How people woke up before alarm clocks | Hacker News Reader

How people woke up before alarm clocks

bbc.com

80 pointstchalla60 comments

> "In many pre-industrial societies, daily life followed the rhythm of sunrise and sunset, which naturally shaped circadian rhythms."

Having an office job that allows for flexible hours, I start my working day at different times during the year. Setting the alarm to the latest hour that I can start to work it never wakes me up, but it is there just in case.

Overall, I feel that I am less stressed, sleep better and have more energy that if I force myself a schedule to wake up. What I have is a schedule to go to sleep, the rest I leave to nature.

> Mary Smith, a much-loved knocker upper in East London

Great picture.

> Setting the alarm to the latest hour that I can start to work it never wakes me up

Funny enough, I have the same strategy but the exact opposite experience -- it _almost always_ wakes me up, even when it's set for 11 am. I don't disagree with you though, I just think it's funny how different human experience is. And there are benefits too, it's easy for me to stay up late, and a lot of my best work comes naturally at 1 am. But basically nothing good happens before noon.

I think the important part was that they also had a schedule for sleep. That’s the real key to a natural wake up.

I’ve struggled with the decision to go to sleep my whole life. If left to my own devices I’d effectively have a 28-30 hour day and my sleep/wake times would continuously shift.

I'm pretty much the same. Nothing done before noon. I show up to the office on time just for the sake of it, I then get my work done at night. My manager is okay with it but it is not sustainable, I feel like it takes unnecessary time out of my day. But it is genuinely hard.

Can you negotiate with your manager about start time? I know it will depend on the exact team, but n my old team I would walk into the office at like 10:30 every day, and then stay in the office till about 7-8 every evening. I wasn't secretive about it, but nobody was upset, it was obvious that I was staying later to get work done.

One of the benefits of remote work is not waking up with an alarm clock. It's been so long I forgot how much that sucked. And the snooze button.

I think we might need another term for working both remote and with a flexible schedule. I'm working remote, have been at a few jobs, but while my location isn't an office, my schedule is fixed, the same as if I were going in.

Alarm clocks with needles have a huge error in minutes. I also suffered when I was a teenager.

Do you not have to be online at a certain time when remote?

I’ve been remote for 6 years now, and did it on and off for a while before that. I’m still woken up by an alarm clock, because I can’t get myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, but have to be online for meetings and stuff and 9am… I think many would prefer 8am, but that’s just a symptom of a broken meeting culture.

For me I just wake up at about the same time every day, and that is ahead of anything on the schedule. It isn't like you might end up sleeping another couple hours. I physically can't sleep past 8 hours or so.

9 or 10am means going to sleep by 1 or 2am, idk wasn't an issue for me to be up, even at my worst phase of stay up smoke weed and watch TV lol

Flex work time is awesome. Other than flights I haven't set an alarm since before covid.

1.5 years of basically no irl social life and going to bed at 22 every day has really hammered home my rhythm. I still wake up around 06-07 every day.

I've had the great privilege of working remote for quite a while. Unless I have an early flight to catch, I don't set an alarm. I tend to wake up within 60 min. of sunrise regardless of the season and fall asleep somewhere around T-8 hrs.

I can't tell you how much I'd dread having to be violently aroused from my slumber on an ongoing basis.

“Most Indians [= indigenous Americans] did not know how old they were. They measured time in days, moons, and winters, but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. On the eve of an important event, when they were afraid they might oversleep in the morning—for example, when a war party discovered an enemy camp and wanted to make sure to wake up and attack it at first light—Indians would drink a lot of water before going to bed.” — Ian Frazier, Great Plains (1989), p. 48.

> but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes.

I don't think this is true.

We (Asian) Indians make a big deal out of beginning and doing important tasks at auspicious times. That wouldn't be possible without some means of measuring time of day even if its not perfect.

Edit: updated for clarity and leaving original comment as is.

Indigenous Americans. Not East Indians.

Thanks for clarifying that. Considering HN's worldwide readership, I should have anticipated that misunderstanding when I posted the quotation. I have now added "[= indigenous Americans]" above.

