Somewhere in the last two decades, mornings became a battleground. We started treating the hours between 5am and 9am as the arena in which our worth as human beings would be decided — through the quality of our journaling, the length of our run, the greenness of our smoothie.
The “5 AM Club” became shorthand for ambition. The algorithmic feeds filled with before-and-after stories of people who had unlocked their potential simply by waking up earlier and filling every minute with intention. The message was clear: idle mornings are wasted mornings.
