I have always been a morning person.
One of my greatest joys has always been to get up while my room is still glazed by darkness, stretch out my limbs like a panther in the presence of prey, and haul myself over to the nearest window to watch streaks of light break through the darkness. I’d watch how the sun floods treetops and rooftops with a slow eruption of color like a reimagined black-and-white film.
I have been this way since early high school. There’s just something about the early morning that is uncanny, that stillness despite the underlying forces of change at hand. I prefer it to the night, in part because the night is still, outstretched, and unchanging. There is little to no sign of life, and I am most moved by the things that stir, even when they don’t want to. And I love mornings in part because I can never bring myself to stay up late at night, no matter how much I want to, which is why I am dubbed grandmotherly, ancient, and even meemaw by my teasing friends.
And to think there was a time when I allowed my love of mornings to be disrupted with these fantastical illusions of optimization.
The truth is, as I grew older, I became more attuned to the pressures of the external world. The secret hopes of parents, the pressure to keep up with the most high-performing peers, the desire to impress teachers, the need to meet managers’ expectations. And I felt the appeal of optimization culture sneak up on me. The way I saw it, the original intent of optimization was a very compelling countermovement to nihilism — in that everything we do is meaningful, and it is our responsibility to narrow down our actions into the most fruitful outcome.
And yet, something happened when I maximized my morning routine: replaced the slow, lanky walks to the nearest window with a bowl of antioxidant berries, opened tabs to the latest news in technology, and quick-as-a-whip outfit change into my gym clothes and found myself flying out the door faster than the light pouring through the cracks of my black-out curtains. And I stopped noticing the changing shadows throughout the different stages of the day.
Los Angeles is a city with long commutes and a need for efficiency to even move around. My time there was flooded with big cinema moneybags, matcha influencers, and aspiring technocrats. I feel like I, at some point or another, was myself one of these things. Even at my alma mater, there was a subtle, unspoken agreement to pursue a very high level of excellence. The smartest students were the ones who knew all the hacks, shortcuts, and time-minimizing strats: not the heads-down library grinders. Workshops on using AI to make student resumes “more legible” to AI screeners were broadcasted. My cold application-to-interview rate jumped dramatically. And suddenly, efficiency was equated to success.
One day, in the thick of my efficiency kick, I bumped into an acquaintance in the streets of Westwood. I was getting coffee with a younger member of one of my student organizations — a sort of semi-professional coffee chat — and we ran into an incredibly sharp entrepreneur who I had worked with in the past. We pulled over by the sidewalk and chatted for a bit. I learned that my acquaintance was running an experiment of sorts.
“Today, I am doing everything ChatGPT tells me to do.”
“What?”
“I told ChatGPT to make every decision for me today. It told me to go for a walk right now, so here I am. Tell me, would you ever let AI control your day?”
We chatted a bit about efficiency and maximizing performance and what it would take to live up to our fullest potential. And then we went our separate ways — two of us looking at traffic lights and cars and one of us looking down at an active screen.
I often think about that interaction. I debated whether I would lead a healthier life if I tried that experiment myself; after all, a machine can read hundreds and thousands of scientific studies on human health and the most beneficial habits and routines to optimize for longevity. But then I wonder, if I was told to meet up with a friend, or vice versa, would the time spent together still be meaningful? Because it would not be a strenuous effort or fully acknowledged tradeoff of some other activity, it would simply be because I was told it would be what was best for me. Is friendship still genuine if it is inherently optimal?
My optimization bender left me overly caffeinated, constantly twitching, and with a habit of shutting my phone screen on and off over and over again. I ate foods that corresponded with my projected energy levels of the day. I studied in the morning when I was at my sharpest and let my creativity take the back burner since there was no direct way I could tangibly profit from it. Upon getting my feelings hurt, I surmised that the best way to cope was to take ice-cold showers to physically restart my nervous system and force neurotransmitters to surge and shake up my mind. I gained momentum, fervor, and boatloads of free time. But I lost slowness. And rituals. Tenacity to sit through discomfort. And the ability to repurpose that free time into something beautiful.
And I found myself with it all: the dream job, the right circles, and lavish evening plans. And yet I was still like a jackrabbit bending its legs for the next leap. Caffeine-induced jitters and a slight tremble in my hands.
The issue with performance-maxxing is not what is gained. It is what is lost.
As I struggled to find the source of my hollowness, I realized that the issue was rooted in what constitutes humanity. I wasn’t fully able to describe what I was feeling until I read Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It warns about the effects of over-optimization. I have interpreted the document to be a sort of framework urging that human dignity be preserved at the center of all tools and progress. I came away from it with a sense of what is lost from optimization: the ability to sit and struggle. When failure is erased, so is the soul — the very thing that is stretched out and retracted and worn down by the battles of striving. Loss creates the space to notice presence and absence: and that in turn is what elicits character, values, and personality. We are the combination of our gains and losses and hopes and regrets — not the sum, but the composite.
Completely turning my back on technological advance hasn’t felt like the right direction. I’ve become convinced that the people most concerned with human dignity should be the ones shaping the future of technology so that it preserves — and even uplifts — human dignity rather than stifles it. My pull towards this kind of work has only made me more certain that this is where I’m meant to be.
And yet, I do what I can to maintain a resemblance of un-optimization. I’ve started reading William Wordsworth in the mornings. It is long, painstaking work for someone with an attention span as shot as mine. And yet — it unclenches my jaw and unfurls my fingers. I start to see patterns — in how the environment gives way to the human condition, to people, to how they impose and withdraw, control and succumb to, and how they carry love. It makes me feel the natural world more distinctly. Literally — the way the pen feels twisting in my fingers. The crunch of a page turn. The sound of the outside wind. I go outside when I can and sit and people-watch. I delete social media apps from my phone and stop responding promptly to texts: not to go ghost, but to silence the outside world the way I would my phone. To see what is left in the absence of stimulation.
I think this is the way to see what our natural beauty is — who we are, what we like. What strikes us as ethereal or haunting or shallow. And how that stands still when no one watches, and there is no one to show off for.
Distillation of the self occurs when motivation to participate in the outside world is high, but the volume on feedback from algorithms is low.
And just like that —
I find myself in the early morning once again, sitting on the fire escape.
