“The Morning Routine That Changed My Life”
Beneath the bullet journaling and cold plunges lies a fixation with productivity—and the loss of something more human.
Recently, the internet became obsessed with morning routines.
Starting last year, hundreds of videos, usually with the same title: “The Morning Routine That Changed My Life”, were uploaded onto YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
While there’s some variation of form, the videos have common themes: an early (sometimes jarringly early) wake-up, self-care rituals, journaling, expensive caffeine, and physical exercise.
The routines are filled with intentionality and meditative pauses, with ashwagandha supplements and matcha, with contrast plunges and bullet journaling.
Notably absent? Other people.
The videos presume a lack of obligation—to children, to partners, to society, to elder family members, to any sort of dependent. Instead, every video assumes rational agency free from illness or injury, from financial need or hardship. The subject is open-minded, abled, cosmopolitan, and seemingly unconstrained.
But I wouldn’t label what’s displayed as freedom.
These schedules, and the thousands of views they garner, reflect deep anxiety: our fixation upon maximized personal value, our fretting around self-optimization, and our desire to make each day productive in a hyper-capitalist relationship to the market.
But let’s back up for a second. Morning rituals have a long history.
Many centuries before the first YouTubers uploaded morning life hacks, St. Benedict, the 6th-century founder of Benedictine monasticism, created rigorous schedules for his followers. Idleness being “the enemy of the soul” he specified exact times for prayer, reading, and manual labor. Brothers awakened for pre-dawn prayer of Vigils, followed by Lauds at daybreak, a prayer of praise to welcome the new day. After prayers, monks were to “devote themselves to reading until the end of the second hour,” studying scripture or theological texts, as part of their intellectual and spiritual formation.1
Morning rituals adapted with the changing worldviews of early modernity and the Enlightenment. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin detailed his morning schedule as a youth, a structured commitment to continuous self-improvement. He began each morning with a question, "What good shall I do this day?," and focused on planning, reading, or reflection.2
In modern times, many writers and thinkers created their best work through structured mornings. Cal Newport opens the bestselling Deep Work, an encomium to focused performance, with the story of psychiatrist Carl Jung, who rose at 7am to “spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office.” Other case studies in Deep Work highlight dedicated morning work as a tactic for successful knowledge careers.
As a runner, I’m fascinated by routines.
Runners live and die by the ticking hands of the stopwatch. Time moves forward—steady, inexorable, and cruel. It is, as Kipling observed, an “unforgiving minute” that you might fill with 60-seconds distance run or scrolling on TikTok. Either way, the minute cares not.
Competing in college, I learned to adapt myself to the clock. Multiple daily workouts meant an early rise, an early effort, and a disciplined, almost mechanical approach to mornings.
That mindset bled into other parts of life. When I entered graduate school, I approached the process like a training plan. I tightly scheduled my mornings amid the flexibility of a PhD program, applying the same rigor I brought to the splits of a track workout.
Upon waking in my tiny in-law on Euclid Avenue, I’d be out the door by 6:00am, shuffling up the slope of the Berkeley hills, eventually rolling along Selby Trail in the grey damp, fog raining off the eucalyptus trees overhead.
Back at my studio by 7:20am, I’d be showered, fed with cold cereal, and clothed by 8:00am. A bus ride brought me down to a library on campus with butt-in-chair by 8:30am. My study was structured down to the minute—reading and research only interrupted by a hasty lunch.
I always felt I was falling behind.
Unlike a track workout, knowledge work is capacious and emergent. I could never read as fast as I had scheduled, could never write in time to hit my next benchmark. Frantic, churning—the regimen caused more anxiety than it was worth, and, eventually, a therapist gently encouraged me to lighten up.
Now, with a small child, the tension is how I spend that sacred morning hour—the quiet time before my family wakes up and day job begins. Should I run, or write? Running is therapeutic, grounding me physically and mentally. But writing feels meaningful, building toward something. And, ironically, my best writing ideas flow from the meditative miles I run in the pre-dawn streets of Oakland. But I can’t do both.
“If I only I could hack out more time!” I think to myself. And so, I was drawn to those morning-routine videos, with their quick fixes and frothy espresso shots.
One particular video caught my eye. It was circulating on X from an entrepreneur influencer named Colin Yurcisin. In my first viewing, I found it a pleasant watch—quiet, methodical, relaxing, almost ASMR-like. Viewed again, its strangeness reveals itself.
The video is a polished display of wellness tech, showcasing devices that transform a typical morning into a high-tech ritual. Yurcisin awakens with an eye mask and mouth tape, then follows a hyper-controlled sequence: espresso, Scripture, powdered beef-organ supplement.
Next, in a darkened room, he lies bathed in infrared light on a $5000 PEMI mat—which claims to “restore cell function.” Then to an upscale gym via Lamborghini, lifting weights before returning home to plunge into a cold tub, swim laps, and retreat to a sauna for a few pages of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Back at his MacBook, the day officially begins.
Like the other videos, this is a performative expression of self optimization. If the body is constrained and disciplined into a series of rituals, personal productivity (and thus personal value) will increase.
Yurcisin takes it further. Optimization merges self and commodity: his identity becomes subsumed by product. In another video, a “day in the life” post, he strolls around a posh part of Miami, speaking on self-made success:
“I became a product of the product…whatever you teach, you’ve got to live…As long as you live out what your product is, then you’re authentic and people will trust you and buy your stuff.”
I’m sure all this is just marketing to sell online courses or bait young men into crypto pump-and-dumps. But the language is telling. Yurcisin aspires to turn himself into a product; his sense of self revolving around the amount of value he can extract from it, his personhood giving way to commodification.
It makes me think about the morning-routine scene in American Psycho. In it a sculpted Christian Bale plays Patrick Bateman performing his wake-up regimen. The clip concludes with an ominous skin-mask peel, gesturing at the vacuum beneath Bateman’s polished exterior.
I see in social media this same horror of negation, the obliteration of identity beyond one’s market value. Now, however, the psychosis is self-optimization.
It may seem we’ve come a long way from Benedict’s early-rising monks, praying in the damp cells of early medieval Europe. Or perhaps we’ve come full circle, back to the total abnegation of self. Except this time the rituals serve not spiritual growth, but the relentless pursuit of self as commodity.
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Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Thomas Fry (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981), 38, 69-70.
Max Weber highlighted Franklin in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a prime example of how Protestant values shaped economic success. Weber saw Franklin’s focus on discipline, hard work, and thrift as embodying the "Protestant ethic," a cultural mindset where worldly success signals divine favor. Symbolized in his structured morning routine, the Founder exemplified a shift in values that Weber argued fueled capitalist development by tying spiritual purpose to industriousness and economic gain.
OTHER PEOPLE!! amen. this was so good. rituals are incredible but the extent to these self-optimizing morning routines feels so synthetic and dehumanizing to me.
Another great read, thank you. When I quit drinking (almost four years ago), a near-monastic morning routine was one of the things that kept me anchored. Each component, performed in order and the same as the day before, was a thread in the lifeline. Over time, I've loosened up on most of these — let others go entirely. But I'm grateful to have tapped into the grounding energy when I needed it most.