You Cannot Wake Early Not Because You Are Weak in the Mornings — The Record Moves the Standard Outside

Introduction: The Loss That Comes When One Day Breaks

Successful people rise at five. The first-rate begin the day this way. You read the article and move your alarm earlier. The first few days genuinely feel rewarding. Records line up in the app, the consecutive-day count climbs.

But the instant one day breaks, an oddly large sense of loss sweeps in. The un-filled square presses on you as proof of a thing not achieved. And you conclude: I really am weak in the mornings.

Tips for rising early have been told at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: why the simple act of rising early has become a device that produces such strong achievement and guilt — its design.

Let me give the conclusion first. You cannot keep it up not because you are weak in the mornings. It is because three devices — recording, visualisation, and mutual surveillance — are designed to move the standard of behaviour from your interior to the outside.

Where Did the Inner Watchman Come From?

First, the principle of this device. The philosopher Michel Foucault argued that modern power, rather than punishing people from outside, arranges for people to watch themselves [Foucault, 1975].

The metaphor he brought out was the panopticon, a circular prison. A watchtower stands at the centre, ringed by cells. From the tower all the cells are visible, but from the cell you cannot see whether a guard is in the tower. So the prisoner, unable to know when he is being watched, comes to behave as though always watched. In time, even when the guard leaves the tower, he keeps disciplining himself. The gaze of surveillance comes to dwell inside him.

Foucault called such practices, by which a person works on himself to remake himself, “technologies of the self.” Observe yourself, evaluate yourself, correct yourself. A person who has acquired this technology keeps ordering himself toward the figure held up as ideal, even when no one is watching.

Here lies the cunning of modern self-management. It does not compel discipline. It raises, inside the person, a state that wants discipline. Then no external surveillance is needed. People gladly watch themselves and willingly drive themselves.

Three Devices Mesh Into a Circuit

The inner watchman does not settle in by itself. Day by day, it is reinforced by outer devices.

The first device is the record. How many days kept up. How many hours slept. Every behaviour is converted into a number and accumulated. The record looks, at a glance, like a neutral tool, as if merely copying down the facts. But the record has the power to turn the recorded number into a thing to be defended. A thirty-day record becomes pressure to keep the thirty-first.

The second device is visualisation. Numbers are arranged into a visible form as graphs or chains of consecutive records. Achieved squares fill in with colour. This visualisation amplifies the record’s power further. A broken chain unsettles the person as a visible gap. Though the number itself has no meaning, the visualised number begins to behave as if it were the aim.

The third device is mutual surveillance. Many services carry a function to share individual records with others. A companion’s achievement is notified; a ranking is displayed. By this, the inner watchman is connected to countless outer gazes. The sense of being watched is re-supplied continually.

These do not work separately. Recording supports visualisation, visualisation fans mutual surveillance, mutual surveillance produces the motive for further recording. The three devices, meshing, form one firm circuit.

Taking the Objection “It Helps” Head-On

Here an objection must arise: do not records and companions help you keep going?

Certainly, these devices have an effect that pushes behaviour along. That the power of numbers stabilises behaviour does really happen. The problem is which way that push faces.

These devices do not help you act on the basis of your own inner sensation. Rather, they habituate you to act on the basis of outer numbers and others’ eyes. Seemingly helped, the person grows ever further from their own sensation.

When you are frantic over the record, you almost never confirm whether that number truly corresponds to your physical or mental state. Still you keep raising the number. Simply because it is frightening for the visualised streak to break. What is running here is not for your own sake but for this circuit’s.

And the line successful people rise at five plays the role of granting authority to this circuit. The standard of what hour you should wake at is supplied from outside, not from your own life and body. The true reason you cannot keep rising early lies in the single point that the hour was never decided from your own need.

▸ The path of stepping off the menu of discipline distributed from outside is treated in habits are not something you run by will.

Conclusion: Whose Standard Is the Number Defending?

You cannot keep rising early not because of a morning-weak constitution, nor because your will falls short. As long as you are inside the circuit of recording, visualisation, and mutual surveillance, you keep having to confirm the standard of behaviour from outside, ceaselessly.

Let me confirm, to be safe: I am not denying rising early itself. If you decided I want to wake at this hour from your own body and life, that is the exercise of sovereignty. Using a record as a tool is the same.

The problem is who decided that hour. If the fear of the number breaking has grown larger than the reason you want to wake, the standard has already moved outside. One question suffices to check. If no one saw your record and no consecutive count remained, would you still want to wake at that hour? The whole picture of this argument — the location of the standard — is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish (1975)
• Foucault, M. Technologies of the Self (1988)