“The early bird catches the worm.” It tries to teach that when you get up early, you have the whole day ahead of you to be productive. But what about the hours of the night? You can also use them!
However, society does not seem to care about that and wants people to stay in a rigorous system of getting up early and therefore going to bed early.
Apart from the fact that people just have different sleep cycles and different productivity levels throughout the day (and night), it is also not a feasible system on a grander scale.
If you have to work from nine to five, but the stores are open from nine to five, when do you have time to go there and run errands? Would it not be so much more effective if there were a lot of different shifts so that you could (almost) always run errands and pick when to work based on your personal sleep cycle? Of course, you can work the night shift, but that is only possible in very few industries, and you could still feel alienated because all of your friends work a nine-to-five and your schedules are never compatible.
Not to mention, many kids in school would benefit from being able to at least push the start of their school day back by a couple of hours because they cannot really focus due to being too tired. And that is not the only group of people — artists oftentimes have their peak creative time at night (after all the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design is open 24/7 to its students) and do not really have the public infrastructure to connect with other people and work on their projects together during the night like you would be able to do during the day. Of course, you could go to a bar together, but that gets rowdy and loud as opposed to a quiet and softer atmosphere like in a café because typically, not even libraries are open 24/7. The ideal solution would maybe be a café that is open at night and can host people, specifically creatives, and maybe other university students.
Also, the way society speaks to night owls often seems quite derogatory and would not be okay the other way around. When someone gets up past 10 am and everyone says, “look what the cat dragged in,” that seems normalized, but you would never say “quitting for the day?” to an early riser going to bed before 10 pm.
Additionally, when early risers go to bed, a lot of times, they expect everyone else to be quiet and let them sleep in peace — which night owls are usually very respectful of — but then in the morning, they have no respect for the people still asleep and just go about their routine without lowering their noise levels.
My point is: there are a lot of double standards for people who get up late and those who get up early. I do not think it is fair that people get treated differently based on that because at the end of the day, you cannot control when your brain is the most productive. Some people just are not made for mornings, and that is okay! We as a society need more spaces and acceptance for people with different sleep cycles because it would help so many children in school, and also make the way our society works, in terms of opening hours, so much easier and accessible.