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American cities are reversible figures. What you see says as much about you as the city itself. New York rises and grinds as much as it never sleeps. Los Angeles is Westside wellness as much as it is Hollywood debauchery. San Francisco has its cracked engineers and its burner polycules; Miami its public beaches and its VIP clubs; DC its morning joggers and its smoke-filled rooms.
Ecosystem layers on ecosystem—sometimes intersecting, often not. Each is inhabited by distinct characters, championing their own values and behaviors. So distinct are these phase shifts that noon and midnight feel not so much different times as different cities.
Cities are the focus because nightlife is fundamentally enabled by the built urban environment. You can see its footprint spread across satellite images of the Earth: clusters of light cling to the Eastern Seaboard, trace the shores of the Great Lakes, dot the Great Plains, sweep down the West Coast, extend tendrils along the Interstate Highways, dimming into the hinterlands. Nightlife was always a consequence of modernity.
At a minimum, it required gas street lamps to exist…
If the twentieth century conquered the night with electricity, the twenty-first is doubling down on the day. The question is: why?
Has the novelty of the night worn off?
Are we afraid of the dark?
early birds
Symbolically, day and night mirror other Manichean contrasts: good and evil; black and white; life and death. Morning is semiotically loaded with inherent wholesomeness: fortified cereals, sunshine, and Saturday morning cartoons. Mornings bustle. They’re montages of Subway trains and heaving crowds. Mornings are power: the quiet of dawn gives way to the energy of day.
Maybe that’s why we say: 'the early bird gets the worm.' Mornings are kinetic and whoever harnesses that dynamism wins the day. It’s a truism of hustlepreneurs, LinkedIn influencers, and venture capitalists alike: successful people don’t sleep in.
It’s an issue of alignment. Just as market positions have headwinds and tailwinds, so too does human nature. Artificial energy (amphetamines) and artificial daylight (LEDs and screens) can fool our circadian rhythm, but in the end, these hacks are always borrowing against the future. Someday the sleep debt must be payed—either with actual rest or accelerated aging.
Sunlight, key to a healthy glow, is increasingly seen as a wellness treatment in and of itself. It’s long been a pet topic of Silicon Valley’s favorite neuroscientist and podcaster, Andrew Huberman. The morning is the beginning of the virtuous cycle.
Healthy ➞ Wealthy ➞ Wise
All of this idiomatic praise might lead you to believe mornings are without their discontents. Not so. The flip side of balance is routine, structure, constraint. Mornings are the tyranny of the normal. Mornings are not avant-garde. (This is why daybreak raves are so unspeakably bleak.)
We spent the twentieth century terraforming the night with street lights and neon, carving more usable hours out of the day with electricity the way a machete carves a path out of deepest, darkest jungle. Early Birds reject the adventure of the night. It’s very last century, you see. As with all dreams of infinite expansion, you eventually discover the limit. Negative side effects start to kick in. At the far end of sleep deprivation lies psychosis.
In our era of crisis, few feel like they can risk a psychotic break, let alone being late for work. Maybe this is why Gen Z is going to bed earlier than ever.
The Early Bird optimizes for realism.
