20 Mar 2025

The Night-Dwellers

by Brian Hioe

One of the perks of life as a freelance journalist is being able to set your own schedule. Or perhaps another way of putting it is that I’ve only ever considered career options that allowed me to avoid getting up in the morning. Whatever would keep me out of the 9 to 5. This was what drew me at first to academia, before I ended up unexpectedly becoming a journalist.

I’ve always had an odd sleep schedule, and don’t usually require much sleep. These days it’s common for me to go to sleep at 10:00 a.m. and wake up at 3:00 p.m.. This erratic tendency began in high school; under the pressure of studying to get into a good college, I’d stay up until 2:00 a.m. and wake up at 6:00 a.m. to be ready to attend orchestra at 7:00 a.m.

Absolutely brutal. I couldn’t do that now.

To this day, it makes me feel a bit irregular, being an extreme night person to the point of being a morning person. As though I’m cosmically mismatched for this day person’s world of ours.

I never really get to experience many parts of Taipei that don’t match with my waking life. Other businesses I use entirely the wrong way. For example, because I sleep in the morning, I usually have dinner in Taiwanese breakfast shops. A friend of mine who lives nearby sometimes seeks me out when he’s walking his dog, to see if I want to get breakfast with him, though I’m usually too tired and jittery by then to have much of a conversation with anyone. Probably the reason why I like bars and clubs so much is that they’re among the few public establishments that line up with my schedule.

I find that I need at least 3.5 hours of sleep, but as I get older, I’m slowing down somewhat. When I was in college, someone joked to me that my sleep schedule showed that I was unsleeping modernity itself. I don’t know about that, but in journalism, my nocturnal tendencies can be a help in certain circumstances.