Editorial source note
Clarity of the Morning: Morning Routines Examined
Joe rejects the internet's hyped morning routines in favor of five minutes of deliberate neutrality in bed, illustrated by his alcoholic grandfather's undeceived clarity before the day's first drink.
Related principles
An editorial summary of views Joe expresses in the linked video. The original recording remains the primary source for his full words and context.
Detailed notes
A closer look at the ideas, examples, and reasoning Joe presents in this recording.
A morning routine against morning routines
This video takes aim at the internet's morning-routine genre — the made beds, the cold showers, the dawn push-up circuits of athletes and high performers. Joe reports having tried the tricks himself and found their benefits impossible to quantify: the energized feeling, he says, just played a trick on him, similar to coffee itself. He does not believe the way a day starts sets its tone, and the routine he offers instead runs deliberately counter to the genre's promises.
Five minutes of neutrality
Joe's only surviving practice is what he calls a routine of non-routine. He sits up in bed and spends about five minutes staring, in equal measure, at the three walls around him, appreciating what he names the melancholy of the morning — feeling neither happy nor sad, neither excited nor depressed, completely neutral. The hyped morning, in his analysis, is the sizzle instead of the steak: high performers sell an excitement that makes a person feel like more than they are, when the useful state is tranquility and the recognition that nothing outside yourself is needed.
His grandfather at baseline
The video's centerpiece is a family story. Joe's grandfather, injured by a boiler explosion in the Second World War and left with shrapnel in his back, drank heavily through the day to sedate the pain. But each morning, before the drinking resumed around ten thirty, the man was clear — immediate answers, no slurring, no deception. He had the clarity of the morning. Joe's point is that everyone forfeits that baseline the same way his grandfather did, not necessarily to alcohol but to chasing ambitions, desires, and false ideas as the day accumulates.
Coffee comes second
Only after the quiet minutes does Joe reach for his reishi mushroom extract coffee. He is explicit that the beverage and its energy are secondary — things that push him onward, not the source of the clarity. Whatever virtues he attributes to the mushroom extract elsewhere on the channel are his product preferences, not part of this video's argument.
The purpose of the day, as he frames it in closing, is to listen and see what it brings rather than what he forces into it — no clinging, no longing, just clarity.