The Tyranny of Morning People
Someplace in the last few days, I read an op/ed type column from some guy giving his opinion about why students someplace should be forced to get up earlier and go to school. These students were all snivelling lay-abouts and it would be good for them, he pronounced. What rubbish! Although he failed to lay all his cards on the table, he was clearly a morning person. I hate morning people.
Morning people, like extroverts, have no empathy and believe everyone must be made like them. "Just walk up and introduce youself", the extrovert says, never comprehending the incredible challenge to the introvert that may be insurmountable. Morning people are also like Republicans in believing that the world would be a distinctly better place if only everyone behaved like them.
I deny any obsessive fascination with "definitions", but over time I've found these to be useful:
- Morning People wake up with their energy at its peak; they use the energy through the day and stop at night when they run out, going to sleep to recharge.
- Night People wake up with very little energy; they gather energy throughout the day and reach a creative productivity peak late at night, so that going to sleep seems an intolerable intrusion, a loss of creative powers that will mean starting all over again the next morning.
Morning people, in their uncritical love of all things like them, usually make these two specious arguments against the sensible practise of getting up at a reasonable hour:
- It's so quiet in the morning, when no one else is there, that those are my most productive hours — you should try it!
- If all those lazy heads just got up a couple of hours earlier, think how much more work we could get done (during those quiet, early hours)!
First, let's set aside the obvious: if everyone got up earlier to take advantage of those early, quiet hours, then they wouldn't be quiet, now would they?
Remember that morning people are morning people, and quite naturally they claim to be at their creative, productive best first thing in the morning. Fine, go for it, but remember that not everyone is like you, and it's childish to behave otherwise.
Besides, experience tells me it's all a lie, a giant conspiracy of the bright-eyed and bushy tailed. There have been times, very rare times, when I have awakened unusually early and decided to head on in to my place of employment, in order to catch the benefit of some of those early, productive hours and see what all the real morning people are up to with all their alledged perkiness.
What I find is a bunch of surprised people — surprised that I have caught them in their pretense! — since they're generally either slumped over their desks, snoozing, or else desparately trying to figure out how to make the coffee machine work. They tend to sit around, doing nothing (except take cat naps), just waiting for all the late arrivals to arrive, when they then actually have to start working, after telling fabricated stories about how productive they've been for the past two hours. They seem to feel that it's natural and to be expected that one spend two hours "easing into the work-day" instead of working. Wouldn't we all be more productive if they, like the rest of us laggard late-arrivals, actually started working when they get to work?
Now, as for everyone just getting up a couple of hours earlier, my counterproposal is this: if only everyone would stay up two hours longer, we'd all get much more done.
Here the morning people make the foolish mistake of thinking that anyone who gets up later than they do is a sluggard, a lazy person. Morning people believe that night people want to spend all their life in bed, and sleep far too much. It's incredible, but morning people universally believe that night people sleep more, and are therefore bad people.
The reason for this mistaken notion is simple: lacking empathy, morning people simply can't imagine that we night people actually stay awake long after they have fallen asleep! In fact, we usually look forward to these late evening hours when all the whiney morning people have finally fallen asleep in their easy chairs and it gets nice and quite and we can really get things done.
You can see their self-delusion in operation with this argument, too, just like with that silliness about dawn's productive hours. Think about the number of times you've listened, say, to construction workers say "yeah, I like to get an early start, so I can knock off around 3"? And what is it when they get home so delightfully early with all those extra hours stretching before them? They take a nap, because they're exhausted from getting up so ridiculously early in order to be on the job at 6am. Note: they still go to bed early because they have to get up early. So, where's the thrill in coming home early so you can have a nap? Isn't it more efficient just to stay in bed a little longer when you're already there: less overhead wasted in getting up, getting dressed, getting undressed, getting into bed, etc.
The last-gasp argument of the morning people usually goes like this: fine, sleep if you want to waste your life in bed, but real people have to be at real jobs in the morning because everyone else does it. So there!
