Please give evidence beyond “I hate them” or “I like sleeping in” or “I have to get up early”, none of which is actual evidence
Signed
an actual morning person
Night person who needs to see a doctor/get your car worked on/go to the bank/buy groceries, etc? You’re gonna have to sacrifice sleep for it. Because for some reason it was decided that most places of business should open in the morning and close in the evening. Fewer and fewer places are 24/7. Wanna go for a nice stroll in the park? Tough shit, they close at sundown. Hell, want to just go for a walk in general? Fair chance of being harassed by the cops because being out and about in the dark is “suspicious” behavior. Want something that’s not fast food and don’t want to/can’t cook for yourself? Best we can do is a diner like Denny’s or IHOP. Got a loved one in the hospital you want to visit between work and sleep? Either gotta get up early or stay up late to meet visiting hours.
And let’s not forget, no matter how little you actually sleep and how much you actually get done, if you’re not awake during certain hours it means you’re a lazy good-for-nothing. Express a desire for more places open 24/7? Selfish and entitled. Complain about how noisy your neighbors are during your sleep hours? Well you can’t expect the world to tiptoe around you. But also you’d better keep it down at night because other people are sleeping!
But don’t worry! There are plenty of guides on how to “fix” your sleep schedule out there! You just have to follow a strict, often disruptive routine that you can never stray from even a little or else you’ll fall back to your natural sleep schedule lazy, undisciplined ways.
And at that, good luck finding a job that doesn’t expect you to be in by 9 AM at the latest. Which means getting up at 7:30 AM at the latest, earlier if you have a commute. Which means getting to bed at 11:30 PM at the latest.
Which means night owls have a straight choice between self-employment/freelance work, with all its insecurities, or constant self-torture. (Oh yeah, sleep deprivation does count as torture, per the UN.)
I’ve done second and third shift work most of my life. My partner and I are naturally inclined to it. We sleep best in the early morning and are most productive after 9pm.
When we lived in california and had access to 24/7 grocery stores it was great. I would get out of work at 1:30am and stop by the mostly empty grocery store and quietly pick up my groceries, unstressed and easy. When we moved back to New England, with its deep-rooted protestant work culture, we both worked 2nd shift jobs but everything closed between 6 and 8pm. So we would get out of work and no restaurants would be open, Grocery stores closed HOURS ago, gas stations would be closed (except for the really expensive ones), and many places had a curfew, so we were just stuck at home. because of our schedule and the fact that the entire region was run by people who regularly wake up at 5am and are going to sleep before sundown, it meant that we had to carefully plan out our grocery trips. We had to waste an entire weekend day of ours getting all of our shopping and errands and groceries done for the week (often in incredibly overcrowded and overstimulating stores, and it all took way longer because of lines) and make sure we didnt miss anything, because we wouldn’t be able to get anything until the next weekend. There just wasn’t enough time before work with our commute.
There was a lot to dislike about california, but the fact that they had ANY provisions for late nighters made our lives a lot less stressful.
Living in a place that has no consideration for late night workers at all is borderline torturous. And theres always a lot more late nighters than you think. Jobs don’t stop needing to be done just because you wake up at 5am and go to bed at 8 or whatever. Construction, manufacturing, commercial delivery, food production, emergency crews, travel crews, night staff at public utilities. These people all deserve your respect and the support you are given as a morning person. You morning people really do not understand how good you have it. How easy your ilfe is when the entire world you live it revolves around and caters to you. Don’t take it for granted. And next time you see your neighbor coming home at 7am and cracking open a beer after a long nights work, maybe shut the fuck up about it and mind your business alright?
