Comic Strips

You borrow it from the next morning. A few years ago I went through a phase where I would get up at something like 4AM, voluntarily, and in the morning and early afternoon I was fully awake and alert like I usually am at night. It actually felt really good to be functional and productive when the sun was out, but the problem is I would tend to get sleepy and pass out at around 8pm when I wanted to keep doing things. My theory is that your body needs a balance of sleep, awake but not very active time, and active time, and it is all controlled by when you fall asleep which determines where your free time is to do the things you actually enjoy doing.

Like when I woke up early, I would usually start the day doing things that I would at night - playing video games and scrolling through memes primarily, and during that time I could also get housework done, my (at the time) university homework, and planning for the week. I realized that it was the same productive time but only shifted because of when I had the free time to so.

Eventually I returned to night life because the time limit on my free time imposed by when my obligations for the day start versus how much sleep I am willing to sacrifice and move my unproductive time to work hours is a trade off I am very willing to make.

Morning: fugue state. Feel as if I’ve been slingshotted into a separate plane of time where the hours of the day feel drawn by random.

Evening: alert, focused. Each minute feels precious. Backlog of ideas overflowing. Dread having to go to bed at a time that feels ‘normal’.

A term I learned just this year: chronotypes. Basically, the preferred timing of the wake-sleep cycle varies among humans. Easy to imagine how that might have been useful from an evolutionary perspective: always someone to keep watch while the rest sleeps.