Somewhere around 2015, having a morning routine became a personality trait. CEOs started giving interviews about their 4 AM wake-ups. Influencers posted time-lapse videos of their seventeen-step morning rituals involving journaling, meditation, cold showers, gratitude lists, green juice, sun salutations, and something called "grounding" which appears to involve standing barefoot in your yard and hoping the neighbors aren't watching.
There is an entire industry built around the idea that how you spend the first hour of your day determines the other twenty-three. If this were true, most of humanity's greatest achievements would never have happened, because for most of history people's morning routine was "wake up, try not to die of cholera." Mozart didn't have a Peloton. Shakespeare didn't journal.
When someone tells you about their morning routine, they are not giving you useful advice. They are telling you they have the luxury of free time in the morning, which means they either don't have small children, don't have a long commute, or don't have the kind of job that starts before their carefully scheduled 45-minute meditation session ends. Their morning routine is not the cause of their success. It's a symptom of already having enough success to afford an hour of doing nothing productive before 7 AM.
The cold shower people are the most aggressive about this. "It builds mental toughness," they say, while trembling. "It activates brown fat," they insist, as if brown fat were a thing any of us thought about before a Dutch man who climbs mountains in shorts told us to. You know what else builds mental toughness? Having a normal shower and then dealing with the rest of your day, which will provide plenty of discomfort without you manufacturing it at 5 AM.
Wake up. Check your phone even though you said you wouldn't. Lie in bed regretting not going to sleep earlier. Get up. Coffee. Stare at the wall for a while. Get dressed. Leave. That's a morning routine. It works. Millions of functional adults use it every day. Nobody writes a book about it because there's no margin in telling people they're already doing fine.