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Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

Pet peeve of mine: some older adults are proud that they get up early. And that’s OK in isolation. The problem though is that older adults rule society moreso than younger adults, and certainly compared to teenagers. So for many older adults it feels natural to go to bed early and to get up early. But then we as a society confuse that with universal “good behavior”/good character, so everyone has to dance to that tune.[1] And we do get up to things so that we aren’t expelled from school or fired from our jobs. But some of us do it at the cost of our health and well-being.

[1] Or maybe the cause of our early starts is completely different. It’s not like I have any proof.

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It took me a long time to accept that I wasn't going to grow out of my night owl tendencies (or at least I haven't yet, in my 30s). So much conventional wisdom about health, productivity, and even diet begins with "early to bed, early to rise" type of advice. I've never been happier and healthier, though, than when I gave up trying to force myself into that kind of schedule. I enjoy my most alert and creative hours in the evening and I hate the world in the morning. I have no appetite til the afternoon, so I can't comply with all the advice about no eating after 6pm or after dark or whatever. When I try to get up early to go to the gym my workouts are terrible because my body does not want to be awake or alert at that time. I wish society was more flexible and had more career paths that allowed for a less morning-oriented schedule! There is natural variation in human circadian rhythm and not everyone will grow out of that teenage sleep schedule. Well, I certainly sleep less now, and get up at a time my teenage self would have considered early (9 am), but I cannot properly enjoy my life when forced to go to bed before midnight so I've simply given up trying. We need a night owl movement!!

I feel like you're onto something. Growing up, I was always told "The early bird gets the morning worm." In my opinion, I did not want to be the worm waking up early.

I do think there's actual correlation between getting up earlier and achievement. I don't know many successful people who get up super late. Don't know if that's correlation or causation, just that there's something to getting up early to crush it.

There may or may not be a correlation, but how much of that is a vicious cycle?

The kids who grow up to be high achievers tend to have done well in school, which means at the very least they were able to cope with an early schedule. They then observe the correlation that you note and think to themselves "huh, my parents were right, everyone should wake up early" and proceed to preach it to the next generation, who learns it as if it were some fundamental fact of life and not a consequence of the way we've designed our systems.

It's like the problem with math education: the people who dictate the way that the world works tend to be the ones who did well in the existing systems and can't see anything wrong with them.

There are only a certain amount of hours in a day that you can be actively chasing something. Your energy depletes, places close, sun goes down. So it doesn't matter if you get up at 4AM or at 10AM, what matters is the active hours you give yourself. The 4AM person is probably going to sleep earlier than the 10AM, so it equals out.

The only real catch about this all is the simple fact society is based around the sun, and so if you are someone who wants to get up extremely late (2PM+), you have to work harder to accommodate. But those are very rare outside of health conditions. Even most night owls who say they're not a morning person, tend to wake up before 12PM purely because of how society functions. They can't have meetings when others are asleep!

Although the interesting part is how much this changes in the future, with increasing levels of remote work and automation to compensate.

// So it doesn't matter if you get up at 4AM or at 10AM, what matters is the active hours you give yourself. The 4AM person is probably going to sleep earlier than the 10AM, so it equals out

What I am observing is that it doesn't actually seem to equal out for whatever reason.

You might need to seek out more routine information from successful people. See Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. All of them wake up around the ~7-9AM timeframe rather than the super early ones aiming for ~3-5AM. These 7-9 risers tend to go to bed around 10pm-12.

There are some major super early risers of course, like Tim Cook. However he goes to bed much earlier at around ~8PM. So you can see how he's trading ~3 hours in the evening for ~3 hours in the morning (contrasting against Satya Nadella's 7AM-11PM schedule [16hrs equal]).

I'm convinced that that correlation has more to do with most of society functioning on a morning-oriented schedule. Night owls are often chronically sleep deprived and prevented from working during their peak hours. Anecdotally I do know a few people who are successful in the entertainment industry and most of them are serious night owls - I would imagine that they're suited to that kind of schedule the same way morning people are suited to the schedule of school or a corporate environment.

There are a lot of different chronotypes, but it makes sense to have a predictable set of expectations for society. Imagine a world where your doctor was only open from 10pm-6am, because he was a night owl, and your grocery store was open from 7am-10pm, and so on. It would be fairly complicated to navigate. Given that, the question is whether to expect society to be oriented around day or night. Of the two I think day makes more sense for most activities: you can see better, for one thing.

A doctor’s office can have multiple doctors. A grocery store is staffed on shifts.

We have ceded far too much power to the morning people.

We change our clocks every year for the night owls.

First mover advantage.

Back in caveman times, somebody had to stay up to tend the fire and keep watch. Unfortunately in the world of houses and locks, the daytime people don’t need us anymore, and since they get up first they set the agenda.

Should have let the leopards eat them.

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