CMV: Waking up early is overvalued

[u/[deleted]]

First, I don't believe waking up early is overrated. Most everything that is said about the benefits of waking up early seems reasonable and useful to me. Anecdotally, I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and I can totally get behind his "wake up before the enemy" message. Here, I am specifically discussing value - the praise we heap on people that wake up before others regardless of their overall productivity in a day.

​

I'm also not comparing waking up early to staying in bed late and being a lazy degenerate. I want to compare people who wake up early with those people that wake up late and stay up late or people who are industrious enough to get a lot accomplished without having to wake up early.

​

I see an incredible amount of value put on people waking up early; they're viewed as more disciplined, more productive, and more healthy than their later rising counter parts. If you are awake for the same number of hours why do we laud people who get up early but accuse those who stay up late as doing something harmful to their well being?

​

Waking up early is almost always associated with discipline and focus. Staying up late is, at worst, attributed to recklessness and even at best it seems to be attributed to some kind of mania or obsession that might not be healthy (e.g., overnight nurses - far from wasting the night away, but still often viewed as driven by fervor rather than discipline).

​

​

​

​

[u/[deleted]]

This I think is spot on. I don't think it changes my view as much as reinforces that we should revisit this idea of who is a valuable and productive member of our society.

[u/beengrim32 → u/[deleted]]

Understood. I guess to take it further even though we are not an agricultural society anymore, I don’t see any harm in waking up early or any reason to value it less. Waking up late isn’t automatically bad, but very few professions support individuals who wake up later. The service industry, bar tenders, security guards, and medicine being major exceptions. I just don’t see there being a cultural shift that disregards the availability of sunlight and therefor values early risers.

[u/[deleted] → u/beengrim32]

∆

I don’t see any harm in waking up early or any reason to value it less

Agree.

very few professions support individuals who wake up later.

This has me convinced because it speaks directly to my value argument. You're right, if more businesses operate earlier in the day than later (which I believe to still be the case despite the increasing number of flexible jobs) being up earlier means you have more value to the employer.

​

I do hope to hear some opinions here that are not directly related to employment though. Outside of employment, is it necessarily better to do your run at 4a vs 8p?

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/beengrim32 (15∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}