Interesting thought. I enjoy being alone and have always equated early morning with freedom. There are very few distractions at 5am. Night owls just get to that sweet spot in time from the other direction.
Personally I find evenings a bit different, in that I’m sufficiently worn out mentally from the day that I no longer can think (productively) about work — and so the worries of the upcoming day are temporarily shelved for lack of practical progress to be made on them. Through no particular mental effort on my part, it is easy to relax in the evenings.
But in the mornings, I’m fresh enough that that doesn’t work. I can, through an act of willpower and mindfulness, intentionally forget that work is a thing I’ll have to be doing in a few hours, and so just enjoy my mornings like you do — but this was a skill I learned, and I didn’t always have it; and moreover, I suspect it’s a skill many people never develop.
I am sharpest in the morning, and every day gives me a new opportunity on where to apply myself when I'm at my best.
I work night shifts, some of the early birds are insanely dumb after 3 am, insanely dumb compared to who they are the rest of the day. I see one student of higher education put down his a tool and turn around for 3 seconds then panic wondering where they put it. Not one time! I see him do that hundreds of times. I keep a mental map of where I see him put stuff so that I can remind him or answer when asked. They had plenty of rest, they work hard. It's supper funny to me because I'm a bit like that before 11 am. I'm physically there, if someone asks me to do something my mind makes a raw audio recording of it that I often revisit later to parse out what it was they actually said. In school I've aced tests with 100% questions I consciously knew nothing about. You have to picture it, its hilarious, I read a question about a topic I've never seen before, 5 seconds later I apparently know the answer to the question. I know the difference in file format, recalling unparsed information comes with a lot of irrelevant data about the moment the teacher explained the topic. After 1 pm I only retain the relevant parts, those files contain almost no information about when I learned it, their attachments are my own thoughts.
Of course at times I have to condition myself for morning productivity, I can for example get up at 4 am if I need my brain at 9:00. I can go to bed early, at exactly the same time, rest the body/eyes and think about life for a few hours. It works but it feels wrong, it screams wrong.
I did a hilarious experiment one time where I went to bed at 17:30 straight after work and set the alarm at 1 am. It felt perfect but had negative social implications.
Maybe its a cool idea for a startup. It seems one hell of a perk from my perspective.
I love the feeling of running early in the morning as the city wakes up around me. I get a lot of the same enjoyment as when I stay up late at night, but I still haven’t been able to maintain a habit of truly early runs.
These days I sleep roughly midnight to 8am, and could very easily stay up til 4am if I were to want to, but shifting the other direction and waking up at 5 or 6am to run is super difficult. I can do it for a few days but have never made it stick. Running at 8 or 9am is still nice but not quite the same.
Is that even quantifiable? Maybe you can stay up till 2 but not wake up by 7. But 2 and 7 nor any other pair are equivalent so I don’t see how you could make that comparison.
> Night time is equated with freedom
I'm middle-aged. I think my testosterone-levels are falling (sex-drive diminishing, at least). Paired with that I've had less depression [desire a season of grief]. But also I've had periods of morning wakefulness.
Someone said downthread "you've just aged". Seems to me, on n=1, like I'm transitioning in my sleepy times. I'm getting up early (for periods of days/weeks at a time), but it's the 'waking and feeling wakeful' that is driving it.
On the flipside, I get super-sleepy after lunch.
If the drive to get solitude were the cause, then night-time provides that still in my home, despite me finding myself drawn towards being an early-bird (but still only for short periods of a few days to a few weeks, so far).
Of course I could just have a brain tumour, but it would be interesting to see some broad studies on sleep pattern changes in middle-age?
I think the early morning wake-up time (5:00 am for the paragliding classes) was a contributing factor in one of the other paragliding students running into me, collapsing both our wings, and sending us 150 to 200 feet into the ground.
Fortunately, neither of us died, but I shattered one of my vertebrae and she shattered her pelvis. Not worth it.
The tagline and part of what is explored in a Fall anime - Call of the Night.
Was really good, highly recommend
I suspect this is at the root of a lot of “night owl” personalities: Night time is equated with freedom, whereas mornings are equated with having to do something they don’t like (work, school).
Finding something semi-enjoyable to do in the morning is key to not hating mornings. If someone’s mornings are just a painful slog to a job you dislike and a detour until you can get to the evening where you can maybe enjoy something, of course they’re going to be a night owl.