The Nocturnals

An interesting article made its way across my Bluesky feed recently. On nocturnal introverts, it struck a bit of a nerve, because I'm fairly introverted (maintaining a very small set of friends, loathe to leave the house, etc) and there's a part of me that very much prefers the quiet and calm when the world is asleep. When I was a teenager, I used to have to deliver newspapers at 6 a.m. - and I got up even earlier, usually just after 5, to call BBSs that would be plagued by busy signals later in the day.

Life has generally made this more difficult - school and university, work, relationships, you name it. And having dogs means that they wake up and follow strict internal schedules around feeding and such. Nocturnalism isn't an option for me. But I'm fascinated by it.

More than once I've been up very early in the morning, between 2 and 4 a.m., typically for some work related "emergency" that wasn't. And after the emergency deploy, or fix, or whatever, I'd find it hard to go asleep. I'd make a cup of coffee on the stove. It was always pitch black outside, and dark inside the house too. I'd have a single light on, just to make sure I didn't bump into anything and wake the dogs. I'd settle in with the coffee. Hack at some of my projects. And one of those mornings, adding a feature and testing it, I remember having a real sense of, "Yeah, this is good. Yeah. I could really get used to this."

gemlog