On Early Rising
2025-09-28
We've got a relaxing Sunday morning on our hands. I woke up rather late this morning after a long night and while I did technically wake up with my 8 AM alarm, I absolutely fell back asleep so that I could sleep in. I've been having a tough time with getting up early because I've been having a major preference for staying up later at night because the house is quiet and I have less distractions so I can read and write more freely. But at the same time, I'm rather unemployed and have no major obligations that require me to get up at a certain time, so there's not really much of a reason to other than to keep my ancestral puritan work ethic from gnawing at me.
I don't feel particularly emboldened to wake up super early these days. It seems that I don't have the level of self-control to go to bed early and wake up early solely on my own. I mean, if I had a job I'd be able to wake up early—well, most likely I don't know. I've found that people are motivated mostly by two major ideas: obligation and passion. So for me, I don't have any obligations making me get up early and I have no passion for waking up early because I'd rather be more of a night owl, so there it is. But again, the puritan spirit still gnaws at me. Ancient wisdom gnaws at me too. It is just healthier for us to wake up early in the morning.
But here's the thing, I have spent so much time digging myself and crawling into a deep dopaminergic hole. I developed a harsh sense of egoism in my late teens and early twenties, and this egoism fostered an equally damaging hedonism. I was into Max Stirner at the time and didn't have much of any kind of spiritual sense. A quote from Stirner that describes me at twenty years old:
“When the world gets in my way—and it gets in my way everywhere—then I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. You are nothing for me but—my food, just as I am also fed upon and consumed by you. We have only one relationship to each other, that of usefulness, usability, advantage. We owe each other nothing, because what I seem to owe to you, I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheerful expression in order to likewise cheer you up, then your cheerfulness matters to me, and my expression serves my wish; I do not show it to thousands of others, whom I have no intention of cheering up.”
Yes reader, I really did think of people as food to consume. I was an asshole, but did a lot of mental gymnastics to not convince myself otherwise. It was a time of true spiritual carelessness, but I've grown a bit wiser since then. Well, at least that's what my feeble and corrupt mind would like me to think.
My aim now is to release myself from my dopaminergic traps, but I have enough sense to understand that I have to do so one vice at a time. Thankfully I've figured out life without nicotine (probably need to write about this in depth), got myself back in the gym, quit drugs (well, the really bad ones), drink plenty of water, etc. But I still need to figure out my diet since I have an intense sugar addiction thanks to quitting nicotine. I'd also like to do more to cultivate discipline. I've been figuring it out slowly, but I'm hoping to keep making progress.
One day at a time, y'all.