My bad. I too should have considered that the term "Indians" is ambiguous and should have looked up the reference book. Thought the title "Great Plains" was referring to plains including the Indo-Gangetic plain.

Is "East Indians" the commonly used name in the US for the people of India ? I've come across "Asian Indians".

"Indian" is the commonly used term for the people from India as far as I know. You don't very often see that cohort referred to by some other term.

Interesting question. My impression from afar (I live in Japan) is that “Asian Indians” and “East Indians” are both used but that just “Indians” is increasingly common, partly because of the growth in the number of people in the U.S. from India and partly because of the growing tendency in recent decades to avoid using “Indian” to refer to native Americans. Wikipedia has a long article on the latter issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_name_controver...

I would have thought the war parties of the great plains would give it away.

I have often wondered why it is still acceptable to call Native Americans "Indians".

It is an extremely colonial term, but its used in the country that is the most sensitive about using such terminology. It originates in a marketing term to cover the failure of someone who was, among other things, a slave trader.

On top of that it is ambiguous and often causes confusion, as here, so its not even a useful term.

Surely its time to drop it?

The other comments make good points but also want to point out that that quote was written 37 years ago.

If you are interested in the counter argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ

It does not explain why the term "American Indian" (which it says the series will use) is preferable to "Native American" or "Indigenous American".

it does use a term ("first peoples") which avoids using American and is not used outside North America as far as I know.

Grouping people that way in general is barbaric anyway. There's no great answer. "Native American" is a colonial term too. What do they call themselves? It's up to them. Actually, it's up to the individual what they prefer. I don't like being labeled an "American".

> Actually, it's up to the individual what they prefer.

If referring to a group you cannot use a term that all individuals prefer as they will have different preferences. In general certain terms are not used - for example one for black people is never even written out in full by Americans. If one person said "I am fine with being called that" does not mean the rest of us should use it because most people find it offensive.

> I don't like being labeled an "American".

Being called an American Indian (which is necessary to avoid ambiguity) also means you are labeled an American.

"American" is also derived from the name of someone problematic (he even took part in a slaving raid) but that is another issues.

I first learned this from Lisa Simpson.

https://youtu.be/pmRtY_vvW1U

When researching my ancestry, I came across someone with the last name Budzik, which literally means alarm clock in contemporary Polish. Historically it was tied to the verb budzić, to wake up, so I imagine either my great-great-great grandfather worked as a waker-upper…or he snored a lot.

I also have that surname in my ancestry! Here's a Czech source claiming that the name might more likely be related to a shortened first name, or an old word for a stuffed stomach, used to describe a fat person: https://dvojka.rozhlas.cz/budik-8215419

Single greatest thing I did to fix my circadian rhythm was get a sunset/sunrise lighting alarm. I have some hue lights and a "Hatch" alarm clock that both do sunrise lighting and some light morning noise that gradually increases lighting early in the morning. Even when its dark outside, my body has accustomed to it so much that I didn't even notice day light savings at all. Best investment for myself and my daughter I've ever done.

I do the same in the evening. Gradually fading the light low till they turn off one by one, over the course of an hour and a half. It has the reverse effect and makes me sleepy.

I love my smart rolling shutters to do the same, literally night and day difference :P

Does that clock require an app or internet telemetry?

any brands or models you can recommend?

People went to bed when the sun went down because candles cost money. The light bulb changed everything.

I find that when I go camping, I get sleepy early around 9pm and I wake at 6 feeling more refreshed than I do at home. Fresh air and birds chirping. It's honestly a dream

Lighting was the killer app for electricity.

Outdoor lighting in particular, at first at least. A fun historical anecdote on this one most don't know is the saying that somebody "can’t hold a candle to [x]". It's a reference to the old profession of link-boys who were mostly poor kids who'd carry a torch at night for people to see their way about, in exchange for a penny or two.

Electricity costs money too? I don't know how the cost of power compared to the cost of a candle in the beginning of the 20th century though.

I’m going to get an electricity bill each month no matter what. I won’t notice a few bulbs being on for a couple extra hours each day.

