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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> Our society is calibrated with the assumption that you will wake up early. Early bird gets the worm and all that, but everything is essentially rigged toward it. From the time/daylight, to school start time, going by quiet hours (hope you enjoy jack hammers starting at 7am stats, because by most city's ordinance, that's not only allowed, it's NORMAL. And to start at 7, the trucks and crew have to start getting ready long before that).

By what logic is 7 early? Dawn is well before 7 (at least most of the year) so many people sleep in past dawn, but stay up long after sunset, which is absurdly wasteful.

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Wasteful of what? Sunlight?

Early and late are relative concepts. As others have pointed out, there's a variety in natural circadian rhythms, as well as preferences.

So to claim an approach other than your own is "absurdly wasteful" strikes me as just shallow and arrogant, and the reason we wound up with DST in the first place.

There's a wide distribution of circadian rhythms in the human population between the poles of what are commonly called 'early birds' and 'night owls'. Those rhythms mean that there is an optimal wake for each person that is not infinitely flexible. We cannot all sleep and rise with the sun and do our best work.

In my case, I struggle to do serious work outside of 10am-10pm. I wake at 7am because of my partner, but for the first three hours of every day, my brain hardly works. I have to fill my time with other things - exercise, reading, chores, and so on. If left to myself, I naturally go to sleep at midnight and wake at nine, and feel better for it.

As another commenter pointed out, people don't really pick their circadian rhythms.

With that said, even if we forget about that, what's early is defined by what we consider late.

If you have a teenager who needs 9+ hours of sleep, and they cannot go to sleep before 11pm (because we allow people to be noisy until at least that late), then 7 is quite early, yes.

Only if you prefer sunlight over the young night’s darkness

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