Foreword.
Before we start, it should be noted that I am not what one would call a “morning person”. Perhaps ideologically and ideally I am, but biologically I am decidedly not. My (current) tendency towards a late start to sleep makes it a losing battle. Maybe someday I can join the ranks of those chosen grindset warriors who can get up at 5 everyday, but that day is not today. Anyway, all of this is to say that this won’t be a “I wake up early and get shit done” flex. In actuality this is a way for me to pass the time at the gate of my early morning flight.
Hard-hitting 4AM analysis.
There’s a certain surreal magic that you can only experience in the wee hours of the morning. The uncanny stillness, the cool air, the simultaneously peaceful and foreboding quiet. These quiet times are enjoyable, but perhaps the even more rare and surreal is the experience of being in a heavily peopled area at this time of day. It seems almost impossible that so many people would have such common cause to awake (or in my case, skip sleep entirely) at this early hour. It’s possible that this sort of shared purpose only comes in the form of an airplane or other form of scheduled mass transit, but who knows, this is all anecdotal and I don’t get up at 3 in the morning frequently enough to collect data.1
Especially in the largely alienating public existence we lead, there is a bizarrely contrasting sense of unity and kinship, unspoken but palpably present. I think this is a similar phenomenon to that of a group that has accomplished some lofty goal or simply just gritted their collective teeth and toughed it out together. This internal knowledge that everybody must feel as exhausted and shitty as I do, and that we all somehow pulled ourselves out of our comfortable beds to go from the same place to the same place. For a small time (in this case like 2 hours including gate waiting time and flight time), we are on the exact same trajectory.2 We are unified, sharing the same experience, and then after a similarly small time, we will never cross paths again. It’s a weird vibe.
So the big, world changing takeaway is this: the cure to all of humanity’s woes is for all of us to take more 5AM flights to JFK. Try it sometime.