I would notice having to go out and buy candles all the time, or needing to make them. A candle can be consumed over the course of a day or maybe even a few hours. A light bulb can last months or years.

If light bulbs burned out as fast as candles burn, I would be a fanatic about keeping the lights off and only use them when absolutely necessary.

I asked gemini for the cost of power but it could be lying through its smirking sense of superiority and general all around disdain for the humans it will soon replace.

"The electrical cost to produce the same amount of light as a single standard candle is approximately $0.01 per year if run for 14 hours every day. In terms of energy consumption, a standard candle produces about 12.57 lumens of light, which can be matched by an LED bulb using only 0.1 to 0.2 watts."

Ehh, you can still do stuff when it is dark and there are plenty of crafts and tasks you can do in extreme low light on top of just socialization. Its not like northern people slept hours longer than southern people, or that people sleep way longer during the winter. The moon creates plenty of light outdoors for things, and if you don't have fires going and it is a clear sky even the stars are bright enough to walk around through open outdoor spaces. Not to mention nearly everybody had some sort of fire pit at home that they used daily for warming or cooking food and drink.

Personally I think this misconception only exists because people alive today have never had to or tried to do things in the dark or extreme low light conditions. You can't do everything, but there is a lot you can do, especially if you aren't constantly blinding yourself for 20 minutes at a time by looking at bright modern light sources. We even have the notion of a harvest moon, because you can work easily outside during a full moon, and fishing by moonlight is a thing and has been since before electricity.

Also candles may be expensive, but they are far from the only lighting option and certainly nowhere near the cheapest. Candles were prized for how nice and consistent and hands-off they were along with not smelling nearly so much or being as smoky or sooty. Rush plants, or others, dipped in any kind of oil or fat or resin make portable candle-like light, and also simple oil lanterns themselves you can place on a floor or table which date back to atleast 10,000BC. You can also use fatwood sticks, the wood of a tree like a pine that is sometimes soaked with pine resin and would be split into thin sticks that burn really nice and bright and long.

When I started ADHD medication, I started to be able to wake up on time without an alarm. All I need is a nearby source of the current time and somehow I can just wake up when I plan to.

I do still use alarms sometimes when I don't expect I'll be able to check the time and continue to fully waking up, but mostly I haven't needed them nearly as much as I used to.

I haven't used an alarm clock in my adult life. I don't remember using them when I was younger, but think that is just not remembering.

I'm not convinced everyone can just wake up, but I am increasingly convinced it is more possible than most people care to admit.

me neither; i must be an outlier but if i need to wake up at 5 i'll just wake of at 5 (or so) naturally even if groggy and under-slept... i must have some kind of internal alarm clock...

Absolutely the same. And it isn't like I have a good internal timer, as I am not good at judging how long I have been somewhere.

I have my phone set as backup and because I am guilty of the +5 minutes

I always wake up between 5-30 minutes before it goes off, if I have something important the next day tho, I don't sleep at all because my brain won't let me :)

I think it happened because our subconscious mind has its own clock running and it remembers hours and hours of our time From years.

Roosters

How did roosters.wake up before alarm clocks?

It's roosters all the way dawn

unless you a stressful day - with enough hydration - and decent sleep - you can command yourself to wake up without an alarm.

anyone who has gone through boarding school, military etc knows this to be true.

http://astronaut.io/

um, candle with a nail stuck in the side ?

https://www.google.com/search?q=candle+alarm+clock

You mean the "candles that drop metal pins every hour" mentioned in the subtitle?

Somewhat related I find it very funny how some people who identify as conservatives absolutely abhor dailight saving times as something which is "unnatural".

Well, there's nothing more natural than waking up earlier and resting later in the summer, while doing the contrary in the winter. Dailight Savings looks to me like at least an attempt of humans to try to follow the natural rythm of sunrise and sunset as "God intended us to do". Why are you against DST? Are you some sort of communist bureaucrat that want to impose us this government clock instead of respecting God's nature laws?

This story is strangely parallel to the software developer. Just as the knocker uppers stared at their own end... so do we. I wonder if they were in denial as well?

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