The hour before anyone else is up

There is an hour at the start of the day that does not belong to anyone.

It is the hour before the children, before the partner, before the dog has decided you are awake, before the kettle, before the phone. It is dark or it is half-dark. It is, depending on the season, blue or grey or that strange yellow that the sky does just before it commits to a colour.

This hour is, I will argue, the most valuable hour in a life. And the wellness industry has been trying to sell it back to you for a decade.

You know the pitch. 5 a.m. club. Morning routine. Stack of habits. Cold plunge. The pitch is that this hour is when you become the version of you that wins. You will meditate, journal, exercise, plan, hydrate, and ideate, and by the time the day starts you will already be ahead of it. The pitch is, fundamentally, that this hour is a productive hour. That it can be optimized. That somebody, somewhere, is doing it better than you are, and if you knew their stack you could too.

This is, I think, the cruelest thing that has been done to that hour.

The hour before anyone else is up is not a productive hour. It is the opposite of a productive hour. It is the only hour in your day that has not yet been claimed by anyone — including, if you can manage it, by yourself. It is the hour in which you can be a person who is not yet doing anything. That is the point of it. That is the whole point of it.

A list of things that hour is good for, none of which require a stack:

• Sitting somewhere with a window in it. Just sitting.
• A cup of something hot, held in two hands, not photographed.
• Reading three pages of something that is not work-related. (If you finish the three pages and want more, fine. If you don’t, also fine.)
• Going outside. Not for a run. Just outside.
• Writing one sentence, on a piece of paper that you are not going to show anyone, about how you actually feel. (Or not. The page is not a tax.)
• Doing absolutely nothing on purpose, for a stretch long enough that it scares you a little.

A list of things that hour is not good for:

• Email.
• Slack.
• The phone.
• A 5-step routine.
• Optimizing anything.
• Becoming a better version of yourself.

I am aware this sounds precious. Don’t I have to actually work? Don’t I have to actually exercise? You do. You are an adult. You will do them. You can do them at 7. You can do them at 8. You can do them at 9. You cannot do them at 5:30, and also have an hour that belongs to no one, because there are only twenty-four hours in a day and the math does not bend for you.

The reason this hour matters is not that it makes you more productive. The reason it matters is that the rest of the day is going to ask things of you. Real things. Your children, if you have them, will want you. Your work, if you have it, will want you. The people in your life will want you. The internet will want you, in its diffuse and unceasing way. If every hour of your day is an hour in which something wants you, you will, eventually, become a person who has nothing in them that has not been asked for. This is not a personality. This is what happens when a person is used up.

The hour before anyone is up is the hour in which you are not being used. That is what it is for.

I am writing this at 5:47 a.m. The light outside the window is doing the yellow thing. I have had one and a half cups of tea. I am about to stop writing and look at the light for a few minutes, on purpose, while it is still strange. None of this will appear in a feed. None of it can. The light is already changing. By the time I had told you about it, it would not be the same light.

This is roughly the kind of hour we make things for.