What It’s Like Waking Up at 5 Am for Necessity’s Sake
Where some wakeup at dawn for promises of productivity, I did it because I had to to keep my profession
On YouTube, there’s a trend of millennials waking up at 5 AM forfeiting their privilege of sleeping in all for the sake of seeming more productive. Now I say seeming and not feeling because I am a millennial, 24 born in 1997, and I’ve yet to make a million dollars — after all this trend was mostly born of another trend of mimicking millionaire's most successful habits. Whatever blog, YouTube video, or now even TikTok post has made you curious about rising before the sun, none of them mention an important motivator: necessity.
I wake up at 5 AM, honestly more like 5:15 AM PT if I’m being exact, because my current employment depends on it. I live on the west coast but work for a news network that by standard practice runs on EST. A major contingency of me getting this job was my willingness to either wake up early or move to NYC to meet the demands of this busy role. Forget wanting to bullet journal under a soft desk lamp and an aromatic medium-roast brew by my side, I wake up groggy, throw on sweats and open my laptop to join the morning’s editorial Zoom with the camera off and a coffee from a Keurig cupped in my hands.
The reality is that while there’s a growing amount of discourse on the benefit of being an early bird, most of it comes from people who choose to be and don't have to be. In theory, I could have moved to NYC to acclimate to this temporal border. However, I can’t afford to live in NYC with the meager coordinator salary I make. Let’s also consider those, like my parents and grandparents, whose immigrant journeys included blue-collar work that required being up before the worm had even been gotten. (You know the early bird gets the worm?)
Our world is more connected than ever and it's both a blessing and a curse to live in a 24/7 world. The challenge that comes with being an early bird is that just because we get our work done doesn’t mean that there won’t be more waiting for us. I start my work day early and end early compared to most of my counterparts. But when I’m wrapped at 3 PM, that leaves me physically and mentally drained the same way my friends would feel at 6 PM…
