Not all of us can be early risers. My inability to function this side of sunrise has been attributed to laziness, anemia, and any number of cultural ills by many of my peers, but to preference by no one but those of us that can be found pounding away at laptops in 24-hour coffee shops. Am I any less of a person because I prefer darkness, stillness, the complete absence of the normal hubbub usually found at common locales such as supermarket queues, post office queues, bus queues, and all the other institutions without neon marquees? Certainly not. To claim so would be presumptuous, for while you early birds are catching your worms, we night owls are romping in a playground of our very own.

There’s something alluring about the wee hours of the night and subsequent morning, and while I’m not sure whether I can attribute my affinity for this in-between space to the rarity with which I get to witness it, or to the contrast it provides to the normal daytime spectrum, but one thing is for certain: I am a night person. I’m more than happy to explain to you why 23:00-03:00 are my most productive hours, or why I feel most creative after being out in an empty world, but I don’t think I could paint a picture detailed enough to encompass all the night has to offer. My nighttime adventures in Los Angeles were more of an above-the-table dealmaking I took head on with the metropolis, while my escapades in Tokyo were of an entirely embracing nature. Maybe it is a mark of my urbanity, of the youth culture that still defines my generation, but maybe every place really is different by night.

For example, It is no secret I was at odds with Los Angeles for the entirety of my life there, but it was during my last six months that I came to peace with the city. How did I abate my biggest frustrations (traffic, lack of cultural density, difficulty of life)? I only went out at night. To my surprise, while I despised LA by day, I found I loved it by night. Tons of streets open to my whims, beautiful vistas at Griffith Park and Downtown and Topaga Canyon for me and seemingly me alone, and a few hard-fought late-night spots that, though were not nearly enough to hold me in the long-term, made the short-term more than enjoyable. Sure I couldn’t have gone to the mall, but I ate more late-night noodles than I can remember and I had the most engaging of conversations over coffee and pie, and I did not once miss the masses of cars and movie posters and sign spinners. I did not once miss someone telling me “you don’t like ???” or “get out of the way!” and instead spent my early mornings relaxing at one of the many 24-hour Korean spas the city had to offer, or reading in my hammock while the evening breeze rocked me back and forth.

Even in Houston I always opted to walk home late at night, and to order that second cup of coffee since there was no rush, and to spend my hours being creative until my alarm went off and it was time to resume a conventional life. In Brisbane I always waited for the last bus before sprinting from the panorama at South Bank so I could ride across the river, where the reflection gave me double the lights and even at home, enjoying my felafel I could not shake the image from my brain. And in all the cities I have made my home, I did not once miss normal business hours.

Of course if all services were to switch their posted hours of operation that would go and ruin half the fun, for while yes the allure of night is to me tranquil, night can take on a number of other adjectives that suggest something other than peace and quiet — raucous, rowdy, wild, dangerous, terrifying, inconvenient, eerie — in fact living in the witching hours is often associated with the faced-paced, nonstop, semi-gritty life of the ultra-urban, when even in acclaimed “never sleeping” cities the majority of people active at 3:00 are lone wolves, content to journal, embark on late night bicycle jaunts, and explore convenience stores and ethnic restaurants alike. Yes, shocking though it may be, being a night person does not mean you are a raving partygoer. More often than not, it means you like your independence, you like your space, you like your freedom.

Of course that freedom is limited, and not by your roommate’s confusion as to why anyone would think midnight is a perfect hour to take a walk that isn’t doing a drug deal, let alone someone they get on with. The best part of the solo-pilot philosophy is also the most difficult to get around edgewise; it’s tricky when every normal institution mandates you to be present during waking hours: any job that isn’t dead-end, anything that requires and appointment, and most places with a teller. There have been many a person who has opted to give up sleep entirely, whether by choice, as part of some Tesla-esque experiment, or by an unfortunate turn of fate. They will be the first to inform you of the perils of not sleeping: the unbridled stretches of boredom, the inability to normally communicate with the general populous, the free floating chemicals produced by a significant offset in your circadian rhythms, and the occasionally strongly disheartening isolation. But before you decide you can never see the light (or rather, give up the light), don’t forget to look at the other side of the coin.

At the same time the freedom afforded by living off the punch-clock is limitless. The experimenters and insomnia afflicted will also be the first to tell you of late-night’s joys: time that is never crunched, a restructuring of social norms (things like deadlines and identity are completely different), finally getting that moment of perfect harmony, the previously undiscovered and untainted beauty of a skyline lit up at night, of a silent park, of discovering sunlight never leaves the sky altogether, of newfound friendships, of that perfect rooftop sunrise, of a hot bowl of noodles putting the punctuation on an endless string of diner options, of intensely bonding revelry, of transient writing, of successful tinkering, of feeling like you are no one and everyone in the world all at once.

And if you are lucky enough to live in a Sydney, a London, a New York, a Tokyo, somewhere the day is 8 hours longer than 24, somewhere with a night bus or an all-night F train, somewhere you can get more than a kebab at 4am, you will discover that glorious habit the sun has, where it will always rise again. For those of us more nocturnal than diurnal, we are no different. We simply trade our sunsets for sunrises, and spend the last hours of our day people watching, witnessing the worker bees come out of the woodwork and do their duties well before the early morning joggers take to the streets. We get to see the clouds clear and the tops of the trees lit, and though we may fall asleep to the sounds of the morning birds, we wake up to the light of fireflies. Perhaps we are trapped by our instance on said hours of consciousness, but then again, so are you.