I am deep in enemy territory. Surrounded by supporters of the very regime I’ve been railing against for years: the menace to society that is people who get up early in the morning for no good reason.
When I first moved to Ireland I had jet lag. They say you need one day per timezone to get over it. I had just jumped nine. By day three I was so tired I could smell colours.
My body was a cranky toddler that drifted off to sleep in the car and came to screaming in a pram being pushed around an Aldi. I fought off the desperate and dragging need to sleep, going to bed later in a bid to reset myself.
But I shouldn’t have bothered my hole. My circadian rhythm was way off . It didn’t matter if I slept at 7pm or 1am, my eyes would spring open at 4am without fail, and I would be ready to greet the day in Dublin. Except my new city wasn’t ready to greet me.
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My plan was to pretend to be a morning person, get up, get a coffee and walk around the streets. Cafes open from around 6am in Sydney or even earlier. I’d just wait two hours and watch the sun rise, beverage in hand.
Then I discovered the sun wouldn’t show itself properly until 9am in winter and no cafe except the closest Starbucks would open until 7.30am (the Sydney equivalent of noon). So I waited, and as I made my way through the streets of Ringsend, which were empty enough to make me feel I’d survived an apocalypse, I felt profound joy.
Finally I had found my people. I had found a culture that didn’t compel people to leap out of bed predawn.
I saw tradespeople going to work at 8am or sometimes 9am; in Australia the heat has most on site between 5am and 7am. My new boss told me to show up at 10am. Brunch – the meal that’s meant to come between breakfast and lunch – was being offered at 2pm. All this would have been unthinkable just a short time and a long plane ride ago.
Ireland does have a decent number of early risers who do so out of choice and not work requirements. The sea swimmers who like to slice through Dublin Bay while it looks like glass. Parents of small children who have too much inconvenient guilt about drugging them. Nuns. Runners. Busy mothers who just want “one bloody hour of quiet to themselves before everybody wakes up, if that’s not too much to ask”.
But you don’t catch them banging on about it. It’s very much a case of “your body, your choice”. They’re happy in their way but they won’t attempt to proselytise you.
Sadly, my partner has farming child trauma and believes that if you get up at 8am a man in wellies will come stand by your bed and tut “sure half the day is gone” at you in shame. But even he enjoys an occasional lie-in. A morning safe from being ripped from the warm blankets and the soft bed, where it is so, so cozy and you are so, so comfy.
When I moved back to Australia I realised the false supremacy of morning people had taken my beloved country to new extremes. It’s become an influencer trend after Covid to take photos at Bondi or any beach at sunrise, doing something that could easily be done at any point of the day – like running or walking. Or wearing tights.
The problem with morning people is that they assign moral value to what happens to be their natural preference. Which you never catch night people doing, oddly. Depriving yourself of sleep is not labelled performative productiveness – “it’s a mindset for success”. The Puritans would have hated TikTok, but they would have loved the early morning propaganda being spread on it.
Instead of leaving early mornings for the Protestants (like my dad), we have let them become the drag impersonation of work ethic. Getting up and journaling at 6am is seen as self-discipline, but writing things in a diary at 2am is a cry for help. Working into the night is bad time management even if those are your most productive and creative hours. But waking up four hours before you have to work to faff around is not.
It’s a marketing battle, and we are letting the morning people win. Just as I cannot be brilliant at breakfast, a person who wakes up at 5am every day will be no craic at midnight. But who would you rather have at your wedding?
