There are two kinds of people in this world: morning people, and people who are honest about mornings.
Morning people are the ones who wake up before the alarm, stretch like it’s a yoga commercial, and say things like “I just love the quiet of the early hours.” You know what else loves the quiet of the early hours? Corpses. Owls. Burglars. That’s the whole list of things thriving at 5 AM, and I’m suspicious of all of them.
I’ve never once woken up and thought, “Wow, what a beautiful sunrise.” Every sunrise I’ve ever seen was an accident. Somebody demanded I be somewhere, or something beeped at me, and I stumbled to a window looking like I’d been exhumed instead of awakened.
The Alarm Clock Is a Lie We All Agree To
Here’s how my alarm works. It goes off. I turn it off in my sleep, which scientists should study because I’m basically performing complex motor tasks while unconscious. Then the second alarm goes off, and I have a full negotiation with myself like I’m defusing a bomb: “If I skip the shower, I get twelve more minutes. If I skip breakfast, that’s twenty. If I skip pretending to care about traffic, I can leave in nine.”
Morning people set one alarm. One. They treat the alarm like a suggestion from a friend. The rest of us treat it like a hostage situation and respond accordingly.
I once slept through three alarms, a phone call, and — I swear this is true — a smoke detector with a low battery. That thing chirps at a frequency designed to wake the dead, and I incorporated it into a dream about a casino. I woke up an hour late, fully convinced I’d been playing slots. The house always wins, but that morning, the house was also me.
Morning People Should Be Studied, Not Admired
I don’t hate morning people. I just want to understand them the way scientists understand deep-sea creatures — with caution, and from a safe distance.
These are people who go for a run at dawn. Voluntarily. Their heart rate is elevated before most of us have located our phones. They drink one cup of coffee and they’re done — one cup, like it’s a vitamin and not a life-support system. They use the word “productive” before 7 AM the way the rest of us use it in a performance review: with no evidence and a lot of confidence.
And they always want to talk to you. That’s the real crime. “How’d you sleep?” Buddy, I’m still deciding. My soul hasn’t fully re-entered my body yet. The correct greeting for me before 8 AM is silence, or at minimum, a written note I can read after I’ve had caffeine.
The worst is the morning person who’s also your boss. “Let’s do a 7 AM standup, it’ll be quick.” Sir, nothing about me is standing up at 7 AM. I’m horizontal in spirit until at least 9. My best ideas don’t arrive until the afternoon because my brain runs on a delay — it’s not lazy, it’s just in a different timezone than my body.
Coffee Isn’t a Drink, It’s a Contract
Let’s be honest about coffee. Nobody who isn’t a morning person drinks coffee because they enjoy the taste. We drink it because it’s the toll we pay to rejoin the human race.
I don’t “savor” my coffee. I mainline it like it’s medicine, which — legally speaking — it basically is. The first cup doesn’t make me alert; it makes me capable of being spoken to without it counting as an act of aggression. The second cup is when my personality boots up. Before cup one, I’m not a person, I’m a warning label.
Morning people don’t get this. They drink coffee “for the ritual.” They grind their own beans. They have opinions about roast profiles. I have opinions about sleep deprivation and none of them are good. I don’t need a ritual; I need a defibrillator in a mug.
There’s a special kind of despair in that moment when you realize you’re out of coffee. It’s not disappointment. It’s grief. You stand in the kitchen, staring at an empty bag, doing the math on whether you can function without it, and the answer is always the same: technically yes, but everyone around me will pay the price. So you go to the store in pajamas that have seen things, and the cashier — a morning person, of course — chirps “early start today!” and you have to decide whether prison is worth it.
The Snooze Button Is the Most Honest Button in the House
The snooze button gets a bad rap. People call it a sign of weakness. I call it the only honest negotiation in my entire day.
Every other part of adult life is lying to me. “This meeting could have been an email” — true, but here we are. “Your call is important to us” — it is not. “One more episode” — it’s never one more. But the snooze button? The snooze button says “nine more minutes” and delivers exactly nine more minutes of blissful, consequence-free nothing. It keeps its promises. It’s the most trustworthy relationship I have.
Sure, those nine minutes always end. And sure, I always regret it. But in the moment? In that moment, hitting snooze is the single best decision I’ll make all day, and it’s not even close.
A Proposal for a Better World
Here’s my modest proposal: stop scheduling important things in the morning.
Nothing good has ever been decided before 9 AM. Think about it. Every bad decision in history — every war, every regrettable tattoo, every “sure, I’ll sign up for that timeshare” — happened either late at night or way too early in the morning. The morning is when your judgment is at its worst and your filter is at its thinnest. Scheduling a meeting at 7:30 AM is just asking a room full of people to agree to things they’ll regret by lunch.
Let’s move mornings to the afternoon. Not literally — I’m not a monster. But culturally. Let’s agree that “first thing in the morning” means 10:30. Let’s stop pretending that productivity has a start time and admit that some of us are night-shift souls trapped in a day-shift world.
And to the morning people: I respect you. I really do. You are the reason society functions before noon, and for that, you have my gratitude. But I’m going to need you to stop saying “rise and shine.” Nothing is shining. The sun is up because it has no choice. I, however, have choices, and I’m choosing nine more minutes.
I’m not a morning person. I’m a morning victim. And honestly? I’m not looking for a cure. I’m just looking for a bigger snooze button.