in addition to the fact that people just have different natural rhythms, a big reason why we can’t seem to go to bed as early as we “should” is that nighttime is, for many of us, our safest and most fulfilling time of day. we don’t have to work, we won’t be contacted by bosses or insurance companies or collection agencies or other suffocating life business… we’re likely only to be contacted by our friends, or by no one at all. night time is release; it’s ours. we can rest or recreate. we can do things we actually want to do. who would choose to cut that short?? just to usher in the next morning when our lives are not our own again? nighttime is precious and nothing could be more normal than the desire to embrace this
So, y’all remember that post that said animals in urban areas slowly became nocturnal to avoid encounters with humans? Apparently that includes humans.
I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day
ALT
