Contra the Tyranny of the Morning Person

(Don't take me too seriously. Seriousness is a vice.)

In order to end the tyranny of the morning person, we must first prove that they do not exist.

Even at the neurological level, study after study has proven that the brain isn't at peak function in the morning for the general populace. This is especially prevalent in children, and yet it seems families build their sleep schedules around early-rising kids (who are only such because they have to get to school, where they sit comatose before their brains actually turn on).

Anecdotally, I see the science evidenced frequently: the joke that hits hard at 4pm Mass might sail over everybody's head at 7:30am, because people just aren't awake in a church filled with people who will tell you they "get up early." I feel like tapping on the mic. Making them get up for a little calisthenics, like they did to us in grade school when everyone was half-dead.

There's a reason comedy clubs don't do 9am shows.

Farmers have no choice, and I know this via experience in the field. Gotta do what you gotta do, whether you like it or not.

Hemingway used to write in the early mornings. But this was only because he couldn't wait to start drinking at midday. Honestly, I see the appeal -- but what could a sober Hemingway have accomplished in the power of the night?

His fellow Nobel laureate Bob Dylan has spoken over the years about the night, and how certain things live there creatively, inaccessible during the day. He's right. The "mystic hours when a person’s alone,"¹ he called them on his last album.

St. Thomas Aquinas, mega genius he was, wrote during the day. But what he wrote was the product of long nights spent before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer. Those mystic hours when a person's alone. He slept very little, and I suppose that's the ideal.

It's really the cycle of sleep that makes the fake morning person. People who are tired after long days, turning in early. Can't argue with that. Older folks who cannot sleep in long stretches, beginning sleep in the late evening. Understandable.

But not natural, not even by basic brain function. Patterns of living thrust upon us via extraordinary condition.

The morning person does not exist: they are only made such through anguish, exacerbated as it is by the Protestant work ethic.

Big Coffee does not want you to know this.

Persistently viewable server free at Nowhere.