> I felt little of the camaraderie I once did while working night shifts. I’m unsure why I felt this dissonance, and it occurs to me now that it could have been more self-imposed than anything. I doubt it. I've worked days and nights at different times in the same place, at a couple of jobs in different parts of the country. There's a real difference between what people are like in the daytime and nighttime worlds, a…
What do you think causes this difference?
Abroad in the night, the human world grows tenuous, and one's connection to it likewise. Most people can learn to live in that, but you never feel perfectly at home with it. Nor should you; there's nothing like it to dispel the comfortable, foolish illusion that the world belongs to us, and not the other way around.
Humans are better, I find, for a little fear of that sort. It makes us stick closer together than we do otherwise, gives us more incentive to look for the good in one another; camaraderie comes much easier, and that is part of what I miss. Both those jobs were customer service, and even the people on the phone were different: stranger certainly, sometimes desperate, but almost never spiteful like the day shift often was. The sun revolves around every narcissist, of course, but those excepted there is less pretense in all of us in night.
Its very strangeness is the rest of what I miss. I find it frightful too, of course, but never because it's trying, which counts for a lot with me after living so long with humans. There's a lot to appreciate in that strangeness, for anyone who understands fear well enough to feel and not be driven by it - to know the difference between being afraid and being made to feel afraid.
There's a wild and ancient beauty in the night to which nothing wrought by human hands compares, and an inescapable reminder that beyond all the frantic work of busy human hands, something vast beyond our comprehension still abides: the world itself, from which we never stop fleeing, despite that we neither can nor need.
I hope whatever of this species emerges from the other side of the next few hundred years understands that better than today's version does - I can't imagine how they'd fail to, at any rate. I think they'll better understand the night than most of us can, too. Maybe by then the consequences of our lethal hubris will have far enough abated they'll even have some time to enjoy it, the way I did decades ago when I last lived a nighttime life.