I have been pondering a shift in my routine, so that I do my writing and video making at night after midnight, when it is cool and comfy and I am often at my most alert, instead of doing it late afternoon and early evening, when I am often at my lowest.

I have fought an off and on battle with my tendency to be a night-owl all my life. Sometimes it was out of necessity, because I had to work in the 9 to 5 world and could not afford to be up all night and a zombie during the day.

Other times, admittedly, it has been sheer bullheaded stubbornness. Part of me irrationally insists that I am supposed to have the same wake/sleep schedule as everyone else and that if I did, I would be so much happier and healthier and sleep like a little baby.

Only with less pooping.

But despite my efforts and despite using a fairly powerful sleeping aid every night, I still get a power surge around midnight every night and if I did not take said pills and forswore any and all attempts to force myself to sleep and just let nature take its course, I think my natural sleep schedule would be pretty much the same as Dracula’s.

I have pondered why this is or may be. Temperature would be the simplest and most immediate explanation for this trend. After all, I am a big fat sweaty dude who is prone to heatstroke. Certainly at this time of year, I am a lot more comfortable at night after the sun goes down.

But this trend does not only occur in the summer. It’s a year round thing. And in the winter, while the local climate is a lot milder than the one I grew up in, it’s still warmer during the day and hence, all things being equal, more pleasant to be a human being.

Another possibility is that some people truly are night owls by nature. Some people are born to greet the sunrise with joy in their hearts and a spring in their step, and for others, it’s that handy signal that tells them when it is time to go to bed.

It would make sense if this were true, because one can imagine that in more primitive times when fires needed to be fed all night and patrols needed to be done in order to keep the nocturnal predators at bay, it would be very handy to have people who were quite happy to be awake all night and sleep in the day.

But there is another factor contained in that explanation, and in connects with my idea that some of us are born to stay at the edge of the herd.

It might be that some of us are happiest to be awake when others are asleep because that is when there is the least “noise” in the zeitgeist. The lack of the waking presence of the masses energizes us and lets us truly spread our wings in a way that the crush of the mob during the day does not allow.

This concept of cultural/mental “noise” is quite new to me, having only conceived it last Friday night, but I think it has a lot of potentially quite useful implications.

For instance, I think this contrarian instinct to avoid the herd and do things on your own when they are busy can run much deeper than simply enjoying the night life.

I think it can extend even into seemingly unrelated pop cultural choices. I came upon this idea when Felicity and I were discussing a strange phenomenon that I had only recently discovered in myself.

It shames my ruggedly independent heart to admit this, but I realized that there were many times in my life where I had been unable to get into the new hotness of the moment precisely because everybody else was into it.

Sure, after it was a red hot cultural property, I could get into it in reruns or whatnot. But when it was the latest thing, I just… couldn’t, and it had very little to do with the quality of the cultural artifact, because honestly, I rarely even get far enough to judge, and even then, this instinct to shun the herd makes it impossible to be subjective.

Hence “noise”. It’s like wildly popular things have his barrier of noise around them that I just can’t endure. Practically everything I have ever loved, I have loved after the fact, when it was long past being the current thing and hence was safely “quiet”.

This could also explain why some of us are so deeply adverse to competition, even in cases where we stand a decent change of winning. Competition is inherently “loud”, involving joining all the other rats in the race, and if can’t stand being in the middle of the herd, you can’t stand being just another rat in the race any better.

Being a night owl, in short (too late!), could be about a lot more than just being a creature of the night. It could be an indicator that one is a very specific type of person with a remarkable amount of what seems like unrelated traits in common.

Perhaps us night creatures could band together and get ourselves culturally identified as a group, and be a tribe for one another.

We would likely face some prejudice and hate from the skylarks and the haters, but nothing truly serious, and such adversity merely binds a subculture more closely together and cements its identity.

If we got ourselves sufficiently organized, we could even work together to make a night culture for ourselves, where we gather and do social activities together between dusk and dawn, when the rest of the world is asleep but we are at our most energetic and confident.

The world needs us edge of the herd types. We are the ones who find newer, richer grazing grounds, and who see danger in time for the herd to avoid it.

We are just a little different, that’s all.

And we just can’t stand “noise”.