Waking up early serves capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Waking up early serves capitalism

qz.com

51 pointslaurex31 comments

I find this article bizarre. I wake up at 5AM so that I can juggle personal goals - fitness, hobbies, etc with my workday which goes from ~10-5. I typically can work out in the morning, beat my coworkers to work (start work at 7:30, they get in at 10), wrap whatever I had to for the day before my 10AM meeting, spend time during working hours exercising more, playing piano, or flying drones, then do a bit more work, cook AND STILL be in bed by 9:30PM to support my sleep.

Yes, many early risers who are "cultish" are total dorks that are sleep-depriving themselves and evangelize their wakeup time to appear "elite", but if I miss sleep I know it immediately - I feel mentally drunk all day and get mood swings, make simple mistakes, forget things, and oversimplify tasks. As such, I try to be in bed by 9/9:30 to get ~7 hours of sleep which still irritates my tension headaches, increases my workday stress and comes with a whole slew of compromises.

Regardless, I wouldn't trade my rising early lifestyle for the alternative - oversleeping (11->8), getting into work at 10, feeling tired all day, getting 30% as much done, no hobbies, no exercise... no thank you.

As someone who finds it impossible to change their sleep cycle and has tried almost everything in that regard & read a very large chunk of the scientific literature on sleep, both your view and the view of the article seem naive.

Can you be more specific?

Maybe the GP is a natural early riser. I'm not but have managed to orient earlier. If left to my own devices 4am or 5am bed times are the norm but as I work I am up before 8am feeling fully rested and on an 8:15am call every morning. I must get 7-8 hours every night. That is the main differentiator.

Do you have kids? I got a baby this year and my sleep pattern completely changed: I used to sleep late into the morning but for some reason I now wake up by myself at around 7.30 every day. It's a radical change and it's apparently something a lot of fathers experience.

> having free time after you put your children to bed, or watching one of the 17 Netflix shows everyone is talking about

These are two things that are not a big sacrifice for me. But honestly, I am continually baffled by posts that insinuate that waking up at 5:30 or 6:00 is some bizarre ritual. Since the quote mentions children, I will just throw out that a school start time of 8:00 generally means having to leave for school before 7:30, which makes a 6:00 alarm pretty necessary if you want to start off with a good breakfast.

We have lights out by 10PM (with the occasional homework mandated exemption) and everyone is up by 6AM after eight hours of sleep. This has never once seemed like an unusual schedule to keep.

In retrospect I'm really glad to have lived where I lived. Once I was old enough to get to school safely in my own pace sleeping until 7:30 to get there on time just before 8 was so much better than having to wake up at 7 :D

The elementary school was only a five minute walk away, but even still, the kids always wanted to be at school early to play soccer, ice skate, etc. It has always been more of an issue telling the kids that they cannot get to school too early, rather than the opposite.

Thank goodness I was homeschooled.

How about this? All the larks move to California, and all the owls move to New York. Then everyone can have a synchronized workday starting at 10 AM EST & 7 AM PST.~

If that sounds ridiculous, it was supposed to. I am very irritated with lark propaganda, trying to make me feel bad about my natural bio-clock. My opinion is that your work will be best when your body is healthiest, and that will happen when you go to sleep when you get tired, and sleep until you wake up without assistance or unnatural interruptions.

This is both a hilarious and awesome idea. Too bad that 2 people in my family wake up early and two are better at staying up. On second thought, I bet we could become a bi-coastal family.

You've just invented the time communist utopia.

From each according to schedule; to each according to fatigue.

So the summary is that waking up early is bad if you skimp on sleep to do it? Duh. And you're serving your corporate overlords by doing so? Oooookay.

Waking up early serves me, my employer doesn't care what time I come in. But traffic is a hell of a lot easier at 7:00 than it is at even 10:00. And I get to go home at 3:30. And then I go to bed at a decent hour so I can get my sleep.

Agree. Being sleep deprived is not a good long-term strategy. I can wake up early if I wanted to but I need to go to bed way earlier too, which historically hasn't fit well with my lifestyle.

The only real advantage I see to shifting your day earlier is that there's generally less distractions or unexpected demands on your time in the early morning because, well, no one else is awake.

I prefer to work on side-pursuits in the evenings but I do find that the time gets easily hijacked by other stuff like social/family obligations, etc. IMO it's probably easier protect your productive time by saying "sorry I have to go to bed" than "sorry I gotta go work on my Scheme interpreter".

