Chronotype Discrimination
I’m suffering a severe case of chronotype discrimination. I just missed the third lecture in a row on the course I’m currently taking because, for some reason, they’ve seen fit to schedule all the lectures at 9am. Now, I live one hour’s subway ride (plus a ten minute brisk walk) from the university and for me, getting up before 10:30 in the morning is hell. Hell, I tell you. So you can imagine getting to these lectures is … a little bit difficult, to say the least.
Why is it that our whole society is scheduled around morning people? If I get up at seven in the morning to go to a lecture, not only is it impossible to stay fully awake for the three hours they normally take, but the rest of my day has been ruined. There may be about two hours worth of productivity left in me by the time I get home - if I’m lucky. As you no doubt have already surmised, three plus two hours does not equal a full day’s work. If I’m unlucky, I decide to nap, and then the evening is definitely ruined.
What’s worse, I recently discussed this with a fellow evening type, and he seemed to be of the opinion that we should just suck it up and deal with it. Why? I don’t get it. The scientific literature suggests we may be genetically disposed to have our sleep-cycle and productive peak later than other people. Why should we have to suffer? Would morning people suffer the same as we do if we had the lectures start at sometime between 11 and 14? I doubt it. Morning people suffer from evening lectures, evening people suffer from morning lectures, so the obvious solution that would make everyone happy is to have the lectures in the middle of the day.
I don’t want to miss lectures. It makes me upset because I feel like I’m a bad person who can’t keep appointments, it makes me fall behind in the course because I don’t know what information the teachers consider vital and hence have to flounder blindly through the literature, and it makes me lonely because I miss out on a lot of chances to socialise with my classmates. But when the alarm went off at seven this morning, I had had a shitty night’s sleep - yesterday I got up at noon, so how was I supposed to be able to sleep at midnight? - and getting up was simply out of the question.
And not even Sweden has an Ombudsman against discrimination of chronotypes.