It’s 3:30 a.m. Other than a few night-shift workers, insomniacs, and ravers, the world is asleep. But not Mark Wahlberg. His alarm has just gone off, jolting him awake for a long morning of eating, praying, working out, and sitting in his cryo recovery chamber. Not far behind him is Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose eyelids flicker open at 3:45, so he can tackle some of the hundreds of customer feedback emails in his inbox before starting the meat of his day. At 3:52 exactly, the fitness coach and influencer Ashton Hall—whose elaborate, Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine recently went viral—is up and at it, ready for several hours of fitness, dunking his face in iced Saratoga mineral water, and rubbing said face with banana peel.
Now it’s 4 a.m., and the ranks of the successful and productive are really getting going. Robin Sharma, the self-help guru and author of The 5 a.m. Club, is up—“4 a.m. is the new 5 a.m.” he told GQ recently—for a “victory hour” of “meditation, visualization and prayer.” Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to begin his morning workout. At 5, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is centering himself for 45 minutes of meditation, JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon is flicking through the first of five newspapers, and Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned longevity obsessive, is checking his inner ear temperature “to assess if anything is amiss,” heath-wise.
On weekdays, I am usually up just after 8, when Hall is climbing out of the swimming pool. On weekends, I’m proud of myself if I’m up around 9, when Hall is on a work video call, saying, “So, looking at it, bro, we gotta go ahead and get in at least 10,000.” 10,000 what? In a routine video posted after the original blew up, Hall slipped in a wry nod to that much-memed line: “You’ve made your first 10,000, congratulations—we gotta do at least 20, bro.” It indicates at least a degree of self-awareness regarding the mockery and endless parodies (my favorite: a guy getting up at 11:32 and gargling with the dregs of a Red Bull can) the original video was greeted with.
But, as the extravagantly early wakeups of all those tech titans indicate, the obsessive morning routine is more than a joke. Online influencers popularized it, and non-celebrities have come to swear by it as a central plank of productivity and self-improvement. “Own your morning. Elevate your life,” Sharma writes in The 5 a.m. Club. “Win the morning and you win the day,” says Tim Ferriss, another self-help mogul. Though a few notable women are on board—Michelle Obama gets up at 4;30; Jennifer Lopez, 4:45—the earliness and elaborateness of these routines has a distinctly macho sheen. Get up earlier. Do more journalling. Lift heavier weights. And on it goes.
This is funny, given how, historically, a marker of male success was being able to afford to do as little as possible, especially before noon. Glamorous aristocrats and playboys were more likely to be in the casino than the gym in the early hours of the morning. Sprezzatura, the Italian concept of effortless, nonchalant grace, was coined in the 16th century and has been invoked ever since. So why has one masculine ideal, of effortlessness and indulgence, been overtaken another, of ceaseless hustle culture?