Not an early bird, not a night owl, but a secret third bird...

(Time) birds aren't real

by Thomas Wykes

I’ve always thought that there’s something casually insidious about enthusiastically identifying as a morning person. It’s one thing to wake up early because you have things to do or your circadian rhythm is more abrupt than others’, but something never quite sits right with me when someone exclaims how much they love being a morning person. Then why don’t you marry it! is what I want to say. But I don’t, because I’m asleep.

To be clear, I have no beef with the A.M. I just find its implied virtue so boring. Who told you to love the morning so much? Why is the morning the only time to be present for virtue? Wouldn’t it be ideal that the night has more virtuous people to balance out all the assumed villainous activities going on under the moon’s big bald face? Meanwhile, nobody talks enough about how the Sun famously is a convicted serial killer.

I have never been a morning person. I used to be a night owl, but the ‘stay home doing fun little activities in my room‘ kind. 15+ years later, I’m still not a morning person. However, I’m no longer a night owl either. I’m whatever an early afternoon bird would be. Probably a flightless one.

Morning people get too much credit for being productive. My sleeping habits may be ruled by however my brain chooses to shuffle neurons on any given day, but I am usually able to reach satisfaction in its dealings with more patience than grief. The self-employment tax I have to pay just to make a living in this country is my fee for waking up whenever I want to and going to bed whenever I want to.

Suggestions of waking up early to write before the day is daying, time-blocking to sprint my way to a wordcount, or absconding to someplace where there are NO distractions are all ideas that have spawned output in micro increments but never well enough to be worth shifting my whole lifestyle and routine about it. Recently, someone asked me when my best productivity time of the day was, and I couldn’t answer because the top juice as well as the stones of resistance strike often and at will, despite how much energy I have allotted to be productive.

Those committed enough to their craft (or Instagram bio) break free from the bird binary and instead take the tireless route known only as 24/7. Performing the work is just as much the work as whatever the work is itself. 24/7s are never logged off. 24/7s are pure momentum, fueled usually by a deep, spooky something in their lives: loneliness, feelings of inadequacy, the past, ancestral trauma, the haters, etc. But the great thing about them is that they usually make the best restaurant reservations.

However, for [redacted] like me, my process is…no process. If working hours are all the time now, so are fuck-off hours. They’re like yin and yang; you can’t have one without the other. Life is an eternal tug-of-war between hustling and fucking off. And for those of us who have no appetite for hustle culture, it’s a fuck-off buffet all too often.

Creativity is easily immune to productivity, however. It flits all around you. You know it’s there, but not where exactly. Too often it’s hidden in the orchestra of your environment, drowned out by the din of the horns section. Most of your time becomes valued by the level of output it’s able to bear. Sometimes the good shit comes like a lightning strike or a rare bird sighting. It’s a curse dressed up as a reward, subjecting you to a schedule that has no interest in your deadlines. Some of us even tell ourselves that all the other non-productive times are necessary for productivity to prevail — that way rest also becomes a tool of productivity. It allows us more time to wait around while skirting the guilt of just waiting around.

I mean, it makes sense. As the dominant species on the planet, we spend most of our time assigning meaning to everything — they don’t even have to be tangible, and most of the time they aren’t. We value legacy, not life, unlike any other creature in the wild. For them, all time alive is successfully spent. Honestly, it must be nice; what does a cat do all day but just bask in a sunbeam? Instead, I have to pay taxes and negotiate the virtue and morality applied to made-up concepts like virginity and Bitcoin. Being human is weird enough. Why must I also choose a time bird?

Performance of individuality is rife in American culture. (It’s why we’re great entertainers and also why we’ve no tangible concept of a collective.) It reeks of the pitfalls (and pratfalls) of a meritocracy, the side effects of which have birthed the only kind of modesty we can apply our cultural values to: imposter syndrome. This may be something we all suspect, but never is it more apparent than in this excerpt from a NYT article about parched American tourists in Europe.

From the NY Times article “According to TikTok, Americans Are Very, Very Thirsty”

And look, I know The Times takes a notoriously judgey tone to its cultural coverage but if this hurt your feelings, you might be “classic America.” Our patriotism is rooted so deeply that it pathologizes one of the most simple survival activities such as… drinking water. I guess if there is one way you can reject modernity it’s to abandon imposter syndrome.

And I guess one advantageous thing about a meritocracy is that anyone can try anything they put their mind to — sometimes even very badly — and still succeed (especially in the arts). You are what you pretend to be, you know? (And for some folks, if you pretend well enough, you get a Shonda Rhimes Netflix series about you while you’re in jail.) This thought brings me more comfort than it should. Maybe my worst (or what I believe is my worst) actually is good enough. Besides, everyone loves penguins.

ok no more birds! thank you!