when did we forget how to sleep?
the big start
At first we were little and privileged to be able to fall asleep within five minutes of hitting the pillow.
trauma
I'm going to leave this unspecified, but as such things always are it was messy.
puberty
It happened. We learned that not everyone always gets to sleep 5m after hitting the pillow. That said, by and large things were okay. Maybe. Paradoxically nobody here now can or cares to recall the day to day of being a teenager.
early adulthood
Man this was a mess. Came out with great stories and an even worse ability to fall asleep when necessary.
adulting
Now we can't sleep. Sometimes it's 22.00 and it is instant sleep time. Sometimes after dinner we take a nap and fall asleep at 23.00. sometimes we do not sleep until 05.00. All of this is entirely decoupled from when we get up (whenever we feel like. Modern life is good like that, at least for us) and of what we did while awake.
bad advice
I guess the moral of this story can be do not burden folks with sleep advice: 'sleep hygiene', less caffeine, meditation, medication, a regular schedule. We've tried them all and to a certain extent still keep to them (why???). They don't work. For some reason our circadian rhythm was made for a planet that has a nice varied day length, somewhere between 14 and 30 hours.
in conclusion
Sleep well friends. It's nice to sleep when you can.