Overthrow the Tyranny of Morning People
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I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom”
- Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling.
- The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success
Creatures of the Night
This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time.
I hate it because, as a general rule, I cannot stand Morning People. I do not like to cede even one minute to those chipper and virtuous larks, the co-workers who send you emails marked “5:01 a.m.” and who schedule “breakfast meetings” at dawn so we can all do some work before we get on with … doing more work. They are my natural enemy, and I refuse to entertain their caterwauling about waking up in the dark.
Look, I love daylight. I bathe in the rays of summer. I live for the sharp definition of a sunny autumn morning. I am enchanted by the brilliance of a bright winter vista. But I am a Night Person. An owl. A Nosferatu. I move in the shadows. I am vengeance; I am the night; I am Batman.
Okay, I’m not Batman, but I am one of those people who can stay up late and remain completely alert. When I drove a taxi in graduate school, I did the 5 p.m.–to–5 a.m. shift almost effortlessly. I’d hit the road, take people on their dates, and pick them up after their dates. (Sometimes that part wasn’t so pretty.) I’d drive bartenders home after the bars closed; later, I would ferry the, ah, ladies of the evening to their residences once the city finally slumbered. Then I’d have some coffee from the all-night Dunkin’ with cops and other night-shift folks, get the early fliers to the airport, go home, and take a nap.
When I was a volunteer for a suicide-prevention hotline, I worked the weekend late shift, where you’d better be on your game in the middle of the night. I’d do my best to be a supportive listener—sometimes during scary moments—and then I’d walk out at 4 a.m. feeling fine, ready for breakfast and a nap.
But ask me to get up at 4 a.m.? What is this, Russia?
Actually, that jibe is inaccurate: Russia, for many reasons, is mostly a night-owl culture. Be it under Soviet dictatorship, during the brief years of democracy, or under Vladimir Putin’s neofascism, Russian offices tend to be empty early in the morning. But Americans still venerate the idea that mornings are super productive, and every year, we’re all forced to give back an hour of sunlight in the afternoon so that our overmotivated friends and colleagues don’t have to endure their first latte in the predawn gloom. Instead, the rest of us have to feel the darkness enveloping us in the late afternoon, when we’re trying to get stuff done at work while the morning people nod off behind their desks.
Yes, I know: Kids will have to get up in the dark for school. Here’s one answer: Instead of setting the clocks back, maybe we should stop sending kids to school so ridiculously early, especially teenagers, who have a harder time learning in the early morning. Doctors and educators have been suggesting this for years, but we don’t listen, because we remain convinced that industrious people get up early in the morning and lazy people sleep in.
Take a look, for example, at the schedule that Chevron CEO Mike Wirth claims to observe, as reported by the Financial Times:
3:45 a.m. — Wake up to go to the gym for a 90-minute workout
5:15 a.m. — A cup of coffee and reading half a dozen newspapers
6 a.m. — Shower and head to the office
6 p.m. — Back for dinner with his wife
9 p.m. — Bed and reading
10 p.m. — Asleep
I believe that this is complete hooey. Not only is there no time between the end of his workout and his first cup of coffee, but no one reads six newspapers in 45 minutes. He then gets less than six hours of sleep, gets up, and does it all again. This is the idealized morning-person schedule, and it is madness. (Also, no matter what we do with the clocks, he will wake up in the dark. That’s his problem.)
Nowhere is this morning culture worshipped more obnoxiously than in Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital. I no longer live there, and I hear that things may be changing. But I was considered something of a reprobate when I worked in Washington (including on the Hill), because I would saunter into the office at, say, 8:15 a.m. instead of beating the traffic by arriving before dawn. “I was here at 6,” a co-worker would say. “I was here at 5,” another would answer, in a daily game of early-bird one-upmanship that sounded like a young-American version of the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.
I would go to my desk and growl at anyone who came near me before 9:30 a.m., but I was also the guy who was able to whip up a brief or a floor statement in the early evening, when the morning scolds were already glassy-eyed. (The greatest Hill staffers can do all of those things at any hour, but I wasn’t among them.)
I left Washington but then ended up ensnared in the morning culture of the U.S. military. I learned about the military’s love of mornings the hard way, by teaching at the Naval War College for 25 years, where an 8:30 start time for a seminar was considered “mid-morning.” I fully understand that military operations require getting up and being ready to go at oh dark thirty, but the military venerates morning culture as a kind of iron-man virtue signaling. A culture that says a project manager in the Pentagon should arrive at the office at 4 a.m. to be there before his boss—who will come in at 4:30 a.m. after jogging in the dark—is an unhealthy culture.
So, enough. Leave the clocks alone; better yet, comrades, let us smash the oppressive culture of our lark overlords and reclaim the day.
Or let’s at least just get the time-changers and the early risers to stop bugging us in the morning.
Related:
Today’s News
- Hezbollah’s leader gave his first public address since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war as the group continues to maintain a controlled battle along Lebanon’s border with Israel.
- A former Trump appointee who violently assaulted police officers on January 6 was sentenced to 70 months in prison.
- New Delhi’s air-quality index was the worst of any major city today due to an increase in air pollutants.
Dispatches
- The Books Briefing: Neil Postman’s 1985 diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a book that gave senior editor Gal Beckerman “a new set of glasses.”
- Up for Debate: The future of the Middle East is a divisive topic. Conor Friedersdorf asks readers how people outside the region should handle differences of opinion about it.
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More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Do you have free will? A new book by Robert Sapolsky argues that we’re not in control of or responsible for the decisions we make.
Watch. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (in theaters) is a pitch-perfect dramedy from a master of the form.
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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