Luca Amato 
Chief Editor
Viral influencers like Ashton Hall are a reminder that
It’s 3.30 a.m. Besides a few night-shift workers, insomniacs and ravers, the world is unconscious. Not Mark Wahlberg. His alarm has just gone off, jolting him into life 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 has recently gone obscenely 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, visualisation and prayer”. Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to begin his morning workout. At 5, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is centring 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 longevityobsessive, is checking his inner ear temperature “to assess if anything is amiss” heath-wise.
For comparison: on weekdays, I am usually up just after 8, when Hall is climbing out of the swimming pool. And on weekends, I’ll be 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? It remains tantalisingly unclear. Though, in a new 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 favourite: a guygetting up at 11.32 and gargling with the dregs of a Red Bull can) the original video has been greeted with.
But, as the extravagantly early wakeups of all those tech titans indicate, the obsessive morning routine is more than a joke. In step with its popularisation by online influencers, people 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, and Jennifer Lopez at 4.45 — the earliness and elaborateness of these routines has a distinctly macho sheen. Get up earlier. Do more journalling. Lift heavier weights. And so it goes on.
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?
In a word: anxiety. Anxiety hums in the background of all these morning routine videos. Even the hyper-precise time stamps and jerky editing instil a baseline level of tension. This new age of male anxiety comes from male success being a rarer beast than it once was. There are the universal factors that affect everyone, like unstable employment and a precarious economy. But men, particularly white men, now also face more competition than they’ve been accustomed to, as barriers to entry to various areas of society are knocked down. In 2022, three British women started university for every two men; 21-to-26-year-old women in the UK now have a slightly higher median income than men in the same age bracket.
Gender parity being long overdue doesn’t make the shock to men any less bracing. And there have been aftershocks: the rise of the manosphere and incel culture, as chronicled in Adolescence and elsewhere, as well as more widespread, mundane trends like a growing fitness obsession (after-work pints are out; after-work gym sessions are in). When your job is unstable, and everyday prices are at the mercy of grand geopolitical happenings, the one thing you can control is your squat routine – or indeed, the time you get up in the morning.
The importance of ritual and routine to a good life is well-established, and we all uphold our own micro-traditions. On Saturday mornings, I like to water my spider plant and spritz my bedroom with room spray. (Look, it’s the little things.) But outlandish routines like Hall’s swallow up your life entirely, and are sold with an almost existential urgency, as if unclenching from them for an instant will send you into an abyss of mediocrity.
In an age where no one quite knows what it means to be a man — and those who purport to offer little more than curdled chauvinism — losing yourself in 4 a.m. push-ups has an unsurprising appeal. “You can reinvent your entire life in one year,” Hall’s Instagram bio reads. It’s a line that’s meant to project a can-do optimism. Perhaps there’s a whisper of insecurity in there too.
It’s 3.30 a.m. Besides a few night-shift workers, insomniacs and ravers, the world is unconscious. Not Mark Wahlberg. His alarm has just gone off, jolting him into life 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 has recently gone obscenely 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, visualisation and prayer”. Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to begin his morning workout. At 5, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is centring 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 longevityobsessive, is checking his inner ear temperature “to assess if anything is amiss” heath-wise.
For comparison: on weekdays, I am usually up just after 8, when Hall is climbing out of the swimming pool. And on weekends, I’ll be 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? It remains tantalisingly unclear. Though, in a new 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 favourite: a guygetting up at 11.32 and gargling with the dregs of a Red Bull can) the original video has been greeted with.
But, as the extravagantly early wakeups of all those tech titans indicate, the obsessive morning routine is more than a joke. In step with its popularisation by online influencers, people 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, and Jennifer Lopez at 4.45 — the earliness and elaborateness of these routines has a distinctly macho sheen. Get up earlier. Do more journalling. Lift heavier weights. And so it goes on.
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?
In a word: anxiety. Anxiety hums in the background of all these morning routine videos. Even the hyper-precise time stamps and jerky editing instil a baseline level of tension. This new age of male anxiety comes from male success being a rarer beast than it once was. There are the universal factors that affect everyone, like unstable employment and a precarious economy. But men, particularly white men, now also face more competition than they’ve been accustomed to, as barriers to entry to various areas of society are knocked down. In 2022, three British women started university for every two men; 21-to-26-year-old women in the UK now have a slightly higher median income than men in the same age bracket.
Gender parity being long overdue doesn’t make the shock to men any less bracing. And there have been aftershocks: the rise of the manosphere and incel culture, as chronicled in Adolescence and elsewhere, as well as more widespread, mundane trends like a growing fitness obsession (after-work pints are out; after-work gym sessions are in). When your job is unstable, and everyday prices are at the mercy of grand geopolitical happenings, the one thing you can control is your squat routine – or indeed, the time you get up in the morning.
The importance of ritual and routine to a good life is well-established, and we all uphold our own micro-traditions. On Saturday mornings, I like to water my spider plant and spritz my bedroom with room spray. (Look, it’s the little things.) But outlandish routines like Hall’s swallow up your life entirely, and are sold with an almost existential urgency, as if unclenching from them for an instant will send you into an abyss of mediocrity.
In an age where no one quite knows what it means to be a man — and those who purport to offer little more than curdled chauvinism — losing yourself in 4 a.m. push-ups has an unsurprising appeal. “You can reinvent your entire life in one year,” Hall’s Instagram bio reads. It’s a line that’s meant to project a can-do optimism. Perhaps there’s a whisper of insecurity in there too.
