Or rather … too early.

I’ll make my point clear from the very beginning of this article: 10 a.m. should be the new 8 a.m. and midnight should be the new 10 p.m. The fact is that everything happens too early for everybody.

For the number-word-combinational-demonstrative-sentencially illiterate, here’s an illustration:

(Old) 8 a.m. ➤ (New) 10 a.m.

(Old) 10 p.m. ➤ (New) 12 a.m.

It is fair to say that nearly every American may be familiar with the famous Benjamin Franklin quotation: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” But did you also know that Benjamin Franklin had 15 dead bodies in the basement walls of his house? Google it!

But, what I mean to say is that though his hobbies may not be outdated for some of us, Benjy’s rhetoric absolutely was. 

I have seen a certain genre of thick-skulled social media post which says something to the effect of, “The fact that so many things still run off old-timey farmer logic goes to show you how many things they got right,” in a sort of hackneyed intellectual-common-man-traditionalist voice, so that you can regurgitate it to your friends as though it’s an original thought.

The above-stated position can, (looks at color of skin, color of eyeballs, texture of hair in the mirror) clearly, not be the case. The fact is, midnight isn’t that late unless you’re a kindergartener or are 80. And this is a statement that I do not need evidence for. I wholly believe that if you are of the functioning capability to have read this far into my article and didn’t use the Claude/Gemini AI sidebar to summarize it, you agree with this.

It is pretty ridiculous that the outdated formalism of crack-of-dawn waking still exists in our society today. Man is not a rooster.

That it is a genuinely common expectation that a student should have to push themself into the wee hours of the night and morning to get work done is stupefying. The one piece of futile MyPlate elementary health advice that is actually practical to do for most is “get good sleep.” Too bad that the world turns it into useless garbage as soon as life really begins, like most of what children are taught. 

Push everything ahead two hours, and the brains, eyes, bodies, cognitive functions and schedules of most would gleefully appreciate it; and I stand by a different old adage, that “one is only as healthy as they feel.”

Now some may say that what I’m proposing isn’t actually that much of a change because if midnight isn’t that late, and obviously 10 p.m. isn’t either, then putting things ahead two hours is just assigning an unnecessary label over what is already being necessarily done. And many may poke the seemingly obvious hole in my stance that everyone is just gonna adjust to that schedule anyway, so it won’t do anything.

The truth is that getting eight hours of sleep at a later time (say, 4 a.m. to noon) is worse for the body than getting the same amount of sleep at an earlier time (say, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.). The body has a certain internal clock and disrupting it disrupts everything else. But we already know that many must forgo this, so many, in fact, that the standard notation of time that is in relation to this rhythm is somewhat obsolete.

My perspective is actually a compromise between Ol’ Benjy Francis and the “sleep all day; party all night” crowd; for it allows those in the former crowd to adapt to a similar pattern while also normalizing and enabling the work of the stayer-uppers. 

It would not be very difficult to adapt meetings, work and class schedules to this two-hour push. Pretty much every feedback/graded-work email I’ve ever gotten from a professor has been near 11 p.m.; and this applies to them too, as most of them are as busy as students and get paid about the same amount. Let the sanctity of our rest not be trespassed.

Shall we never forget the wise words of that stout comedic straight-man, Sancho Panza: 

“All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level.”