Have you ever thought about how many hit songs there have been about sunshine? For example:
You Are My Sunshine (Various, 1939). … One of the most-recorded and most-listened-to songs of all time, dating back nearly nine decades.
Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The 5th Dimension, 1969) … Billboard ranks this the 66th best song of all time. I admit I didn’t pay it much attention until it was used for the last scene in the 2005 movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Ain’t No Sunshine (Bill Withers, 1971). This was Withers’s first hit, before songs like Lean on Me and Just the Two of Us. Fun fact: Withers worked in a factory making airline bathrooms for Boeing 747s when he recorded this song.
Oh, and as Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School, pointed out recently: Sunshine on My Shoulders (John Denver, 1974), which Denver said he wrote (ironically) in Minnesota, on “a dreary day, gray and slushy.”
It’s a long list, and we haven’t even come to the last 50 years. I hadn’t even realized how many there were until I started trying to compile them for this article.
But the simple fact that singing about sunshine seems so often to generate hits tells you something about how we as human beings react to it.
That’s why I was taken with Brooks’s exploration of the whole concept of sunshine and why it’s such a key component of happiness — well, that and the fact that I’m the proud owner of not one but two light therapy lamps.
15 minutes a day
Writing in The Atlantic, as he often does, Brooks cited an 1841 excerpt from the journals of Henry David Thoreau about the power of sunshine, which was also published in The Atlantic — back in 1878.
Coming across that passage led Brooks to do a bit of a deep dive on why and “how sunshine affects well-being.”
Synthesizing a host of studies on the issue, he comes away with the idea that a good bit of sunshine can increase happiness and improve mood, but not for everyone — and even that “direct sunshine can raise anxiety for some individuals.” (emphasis in original).
Brooks concludes that just 15 minutes a day of sunshine is enough to get all of the vitamin D that most people need, which seems like a not-very-difficult standard to meet most of the time.
Just in case, he offers three distilled bits of advice:
Avoid light at night. (“Under no circumstances should you look at your phone in bed.”)
Make getting sunshine part of your daily routine.
Get your morning light even when it’s not sunny. I suppose this brings us back to my line about light therapy; I don’t think I’ve actually suffered from seasonal affective disorder, but why take the risk?
No matter what else happens …
I found the whole article interesting, but I think I’ve identified one other benefit to getting sunshine that doesn’t seem to get mentioned.
I remember that it came to me in a flash, about 12 hours after my daughter was born.
I was sitting in the hospital room, holding her, passing her back to my wife, and just enjoying my first day as a dad. As the sun began to set and a nurse helped us to put her in her crib, it suddenly hit me:
A newborn baby has no idea that the sun will come up again tomorrow.
But it’s the one thing that we all come to realize, and to count on, in this world.
No matter what else happens, Earth will rotate, night will end, and tomorrow will be illuminated and warmed by the sun.
Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit happy?
7 other things worth knowing
President Trump decried the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as a “Democrat hoax” on Wednesday, saying, “Really, I think it’s enough.” While numerous documents have been released recently, the majority contained information that was already public. Trump’s comments came after Epstein accusers held news conferences on Capitol Hill, and one victim asked Trump to meet her at the Capitol so she could explain why the issue wasn’t a hoax. (PBS NewsHour)
U.S. forces could have stopped a boat that officials say was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, but President Trump chose instead to destroy it, killing 11 people on board, to send a deterrent message to traffickers. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Rubio told reporters. Lawmakers and legal analysts questioned the legality of launching a lethal strike against civilians in international waters outside of an armed conflict. (The Washington Post)
Florida is set to end to all state vaccine mandates, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced at a news conference Wednesday, comparing the mandates to “slavery.” For decades, Florida has required vaccines for kids attending school, including shots that protect against measles-mumps-rubella, polio, chickenpox and Hepatitis B. (Tampa Bay Times)
A new COVID wave is washing over California, with the state seeing continued increases in the number of newly confirmed cases and hospitalizations as some officials urged the public to take greater precautions. The extent of the recent increases has prompted some county-level health officials to recommend that residents once again consider wearing masks in indoor public settings, at least until transmission has declined. (Los Angeles Times)
What We Know About America’s Billionaires: 1,135 and Counting: An exclusive, up-close look at the richest people in the U.S., from celebrities like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk to a founder of a roofing supplier in Wisconsin. (WSJ)
Erewhon, the Los Angeles-based exclusive grocery chain, is coming to New York City with an eye-watering entry fee, but there's a catch: it's located inside an inclusive club, so those who want to shop there will first have to fork over a $36,000 initiation fee plus $7,000 in annual dues. (Daily Mail)
Pippi Longstocking, IKEA and the Nobel Prize are among 100 works, brands and ideas deemed to define what it means to be Swedish, according to a cultural heritage list unveiled by the government this week -- part of the election manifesto of the right-wing ruling coalition. All items in the canon must be at least 50 years old, so it excludes the pop group ABBA, one of Sweden's most famous cultural exports, and rules out contributions made by most immigrants, since most of them arrived in Sweden after 1975. (Reuters)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Katja Rooke on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
And then there’s Walking on Sunshine: https://youtu.be/iPUmE-tne5U?si=_BWnil0yOSZ0tTLD
It’s sad that society is becoming so complacent about vaccines, they forget how terrible the preventable diseases can be on kids - and adults. My mom had polio as a child, it affected her the rest of her life. That there was quite enough to make sure her kids, and my kids were fully vaccinated. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Even those “harmless” things like measles can kill, tough way to learn the value of vaccines.
And the story about blowing up boats gives me pause. How can doing that in international waters be allowed? Don’t get the thinking behind paying $7,000 a year just to buy groceries, either. The US is going down a strange path.