The Commodification of Breakfast and the Rigid Compartmentalisation of Life (At Its Very Worst)

It’s said that the word breakfast entered the English language during the Middle Ages, derived from the literal act of breaking the fast after a night’s sleep. These days, most people are typically eating between seven and nine in the morning. An assigned slot in your day: wake up—eat—work—eat—sleep—repeat.

But it’s 2025, and we’re now carving our routines down to the minute. I’ve endured enough Get Ready With Me’s and fallen hostage to too many morning rituals to know how deranged these expectations have become.

How many lunges can I realistically squeeze in without delaying my forty-second everything shower, followed by the lymphatic dry brushing of my lower abdomen because TikTok told me I have “PCOS belly”?

Don’t get me wrong—I frothed these videos at first. Truthfully? I even took notes. I had an entire album saved. A shrine to these tyrannical, step-by-step guidelines on how to spend the first 72 minutes post-slumber—efficiently, and aesthetically, of course.

But somewhere along the line I lost my mind.

Because you know what the most deranged thing about a morning routine is?

The fact that you could always be doing more.

God forbid I forget to spend 5 mindful minutes alone with my thoughts. Or throw my hair back to massage a home-brewed blend of essential oils into my scalp. Or worse—forget to pat my ultra-rare Labubu on the forehead before disappearing out the door.

Realistically, how much are we all doing here? I need all eight hours of the working day just to complete my morning routine. And then what? Do I unlock the lunch routine? Graduate to the evening unwind ritual? Someone hold me back.

I’m not the first person to be outwardly repulsed by the performative psychomania of these viral videos. It’s the commodification of time that truly grates, though.

This pressure to constantly optimize and schedule every waking moment. Existing as a human without the incessant need to curate your life, both on and offline, isn’t enough anymore.

Most of us, at some point or another, have audibly cursed the man who invented the eight-hour workday (his name escapes me, and respectfully, I don’t care to look it up).

And sure, if you’re a woman like me, you’ve probably heard the discourse that our bodies run on monthly cycles, not daily ones. Which is true. But that’s not the point.

I’m not talking about gendered disconnects or the systemic biases that framework our society.

Take Greece, for example.

Relatives and friends still ask me what an authentic Greek breakfast entails. To this day, I still can’t say.

Some Greeks tell me they sleep in late enough that their first meal isn’t until midday. Others swear that the jet-black, sketo elliniko kafe and the blazing sun are enough to propel them into the evening—where true living begins.

Free from regimes, or routines. Or the neurotic need to curate every moment.