This is really simple. If your life allows it, sleep as much as makes you feel rested. Go to bed when you need to sleep. I have been fortunate enough to do this for the last two years and I can't stress the impact it has had on my mood and my mental health. Obviously the "allows it" part is a large qualifier, but still. I think it probably applies to a large amount of HN readers.

Most people I know that wake up early do so to serve themselves, not capitalism. If you go to the gym you're doing that for the health benefits and you know you're less likely to make an excuse and not go after work if you just get it out of the way in the morning. If you wake up earlier to enjoy a nice breakfast it's so that you are fully energized throughout the day. If you go to work earlier it's so that you can better your life by increasing income or getting that promotion you want. Not everything is some conspiracy about our capitalist overlords. Capitalism has alleviated more poverty than any economical system, so I don't understand the need for constant demonization.

It is very strange that the thrust of the piece is defined as:

Waking up early is good for capitalism, but not good for your own interests

As opposed to:

Waking up early is good for your career interests given that you work in a capitalist system, but not good for your other interests

Anthropomorphizing capitalism and portraying its grand stance as a monolith that demands more time and sweat be thrown into it (for the good of Capitalism!) sure is a nice literary touch. But its a very subversive way of appealing to people's self pity. I can feel the implicit assumptions of language embodied within this article chewing on my mind and damaging the definitions I need to be able to rely on.

> Waking up early is good for your career interests given that you work in a capitalist system, but not good for your other interests

Isn't that the gist of the article? Whether you serve capitalism or whether capitalism serves you?

It's like industrial farming. Do the cows exist to serve the farm or does the farm exist to serve the cows?

Maybe both? Who knows.

Depends on how you define it - while they may not have the best lifestyle it did result in them outnumbering humanity and being fed. While the intent is for humans clearly symbiosis can work on selfishness. Bees are just after the nectar of flowers but the plants get to mate with distant others while being completely sessile. The spice of peppers was "meant" to deter those who would eat it and destroy its seeds but humans are freaks who destroy it with digestion and like it but deliberately farm it enmasse so it works out for the plant. It has no agency clearly but it is served nonetheless.

Your cow example is a good one.

I would argue that there is no farm. The independent behavior of independent agents does create the emergent phenomenon of capitalism. However, this phenomenon does not express will or intent. Saying that Capitalism wants you to you wake up earlier is not equivalent to saying that the farmer wants the cow produce more milk.

When people say things like this, they are lumping together their undesired extrensic motivations and others' expectations of them into a big mental ball of "things I have to do, don't want to, and capitalism makes me do," and calling it Capitalism.

I don't know if those two statements you used are isomorphisms. I haven't read the book that the title is making reference to, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, but I'd guess that they are not trying to anthropomorphize capitalism, but more using the term as synecdoche in referring to the interests of the collection of decision makers who benefit the most from capitalism -- at the cost of all the externalities of living in a capitalist society, in this case the amount of sleep the average member of the proletariat gets, but also environmental costs, the interests of the weak and the oppressed, and any other harm that doesn't lend itself to be easily measured in terms of financial gain or loss.

Generic comment about how I personally go home early anyway, and thus since I do so, the article is moot.

(even if tons of employees don't go home early anyway, and the kind that follows the "wake up early" doctrine peddled by social media influencers is overworked).

I get up at 6:20am, leave the house at 7:15, get to work for 8:15

Go home at 4:15pm

The sole reason why I do this is purely a matter of comfort on my commute, the London Underground is much more pleasant if you take the tube outside of the peak periods.

... This, according to a "travel and lifestyle" "journalist" with a degree in environmental studies. Thank you, very cool!

I think a what a lot of the commenters here are missing is that not every employee has the choice of when they get to come in for work.

I wake up early so I can get to work early and read hacker news for an extra hour before my co workers get here

Waking up early also serves families with children between birth and adolescence. For that matter, it serves subsistence farmers--there are roosters crowing--in pretty much any economic system.

Also, what calendar are the folks working from who write about "late capitalism"? I'm not saying they are wrong; I just wonder whether there is a date at which they will notice that capitalism is still around, and reconsider their forecast.

Clickbait about capitalism serves capitalism.

I'm pretty tired of the false dichotomy that capitalism has an early stage and a late stage.

I belive it's a clickbait article or the author doesn't really tried to understand benefits of getting up early. How can it serve capitalism if someone uses first hours of the day for himself not employer.

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