Several months ago, against my better judgment, I read a “piece.” Someone I had somewhat respected till that moment had recently indulged in the influencer ritual of answering questions about The Morning Routine. It was so bland, so hilariously, sad-trombone performative, so sincerely lacking in self-awareness of what was Actually Happening that I felt the ill-motivated need to write one of these myself, substituting the Optimized Life stuff — the skincare routine, the green juice, the five minutes on a meditation app — with, you know, cold water on my face and leftover tea. I left a note in my drafts then, but only found myself actually wanting to write the thing months later — the day before yesterday. I asked Claude to act as an interviewer. I answered its questions sincerely — no point trying to subvert the genre, thank you, this would happen all on its own just by virtue of me being myself — and, boom, about an hour and 2.5k words later, the “piece” for the pipeline publish next day was done.

The day arrived, the piece went live, and immediately, I wanted it gone. I attributed the feeling to my answers. They were too sincere, not poking nearly enough fun at the questions and the format. They were trying too hard and not hard enough.

I asked ChatGPT for help in my confusion. Thing was, I observed, that the honest answers to any question posed to me in this manner (or any other format similar to it) would be: none; I wouldn’t “do interviews” in the first place.

yes, and that tension is visible in the piece. that’s why i said the problem is tonal instability rather than “fake performance.” i don’t think you’re cynically posturing. i think you’re colliding with the limits of the format itself

the influencer morning routine format fundamentally assumes stability of identity, aspiration, self-presentation, relationship to productivity, and audience positioning.

your actual relationship to all of those is fractured, skeptical, recursive, self-aware, and often resistant. so once you answer sincerely, the format starts deforming under pressure. but if you fully reject the format, the piece ceases to exist.

The concept of me ever being in a position that “warrants” interviews about my habits is laughable. My nervous system shuts down at the slightest sign of becoming known. If that wasn’t the case and I did, through some miracle of self-betrayal, reach internet fame at some point over the last years, I dare speculate that finding myself getting interviewed would confuse me so heavily that I’d self-sabotage like never before, possibly ending up in a ditch somewhere, psychotic, murderous.

It would be a blaring, glaring, white-hot signal that my awareness of what feels true and good to me had left me eons ago.

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Anyway, the robot gave me a set of new questions that sounded much more deadpan and — surely! — much better at the subversion thing I had set out to do in the first place. I mean, “how many of your habits began as attempts to fix something?” — damn. Well, yes Mr. Robot, all of them?!

I tried answering them “correctly” — not too sincere, not too obviously sarcastic — and felt, if possible, worse than before, preemptively, for wasting the time of whoever might be spending theirs on this site. Why do an interview with myself if I’m going to answer every question with the equivalent of “lol no”? All it is, in the end, is posturing, of pointing with a stick. I am better than these people. They don’t know what they’re doing. Sad saps their glitter emojis.

I tried again, though, two or three times, giving Claude more detailed instructions in the first prompt. The ensuing “interviews” did manage to elicit some laughs while they were happening. Turns out, a machine that has consumed the entire internet can really do a fantastic job spitting that entirety back out at you:

c: let’s talk hydration, because no morning piece is complete without it. when you rise — before the coffee, before the inbox — what is the first thing that touches your lips? and is there a vessel? our readers care deeply about the vessel.

e: herbal tea from the night before

c: — the night before. esther. forgive me, i need a moment with that. so what you’re describing is essentially a gift economy across time. your evening self brews the tea, sets it down, and surrenders it to your morning self. there’s a stewardship there. an intimacy with your own continuity that i think a lot of people, frankly, are too fragmented to access.

There’s more where that came from, of course. I wondered then if it’s just the simple premise of letting myself be interviewed by a robot that poisons the resulting words, or, maybe more so the premise of me, an unsuccessful person by society’s standards, “spilling the leftover tea” re: how I Do It All (meaning: nothing, truly — in my eyes, at least). I wondered whether it is purely the editorialization, the existence-as-ad, the fully-on-purpose role modeling of a life that falls apart without the thousands or more profiles, people and bots, drooling, judging, consuming, linking, engaging, simulating witnesses.

I want witnesses, too. I have fantasized about interviews like this. They were vague at best, these fantasies, I had no idea why they would even happen in my imagined life, but they were there and I was giddy about telling the viewers and readers and swipers what I like to do in the morning or evening or in general.

Maybe it is just the simulation of it all, now, that makes me recoil as I did. Maybe it is the wrongness of staging a scene with the embodiment of the un-alive average of every internet interview ever.

ChatGPT asked, among other things, which part of my routines exist because I’ve been exposed to them on the internet, and which have simply happened. I am internally proud to say none of my habits exist purely for internet exposure reasons, yet, also all of them, probably, except that my day is structured around my kid going to school and coming home again. I don’t want to list them here now, the stuff I tell myself I’ve placebo-d my way into, their origins and how they found their footholds in my everyday. What stood out upon re-examining them from this vantage point is that they are all about survival, really.

So, turns out I will list them after all. I take thiamine so I can digest carbs without going horrible daily emotional spirals. I take magnesium in the evening and when I remember, also in the morning. My main rule for food is that I like it and I want it, when I have it. I strength train so I feel like a person, full stop. I want to walk/run many, many km daily for the same reason, but haven’t managed to keep up the habit for the last few years. I drink cappuccino with olive oil in the mornings despite having wished many, many times I could optimize myself out of the dairy of it all, and in time begrudgingly accepted this as one small thing that sparks joy. I read a book (any book) while my son has breakfast, for twenty minutes tops. I block off my computer till noon so there’s nothing to do on it but write; if I don’t I will be lost on the internet and feel ashamed, brain-bloated, by no later than ten AM, my day: ruined. If I let myself build up impatience re: finally getting to Claude Code again or fiddle around on Shopify, I will, when the time comes. I try to protect my evenings, to do nothing but smoke a CBD joint and watch twenty minutes of a mindless show before bed — and yet. Sleep debt accumulates every week. Upon waking up, Tuesday the latest, I feel nothing like I was promised when I started strength training. Either my circadian rhythm does not align with six AM wake-ups, there’s too much caffeine left unmetabolized in my system, or I haven’t been going outside enough, etc, etc, whatever, I don’t know and maybe I shouldn’t care.

These habits are all, on some level, about trying to catch up to what I still wish I can manage to become at some point, just a couple months shy of ten years Being A Mom and nothing else (mostly, despite trying, despite pushing my damnedest, feeling defeated, again and again, my body saying no, and people saying... nothing.)

Because yes, I feel “behind” and hopeless about my little fucking life more often than not. I tell myself this is all just my cycle talking, again and again, when I do not feel I am living up to my potential.

At the same time, I know I absolutely am; I am my own boss — or rather, I have none; the complete devotion I have given my kid since he was born — despite the resentment, despite feeling I was giving up on myself, that everyone around me had given up on me, pitying me, that nobody ever understood how much actually I was doing for this child — is starting to pay off in big ways. I am proud of my child. I tell him daily, multiple times, how much I love him, not simply because he’s my kid, but because I love who and how he is. I am so happy I get to be his mother. I have howling crying fits when he’s away at his dad’s, I regret my emotionally absent days when he was smaller, and ultimately I truly, truly miss him and cannot bear not having him right next to me so I can tell him just one more time how much I love him.

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Last revised May 21, 2026.