On Not Being an Early Bird

• As Robert Heinlein put it, "the early worm deserves the bird".

• Alternatively, and also according to Heinlein, "if the early bird catches the worm, that only proves that the worm should have stayed in bed".

• Heinlein's character Lazarus Long goes on to explain:

  ...But getting up early does not get more work done... any more than you can make a piece of string longer by cutting off one end and tying it onto the other. You get less work done if you persist in getting up yawning and still tired. You aren't sharp and make mistakes and have to do it over. That sort of busy-busy is wasteful. As well as unpleasant. And annoying to those who would sleep late if their neighbors weren't so noisily active at some ungodly cow-milking hour. [...] progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

• Spider Robinson's character Jake Stonebender has a similar opinion:

  I had been a professional musician for a quarter of a century until I gave it up to tend bar; Zoey still was one – or had been right up until carrying both a baby and a bass guitar got to be too much for her; it had been decades since either of us had willingly gotten up at dawn. Dawn was what you occasionally stayed up as late as. Sunlight gave you the skin cancer, everyody knew that. Civilians got up at dawn, for heaven's sake.

• Montreal newspaper columnist Josh Freed once suggested that "the early bird should catch something serious".

• John D. McDonald's character Travis McGee has a slightly different take on that: "The early bird who catches the worm works for someone who comes in late and owns the worm farm."

• Besides, even if the early bird does get the worm, Ernst Berg reminds us that it's the second mouse which gets the cheese.

• Worse still, Mike Sphar observed that, "They say 'the early bird gets the worm'. What they often fail to consider, however, is the early cat."

• Of course, anyone who thinks of programming as "quality time" knows that "Real Programmers only see the sun rise if they've been up all night". (That's partly because "in general no Real Programmer works 9 to 5, except those on the night shift".)

• After all, according to Ron DeBlock, "if God had meant for Man to see the sun rise, He would have scheduled it later in the day".

• That may be because, according to Orson Scott Card, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes."

• The following definition comes from The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

  Dawn, n: The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.

• Or, in other words, "Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead".

• ...although the fact is that everyone is an early riser; it's just that some of us live in the wrong time zone.

[ SMW, June 2014 ]