A couple of weeks ago, a short video clip detailing the morning routine of one Ashton Hall, a personal trainer and fitness influencer, went viral online. Once you watch the clip – and I am absolutely recommending that you do – you will see why: it occupies the big sweet spot of social media virality, both completely serious and utterly absurd, and wildly and inexplicably compelling.
In the video, Hall – thirtyish, shirtless, bulgingly muscular and irreproachably groomed – arises from his slumber at 3:52am, and immediately launches into a punishing, long and precisely time-stamped sequence of self-care rituals.
At 3:53, he brushes his teeth, rinsing with a high-end bottled water brand; at 4:01, he walks out on to the large balcony of his blankly luxurious apartment, overlooking the lights of a still-slumbering city, and does several sets of push-ups, which he then follows with a few minutes of silent contemplation.
He then sits at a desk, still shirtless, and performs further silent contemplation, a few minutes of journaling, and then drinks more high-end water while watching what sounds like a video of some kind of evangelic preacher delivering a prosperity-gospel-informed sermon. He then dunks his face in a bowl of iced water, before getting togged out in gym clothes, and heading down in a lift to go hell-for-leather on a treadmill.
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This gets him to 7:31am, at which point he goes outside – it is finally bright now – to a fancy-looking pool area, and does a few laps and a cold plunge. At 8:23 he’s back in his apartment and engaging in further ablutions, the most notable aspect of which is rubbing the skin of a freshly-peeled banana into his face. By 9:06 he is at his desk again, dressed in a sharp cream suit, and ready to begin his day’s work – though not before dunking his face once more in a large glass bowl of iced water.
He then conducts what seems to be a brief zoom call with a client (“Looking at it, bro, we gotta go ahead and get in at least ten thousand”). We then cut briefly to a woman (whose face remains unseen, as with the maid in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons) preparing a protein-intense breakfast of eggs, bacon and avocado on wholemeal toast, which is then handed to Ashton at his desk, along with another bottle of that high-end water.
(Hall’s Instagram account features another video detailing his “Night Routine”, though it seems he never actually experiences night: the wind-down process – which involves having dinner served to him in the bath, by the same faceless female helper – begins at 5:02pm, and he is tucked up in bed by 7pm, where he reads a few verses of the Bible before hitting the lights.)
This account has omitted many details of Hall’s morning routine, but hopefully this gives some sense of the sheer range and precision of his matutinal undertakings. Part of what makes the video so compelling is its instructive combination of punishing rigour and lavish pointlessness: essentially this man has hauled himself out of bed at 3:55am in order to spend close to six hours doing nothing of any real significance.
Yet every second of it is suffused with an aura of great seriousness and purpose, as of the observance of some arcane spiritual practice.
The fact that it is all conducted in near total silence and solitude adds to this sense of religious ritual. It is like watching a Benedictine monk, but one whose early morning hours are dedicated not to the veneration of God, but to the stern husbandry of the self, and to silent veneration of the hustle.
Watching, I was reminded of a short, cryptic text Walter Benjamin wrote in 1921, entitled “Capitalism as Religion”. In it, he considers capitalism as a religious system which requires continuous worship, and yet which offers neither mercy nor redemption.
“Capitalism,” he writes, “is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that has ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology.” There is, he continues, “no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper.”
Hall’s morning routine video is, in its way, a more extreme sacrament of this purely cultic religion than Benjamin could have imagined in 1921. In its form and in its content, it is both an enactment and a celebration of the hustle imperative that has in recent years become such a dominant strain of online culture – and therefore of culture more generally.
The other thing it reminded me of – and I’m sure I’m by no means alone in this – is American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis’s vicious satire of the hyperconsumerist 1980s, in which Patrick Bateman, a blank and supremely narcissistic investment banker, details at great length and in dire comic detail his daily beauty regimen.
But even Bateman had enough slack in his self-care schedule to commit frequent acts of murder, dismemberment and necrophilia. I’m in no way suggesting that Hall might have such inclinations, by the way, only that even if he did he wouldn’t have the time.
The point of the morning routine video – as with all such influencer performances – might at first glance appear to be a kind of lifestyle propaganda: a demonstration of the kind of grindset that is necessary to succeed in a hustle-centric culture, or even (secondarily) an advertisement for Hall’s services as a fitness instructor and/or life coach.
But it feels, to me, like a primarily aesthetic proposition, a celebration of the surface phenomena of such a lifestyle. It’s an example, in this sense, of content for content’s sake.
The video went viral largely for the same reason I’m writing about it: it’s absurd and powerfully funny. But there’s also an unmistakable mood of sadness running beneath it, which I think accounts for much of its strange fascination.
Hall – or, I suppose, the character he plays for his social media followers – pursues his exacting morning routine in total solitude, save for the hands that pass him his breakfast and the protein-rich supper he eats in his luxurious bath, or the disembodied clients he encounters on his computer screen.
It’s as though his reward, for all that meaningless labour of self-perfection, is a supremely aestheticised isolation.
