a fake sun woke me up gently and i have feelings about it

At 6:12 this morning a small fake sun started rising on my nightstand, ten minutes ahead of my alarm, and I was awake before it finished. No shrieking. No hand slapping a phone. Just a warm gradient getting slowly brighter until a set of wind chimes drifted in like it was shy about the whole thing.

I lay there thinking: oh no, this is nice, and it's mine now, and it cost money.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part is that I resisted this for a year because $200 for an alarm clock is a sentence that should be illegal. Then a work deadline collided with a bad sleep month, and I bought it at 11pm on a Tuesday, which is when all of my best decisions happen. Two years in, this thing costs about $300 total with the subscription, and I want you to sit with that number the way I did. I sat with it. I bought it anyway.

what it actually does, a list

The two big buttons are the whole design and they're perfect. One curved button labeled Rest, one bubbled one labeled Rise, both findable in the dark without opening your eyes or turning on a light. You press Rest, your wind-down starts. You press Rise, your morning starts. There's also a physical toggle on the side that kills the alarm entirely, which saved me on the Saturday I forgot to change anything in the app.

The screen turns off at night, and I love it more than I can explain. You can schedule the clock readout to go fully dark, and then at 3am there is no glowing 3:04 telling you how many hours you have left. Tap the side if you truly need the time and it flashes for a second and goes away. Removing the number removed the spiral, and I did not expect a lamp to fix something in me.

The sunrise alarm is gentle in a way that borders on rude. Light starts rising before your alarm sound, so you surface gradually instead of being yanked out of a dream by a siren. My wake-up is randomized wind chimes that start so soft I genuinely don't remember the first few notes. I used to wake up angry at a machine. Now I wake up mid-thought. Big difference, weird to describe.

The sleep sounds are a whole library, and I found my one. Pink noise, rain, a river, a thunderstorm, a hair dryer. My goldilocks track turned out to be a steady low rain that cuts off after half an hour, because anything all night woke me back up in lighter sleep. Pro tip from my own expensive trial: it took about a week of adjusting defaults before the volumes were actually livable, and I wish someone had warned me to set it up in the daylight, not at 10pm in a silent room.

The sleep stories work, and I resent how well they work. There's a 25-minute one where a friendly train conductor collects tickets while the rails click underneath, and I have never once heard the ending. The trick I had to learn: stop trying to follow the story like a podcast. Let it be a raft you keep bumping into. If I miss a sentence, nothing is lost, and that permission beat took me a week to accept.

Morning routines exist and one changed my actual behavior. Mine is a short guided stretch followed by a two-minute motivational talk. One morning the guy said try the hardest thing first, and I did, and now my inbox lives in fear. I would like it noted that I resisted liking this part the most.

The membership is a paywall and you should walk in with open eyes. Without it you keep the sunrise alarm, the basic sounds, and the lights. The stories, the stretches, and the bigger library sit behind about $5 a month, or $50 a year. Is $300 over two years a normal amount of money for an alarm clock? No. It is not. I decided the quiet nights were worth it and cancelled a different subscription to make room, which is the only way I could make the math feel honest. What I did, not advice.

tangent: my phone does not sleep here anymore

Here's what the Hatch actually replaced, and it was never the clock. My phone slept on my nightstand for a decade, which meant it was the first thing I touched in the morning and the last thing I touched at night, which meant I was never really in either place. When the Hatch took over the alarm job, the phone got evicted to the living room, and Noodle and I both started sleeping like people who are not being watched by a small glass rectangle. The sunrise machine was the excuse. The eviction was the upgrade.

Anyway, moving on, before this becomes a screen time sermon, which is a genre I do not have the authority to write.

the soft landing

The fake sun came up again this morning and it was fine, and fine mornings, stacked on top of each other, are apparently how a life gets better. If your 3am brain likes to do math with a glowing clock, or your mornings start with a jolt, this is the softest version of waking up I have found, paywall and all.

I keep meaning to dial in the wind-down routine as carefully as I tuned the mornings, and the evenings keep, the thing is

Go to bed. The sun will come up on your nightstand too.

• ava 🌅