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I know a guy who wakes up at 4:45 AM every morning to meditate, journal, exercise, read, and prepare his bulletproof coffee before starting his “real” work at 7. He tracks every metric, optimizes every minute, and has three side businesses running alongside his day job.
I know another guy who wakes up whenever his body tells him to, usually around 7:30. He drinks regular coffee, checks his phone in bed, and has never owned a gratitude journal. He works one job that he’s good at and spends his evenings reading novels or hanging out with friends.
Guess which one seems more at peace with his life?
If you’re a man in your thirties, you’ve probably been bombarded with the same productivity gospel I have. The 5 AM club. The morning routine that takes two hours. The side hustle that will set you free. The supplements, the cold showers, the meditation apps, the productivity systems that promise to unlock your potential.
I bought into all of it. For years, I was that first guy—or at least I tried to be. Working in corporate strategy in Melbourne, I’d force myself up at 5 AM because that’s what successful people did, right? I’d stumble through a morning routine that felt more like a second job, all while trying to launch a consulting side business that I didn’t even want.
The whole thing was exhausting, and I wasn’t even good at it.
The optimization trap nobody talks about
Here’s what I’ve noticed after leaving that world behind and moving to Vietnam: the calmest, most content men I know have rejected almost all of this optimization culture.
They don’t have morning routines that require military precision. They don’t treat their bodies like machines that need constant tweaking. They definitely don’t have side hustles eating up their evenings and weekends.
Instead, they’ve figured out something the productivity industry doesn’t want you to know—most of life’s satisfaction comes from doing a few things well, not from optimizing every waking moment.
The highest-performing people I worked with in corporate were often the most quietly miserable. They’d perfected their morning stacks, built their side empires, and still seemed fundamentally unsatisfied. Meanwhile, the people who seemed genuinely content? They were usually the ones who’d figured out what actually mattered to them and ignored everything else.
Why the 5 AM club is mostly nonsense
Let me be clear about something: waking up early isn’t inherently bad. I wake up around 6:30 most mornings here in Saigon, partly because the morning light won’t let me sleep, partly because the city starts early.
But the 5 AM club as a concept? As Vanessa Gibbs notes, “The 5 AM Club is the bestselling book by Robin S. Sharma, a leadership coach, speaker, and advisor to the likes of NASA, Microsoft, and Nike.” It’s become this massive cultural phenomenon that suggests if you’re not up before dawn, you’re somehow failing at life.
The problem isn’t the wake-up time itself. It’s the underlying message that you need to squeeze productivity out of every available hour. That you should sacrifice sleep, social connection, and spontaneity for the sake of optimization.
Most of the calm, successful men I know wake up at completely normal times. They get enough sleep. They don’t feel guilty about hitting snooze occasionally. They’ve realized that consistency matters more than extremes, and that showing up rested beats showing up at 5 AM but running on fumes.
The side hustle that’s stealing your life
The side hustle promise is seductive. Build something on the side, escape the 9-to-5, become your own boss. I fell for it hard during my corporate years, spending evenings and weekends trying to build something—anything—that would be my ticket out.
But here’s what I learned: most side hustles are just second jobs with worse pay and no benefits.
The men who rejected this path? They focused on getting really good at their main thing instead. They negotiated better salaries, found companies that valued their skills, and built careers that actually supported the lives they wanted.
They also protected their free time fiercely. Instead of monetizing every hobby and skill, they kept some things just for joy. They read books without thinking about how to turn the insights into content. They exercised without documenting their journey. They had hobbies that remained hobbies.
After leaving corporate and moving to Vietnam, I’ve come to protect empty time aggressively. A clear calendar isn’t a sign of failure—it’s a sign of health. The space to think, to wander, to be bored occasionally? That’s where the good stuff happens.
The morning stack that’s making you anxious
Cold plunges, supplements, meditation, journaling, gratitude practices, breathing exercises—the modern morning routine has become a part-time job.
I tried to maintain one of these elaborate morning stacks for months. You know what it gave me? Anxiety about my anxiety-reducing routine.
The calm guys? They keep it simple. Maybe they exercise. Maybe they read the news with their coffee. Maybe they just ease into the day without treating their morning like a performance optimization problem.
They’ve figured out that adding complexity to your life rarely reduces stress. That tracking every metric doesn’t necessarily improve anything. That sometimes the best morning routine is the one that doesn’t feel like a routine at all.
What actually works
After years of trying to optimize my way to happiness, here’s what I’ve learned actually works:
Sleep enough. Not because some guru told you to, but because you feel better when you do.
Move your body regularly. Not to maximize gainz or track every calorie, but because humans need to move.
Do work you’re decent at and that pays you fairly. You don’t need to love it, but it shouldn’t make you miserable.
Keep some interests that have nothing to do with productivity or money.
Stop treating your life like a project that needs constant optimization.
The men who’ve rejected the productivity industrial complex aren’t lazy or unambitious. They’ve just realized that calm and contentment come from subtraction, not addition. From doing fewer things better, not more things faster.
When I transitioned out of corporate life, the identity loss was real. I sat in that discomfort for months before writing helped me make sense of it. But what emerged was this: I didn’t need a morning routine or a side hustle or any optimization stack to be okay. I needed less noise, not more systems.
The calmest people in the room aren’t calm because they’ve optimized their way there. They’re calm because they’ve stopped trying to optimize everything. They’ve accepted that life is messy, that perfection is overrated, and that most of what the productivity industry sells is just anxiety dressed up as ambition.
Maybe it’s time we learned from them.