Having an office job that allows for flexible hours, I start my working day at different times during the year. Setting the alarm to the latest hour that I can start to work it never wakes me up, but it is there just in case.
Overall, I feel that I am less stressed, sleep better and have more energy that if I force myself a schedule to wake up. What I have is a schedule to go to sleep, the rest I leave to nature.
> Mary Smith, a much-loved knocker upper in East London
Great picture.
Funny enough, I have the same strategy but the exact opposite experience -- it _almost always_ wakes me up, even when it's set for 11 am. I don't disagree with you though, I just think it's funny how different human experience is. And there are benefits too, it's easy for me to stay up late, and a lot of my best work comes naturally at 1 am. But basically nothing good happens before noon.
I’ve struggled with the decision to go to sleep my whole life. If left to my own devices I’d effectively have a 28-30 hour day and my sleep/wake times would continuously shift.
I’ve been remote for 6 years now, and did it on and off for a while before that. I’m still woken up by an alarm clock, because I can’t get myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, but have to be online for meetings and stuff and 9am… I think many would prefer 8am, but that’s just a symptom of a broken meeting culture.
1.5 years of basically no irl social life and going to bed at 22 every day has really hammered home my rhythm. I still wake up around 06-07 every day.
I can't tell you how much I'd dread having to be violently aroused from my slumber on an ongoing basis.
I don't think this is true.
We (Asian) Indians make a big deal out of beginning and doing important tasks at auspicious times. That wouldn't be possible without some means of measuring time of day even if its not perfect.
Edit: updated for clarity and leaving original comment as is.
I would notice having to go out and buy candles all the time, or needing to make them. A candle can be consumed over the course of a day or maybe even a few hours. A light bulb can last months or years.
If light bulbs burned out as fast as candles burn, I would be a fanatic about keeping the lights off and only use them when absolutely necessary.
"The electrical cost to produce the same amount of light as a single standard candle is approximately $0.01 per year if run for 14 hours every day. In terms of energy consumption, a standard candle produces about 12.57 lumens of light, which can be matched by an LED bulb using only 0.1 to 0.2 watts."
Personally I think this misconception only exists because people alive today have never had to or tried to do things in the dark or extreme low light conditions. You can't do everything, but there is a lot you can do, especially if you aren't constantly blinding yourself for 20 minutes at a time by looking at bright modern light sources. We even have the notion of a harvest moon, because you can work easily outside during a full moon, and fishing by moonlight is a thing and has been since before electricity.
Also candles may be expensive, but they are far from the only lighting option and certainly nowhere near the cheapest. Candles were prized for how nice and consistent and hands-off they were along with not smelling nearly so much or being as smoky or sooty. Rush plants, or others, dipped in any kind of oil or fat or resin make portable candle-like light, and also simple oil lanterns themselves you can place on a floor or table which date back to atleast 10,000BC. You can also use fatwood sticks, the wood of a tree like a pine that is sometimes soaked with pine resin and would be split into thin sticks that burn really nice and bright and long.
I do still use alarms sometimes when I don't expect I'll be able to check the time and continue to fully waking up, but mostly I haven't needed them nearly as much as I used to.
I'm not convinced everyone can just wake up, but I am increasingly convinced it is more possible than most people care to admit.
I always wake up between 5-30 minutes before it goes off, if I have something important the next day tho, I don't sleep at all because my brain won't let me :)
anyone who has gone through boarding school, military etc knows this to be true.
Well, there's nothing more natural than waking up earlier and resting later in the summer, while doing the contrary in the winter. Dailight Savings looks to me like at least an attempt of humans to try to follow the natural rythm of sunrise and sunset as "God intended us to do". Why are you against DST? Are you some sort of communist bureaucrat that want to impose us this government clock instead of respecting God's nature laws?