True, somewhere along the way morning people siezed power long enough to decide that the business day should start at some unnatural hour like 8 or 9 in the morning and thus force everyone to follow their unnatural sunrise lifestyle. But mark my words: come the revolution, they'll be the first with their backs down against the bed.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Tuesday, 2 August 2005 at 17.56
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[…] ar to my goddamned eye. Morning people are not better than night people, damn it! The Tyranny of Morning People This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 2:4 […]
on Thursday, 8 June 2006 at 11.11
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AMEN, brother!! Sure, we could all work at night clubs, or take a swing shift, but all of the "real jobs", (i.e. those that pay a living wage) start at 8 or 9 a.m.. It is cruel and unusual punishment to force us to arrive with the chirping early birds. I get to work at 9 am, but end up doing the majority of my work at home late at night, when I can actually think (without all of those morning people interrupting me). Then I am expected to get up and drag my ass to the office with everyone else, even though I worked until 2am and accomplished more than 12 "morning people" put together.
Night People, unite! We need our own union. Are you in?
on Friday, 16 June 2006 at 04.43
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I completely agree, my girlfriend is a "morning person", she's a real Nazi and tries everything to ruin my morning deep sleep period, drawing curtains, talking, putting the radio on, stomping around.
Why must they push it down our throats!
I block book my morning calender between 9am to 11am to stop the fascists from destroying my day.
on Sunday, 30 July 2006 at 22.38
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So, I don't know why all of your comments are coming a year later. Anyway, I just found this post of yours myself and I wanted to share a post I wrote in April 2005 on the same topic: http://truthbyscott.blogspot.com/2005/04/tyranny-of-morning-people_27.html
on Saturday, 9 February 2008 at 03.33
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THAT was Surprising how well that Zeroed In on Exactly what the situation was …
I`m so angry right now because I said I`d go to my morning-person-sisters house 3 hours away for Turkey Dinner tomorrow (today) …THEN i REALIZED ..Oh CrAP!!..and typed back the next day "what time is "Dinner!?"" …and got back ("noon") ..WHaT ThE &*#@$&*!!!
(NOTICE the important part of that statement though …it wasn`t that sOmEhOW she has TWISTED her brain to think that Dinner is at noon now somehow ..but that even though she said come for "Dinner" .. I Actually Realized ahead of time that of course SOmEhOW she was going to FORCE it to be some kind of EARLY Project for ABSOLUTELY No REASON Other than to FORCE me to REVERSE my Night Schedule and get-up at 8 tea shower drive drive drive drive)
Her ONLY answer EVER for ANYTHING EVER is Lets do it at 6am! Lets go at 7am!!! … I wouldn`t in a Million Years tell someone to come for dinner and tell them to eat at 2am but that`s what morning people are doing to me all the time.
I naturally have a Very Late schedule (Self Employed Artist) where I paint and draw and build until 8am sometimes..3-4am+ usually ..so someone telling me to do something at 8 or 9 or 10am is like telling them to get-up at midnight 1am or 2am and suddenly have energy.
I should just drive over nOW .. (3am typing ..trying to wind down enough to get my whopping 5 hours of sleep)
(geez I could be getting soooo much work done on my website right noW)
on Saturday, 9 February 2008 at 12.16
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I have NO idea what the post, dated this morning (2008 02 09), beginning "THAT was Surprising how well that Zeroed In on Exactly…" is.
It seems to be in response to a 200*5* blog entry.
I thought I was the only person who posted responses to the Bjornslottet blog under the name "Chris", but at the hour this was posted, I was abed asnooze in Toronto.
and, not being a morning person, I didn't get up until 9; it's now 12:10 and I'm still not dressed.
on Saturday, 9 February 2008 at 19.27
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Chris [A]: rather remarkably, this old essay of mine seems to be an enduring favorite of Google on the topic of "morning people"–well, more specifically on how tyrannical they can be. As suggested in his comment, I suspect that [the other] Chris wrote this as a personal release in response to an unusually tyrannical, but not atypical, ploy by his morning-person-sister to impose her opinions about proper sleeping and rising times on the rest of her family.
We can be sure you were asleep, but we should also note that [the other] Chris was still up, at the height of his diurnal creativity, and irritated. I'm glad we could offer this bit of safe haven to help out a fellow night-person.