Being Awake When the World Isn't
There's a state every builder eventually finds when the problem in front of you temporarily becomes the single most important object in existence.
Call it flow or call it focus: founders, research teams, and people working on unsolved problems chase this state without naming it. It explains why people build as much as money or ambition do. And for me, the ambient soundtrack accompanying it sounds like this:
A Japanese videogame gave that feeling a shape. In Persona 3, the Dark Hour opens every night at midnight, a hidden twenty-fifth hour that almost no one knows exists.
When the Dark Hour arrives, most of humanity becomes inanimate and remembers nothing by morning. Only a rare few, those with the Potential, stay awake and keep their human form, and they can do what the sleepers never can: summon a Persona, a manifestation of their psyche.
I know, that's a creepy way to put it, but leaving the fantasy aside, that hour is real even if the coffins aren't. Some of my best work has been built inside it. And, in a less literal way, that is what writing has always felt like to me: summoning something from the part of yourself that ordinary life usually keeps hidden.
The Zone in Bangkok
One of the last times I found it, I was at the Amara Hotel in Bangkok at 3 in the morning, finishing the final stage of an interview process at an AI company. The task involved shipping a full content strategy in a few days.
I had booked a room with a private garden and even a jacuzzi because I knew I would spend those days indoors. The small luxury was part of the bargain: if I was going to stay in the cave for a while, I wanted to be able to recharge without being too far from my laptop.
I walked the city all day, came back when everyone I knew was asleep, and worked until 3 or 4.
This is not an argument for working through the night. It isn't healthy, and I'd hate to recommend it.
I got that job after shipping the full content strategy, which was some of the best work I've done in terms of quality and pace, but I also went back to normal schedules, usually working until around 6 or 7 pm after joining that company.
Most days my best work lives there, in ordinary hours.
This is just to say that, if once a quarter the conditions align and I want to do a deliberate sprint for the right project, with enough distance from my usual routine, and with an ambitious deadline, I'll happily chase that hidden hour of inspiration to ship more than what I normally could.
At 3 in the morning, Bangkok is still full, just with different people than at noon. The office crowd is gone and the food-stall builders have arrived, lighting their burners while no one watches.
They weren't exactly my fellowship. Their presence, foreign and indifferent to me, is just what let me step out of ordinary time into the other kind. They were building on their clock, and I was building on mine.
Chronos and kairos
The Greeks kept two words for time. Chronos was the clock, measured in the same units by everyone; kairos was the charged moment that belongs to no calendar and can't be scheduled, only entered. That hour in the Amara Hotel was kairos devouring chronos. The world kept time, but I slipped sideways out of it.
And what you're picturing now, somebody who's awake while the city sleeps, is one of the oldest figures we have.
The Romans divided the night into watches, the vigiliae. The soldier on the last watch handed the dark to the dawn, and he was half exhausted and half entrusted with something. To be awake was to have access to something the daytime kept from everyone else.
Founders are not soldiers, but they are often watchmen in this smaller sense: they spend the early days of their companies looking at something most people still don't see.
When Brian Chesky was starting Airbnb, he was given advice that sounds like a paradox:
Don't worry about someone stealing your idea. If it's any good, everyone will dismiss it (at first).
The loneliness of holding an idea has a lot to do with the sense of being the only one awake. When ideas succeed and nobody dismisses them anymore, it means they become obvious. Or, in other words, everyone finally woke up.
This is another way to put founder nostalgia: in the early days, most founders weren't simply poorer and happier. They were more awake than everyone else, operating before anyone else knew the room existed.
So the urge to build the unsolved problem doesn't have to be about money or even ambition. It may just be the same four-in-the-morning feeling, scaled up and given a budget: to be, for a while, the only person awake to a question the world is still asleep to.
Flow, and the danger next to it
Pixar also visualized this liminal state of focus in Soul.
In the movie, people enter the Zone when they become so absorbed in their craft that everything else disappears. But nearby are the lost souls: people who became so consumed by one thing that they forgot how to live outside it. The difference between flow and obsession is whether you can return to ordinary life when the moment ends.
That is why the Bangkok story matters to me only because I came back. I got the work done, got the job, and returned to ordinary hours.
Building the door
But how do you enter the Zone, the Dark Hour, without the creepiness?
You build the door by subtracting elements rather than adding them. I turn the phone off, close all tabs that involve the rest of the world, and set the right soundtrack, the same kind of soundtrack that made that Bangkok room feel separate from the rest of time. I don't enter that hour by trying to feel transported, but by caring so much about the work that I forget to check whether I've arrived.
Being awake when the world isn't has helped me my whole life. When I was sixteen, the city I grew up in felt too modest to hold the life I wanted, with no industry that mattered and no sign of the world that lay beyond the horizon. The closest thing to a city that never sleeps was a cluster of factories built in the sixties, with their chimneys always burning during the night.
To the 16-year-old me, those lights were close enough to the inspiring, never-sleeping world I wanted to believe in. Even if I knew it was a chemical plant, and not New York.
Reaching the world I imagined
Ten years later, I ended up working with CXL, Peep Laja's company. I flew to Austin for CXL Live, then went to New York by myself for a few days. I rented a bike and spent hours riding through the city aimlessly, crossing bridges, turning corners, and looking up in awe.
That was the first time I felt I had reached the world I used to imagine from very far away.
And I'm not talking about anything that implies status, money, or position. Simply put, the people whose work I had read for years were suddenly closer. I was writing for some of them, learning from others, and beginning to feel that what I wanted as a teenager, but didn't know, was turning into something real:
I wanted to figure things out through writing, not just consume what other people had figured out. I wanted the spark that my favorite writers, authors, bloggers, and artists gave me, and I wanted to use it to produce something new, not just admire it.
For the 16 year-old Pablo, the chemical plant and my sleepy city had been a bad copy of the One World Trade Center and the view of Brooklyn from the LES. But they had still done their job. Those night lights had taught me that somewhere, even when everything around me was asleep, somebody was still building.
A disclaimer
None of this is really about staying up late.
It's about finding the hour where one's mind gravitates most toward creating and building, and opening the doors that lead to that state of mind. Sometimes that door is the night, the foreign country, the long bike ride through a new city. The end justifies the means if, as a result, you stop running other people's instructions and start making something of your own.
That, in the end, is what every builder and writer here is chasing: not the late hour for its own sake, but the rare stretch of it where the Zone opens and you get to build the thing nobody is awake to yet.
And you are less alone in it than it looks. Somewhere right now, the next builder has her lamp lit and the mind of someone you admire is awake on a page while the world sleeps.