anyway.

2.Posts 2, 7, and 10 are intertwined from my perspective. There's two things at play, and I think that as they become more obvious to the average person they will define much of our civilization for the next 40 years or so.

A. Increased use of computer power to commoditize as much of life as possible. Marx whined about the commoditization of labor, but this goes far, far beyond that. We're commoditizing everything. Hell, look at big data, where the commodity is the process of commoditizing. You can sell the service of selling a service, and then sell the optimization of optomizing that process. Bottom line, the incentive structure of basically EVERYTHING is going to become irrelevant and the process is already well underway. Your intelligence, connections, and hard work will amount to nothing if they don't start to align with this. Even your resources can be rendered worthless and a digital fiction can assume commodity value (bitcoin is just the first, there will be plenty more experiments before it's perfected). This will force a radical rethinking of basically all of our incentive systems and means of relating to each other. Finance is, in this perspective, the lab rat for the shape of things to come. If meaningful reform can be made then the transition will be smooth, but realize that most dedicated futurists forsee global nuclear holocaust being likely before full adaptation given how selfish and irrational people tend to be. Democracy, Republicanism, capitalism, our very concept of what real freedom is, these are going to take a back seat to the next big thing the human race creates for itself. This is a global phenomenon and is totally inescapeable in the long run. The human being hasn't changed, but the human being changed the world and will have to adopt new patterns of chosen behavior. Go ahead and fight it, you'll end up like horse drawn carraige drivers did afer the automobile was invented. Everything your parents taught you about 'the real world' will cease to matter.

B. Which leads me to this. Most the folks on this site were heavily influenced by the baby boomers: the generation that had the nuke and used it. They had the drugs and took them. The computer was born. Humans went to space. Somehow, Keith Richards has been kept alive. The generation that opened pandora's box and put the contents on eBay after farming out replication processes to third world wholesalers. Long story short: they changed EVERYTHING. Gen-y has been doing the followup work. Now we're seeing the blindness of a generation that literally changed the world but at the same time doesn't really fully understand what they've created...but still wants to run it. And then there's the root of the problem: they don't realize they're becomming irrelevant and they won't let go. They're perhaps the first generation to raise their youth with almost completely useless means of navigating the reality they inherit. Now, they're writing articles about how fucked up their youth are and they're too stupid to see: the millenials (and gen-y) are going to take over whether the boomers like it or not, and whatever methods they adopt are going to work simply because they will, on average, outlive the boomers. The only question is whether the the boomers completely ruin everything before they kick the bucket or if they wise up and shift from a 'management' mindset to a 'advisor' mindset. It's an ego issue and the boomers are uncomfortable admitting that another generation would have done what they did had the timing been different...kind of childish really. A huge feature of management (and likely moreso in politics) in the next generation will be damage mitigation of people who still control resources but whose understanding of what constitutes good stewardship is rapidly becomming outdated.

I hope you make it through all this, and I actually WANT (relevant) criticism because it sharpens the exploration of these ideas