It’s become quite a trend online for gormless influencer types to post videos about their 4 a.m. starts and their “grind mindset” routine. Gym before sunrise, a pharmacy of overpriced supplements, an overlong skin-and-face routine, followed by a breakfast of all-natural, non-fat, high protein, non lactose something-or-other with imported Indonesian berries sprinkled on top and a coffee made from beans recently shat out the arse of a wild cat to wash it all down. Then work. We’ve all seen them, we can’t get away from them. And good for them.
I also wake up very early – but I’m not getting out of bed for the first three hours. I’m not hitting the gym, I’m drinking tea and reading books. I do go for hikes later on, and I’ll occasionally throw weights around, but there’s no chance I’m posting it online for likes. Nothing I’m saying here is new. By contemporary accounts, the philsopher Immanuel Kant rose at five, drank several cups of weak tea, allowed himself a pipe, and then got to work. No performance, no applause, just defending the part of the day when he could think. And most of the ancient Roman upper classes would have gagged at the modern “grind mindset.” Their ideal was otium cum dignitate (leisure with dignity), a deliberate shying away from performative bustle in favour of contemplation, study, public duty, and the slow, accountable business of private affairs.
What snapped me out of staying up long beyond my own tiredness was noticing that my nights were being scheduled for me. By whom? The television, originally. Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message.” With TV, the message was simple: sit up until the anthem. Digital media and video-on-demand just pushed into overdrive – just one more episode of this series, just another ten minutes of this podcast, just one more refresh. Once I forced myself to step away from that, there wasn’t anything left to keep me upright except habit, and habit is trainable.
I used to make somewhat of an effort at keeping up with current affairs. Then I noticed how little current there was beneath the affairs. Anyone curious can pull up old episodes of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line from the 1960s on YouTube and see for themselves. The headlines might change, but the arguments don’t. They’re chewing on the same topics that news-network talking heads and YouTube commentators still blather on about endlessly today.
The last few years trained us into a kind of helplessness. Lockdowns shrank life down to screens, a constant scroll of atrocities that made everything feel everywhere and permanently unfixable. In the end I stopped pretending I could do anything about it. My world shrank to the shop that opened when it said it would, the pothole that might one day get filled, and the handful of people whose names I actually knew.
When I get out for a hike, out on the country roads, the days look much the same – fields, hedges, the odd tractor. Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it’s out. The hedge isn’t pretending to be new every morning to grab my attention; it just is, and I’m the one who changes. I come back with fewer arguments on topics that ultimately don’t affect me for strangers I’ll never meet and whose opinion I don’t care about anyway.
I’ve wandered from the initial point. Dictating as I walk means I literally end up far from where I began, but I’ll attempt fold it all back: there is almost nothing new in the news anymore, and we’ve been so thoroughly bombarded with information since stepping into the digital that even if something genuinely novel did appear, most people are far too mentally fried to notice. So when I finally get out of bed, I take a walk whenever I can, and as I move forward in body, something similar happens in spirit. Each day in the countryside looks very much like the one before, but at least it isn’t trying to convince me it’s something else to get my attention. I’d rather keep pace with the field than the feed and it’s actually something worth getting up early for. Which is more than can be said for a bowl of high protein slop and cat-shit coffee.
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