Four Morning Routine Activities You Can Lie About Doing to Impress Your Friends
A Stress-Free Guide to Create the Illusion of a Healthy Lifestyle
Have you ever woken up at 11AM, stared at your phone for two hours, watched some YouTube, and then finally started on your work when the day’s almost over? Everyone’s carefully-structured morning routine makes you look like a slob who never has enough hours in the day to get it all done. And you don’t! Instead of worrying about not filling your day with healthy practices, just tell your friends that you do! Remember, delusion is so powerful that if you lie about it enough, you may be able to convince yourself.
Read a book (Not digitally!)
In a world where tweets are restricted to 280 characters to perfectly entertain your underdeveloped brain for 32 seconds, it seems like we have all the entertainment we would need. However, some people go the extra mile and pick up a book. Oh, to clarify, a book is like a long Instagram caption about a specific thing. Sometimes they’re about made-up stories! Reading for pleasure seems like a torturous activity ever since your high school teachers jammed the literary works of Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald down your throat, effectively making sure you attribute reading with pain, exams, and unclear words. It’s embarrassing to say you’re part of the 24% of American adults who haven’t read a book in the past year, so just lie and say that you read books all the time! Don’t worry, there are so many books that if you make up one about a topic no one has ever heard of before, not only will they believe you, they’ll be impressed you’re the first to research this new genre! “Rebecca told me she’s into turtle philosophy and their beliefs about the afterlife,” they’ll say. “I’ve never even heard of that. How does she get into these niche, interesting and scholarly topics?”
Meditate: Clear Your Mind for Once
These days with a pandemic raging, political instability, and social justice movements happening across the globe, no one has any time to rest and breathe for a minute. After trying meditation for the first time for three measly minutes, you might end your little quiet session after realizing you legitimately can’t function without listening to a song. But to absolve your guilt of being a slave to your pocket rectangle, just lie about expressing your inner tranquility through sitting really still for a while! After you mention your daily “Zen Zone” to your friends, they’ll be so shocked that you actually have the intelligence and self-awareness to be completely at one with your thoughts for a bit. “What’s that important person meditating on?” they’ll wonder, but before they can even guess the high-class, thoughtful topics you were discussing in your mind (climate change or how to solve homelessness, perhaps), they’ll already be browsing Twitter, an app you can mention is “bad for the flourishing of thoughts.” Typical.
Don’t Look At Your Phone Before Noon
It’s becoming increasingly easy to fall into the habit of reaching for one’s phone right when you wake up. This leads to doom scrolling and being sucked into the digital world, wasting an hour of precious morning time looking at TikToks because of its manipulative algorithm feeding you an endless stream of content. Some people put their phone on airplane mode overnight, and others leave it in another room so as to not be tempted. That’s all well and good, but we need to maximize the illusion of productivity. To make sure it’s clear you don’t get distracted by a single Instagram post, say you’ve tasked your roommate to hide your turned-off phone somewhere in your apartment, only to be found once you’ve completed all your work for the day. In its place, say that you fill the Twitter void by reading one of those books we talked about earlier, or happily checking off your lengthy to-do list, free of technological interruptions. When asked about your new tech-free lifestyle, you can say, “I hardly even miss my phone. It feels like I’m Amish, just going about my day without the chains of social media weighing me down!”
Make an Instagram-Worthy Green Juice
Every day on Instagram, it seems like the only thing all those skinny models you follow eat is a repulsive-looking, clumpy smoothie, the nauseating shade of vomit green. If that’s what they actually eat every day to maintain their bodies, then no thanks! Continue eating what you normally do, but blend up a fake smoothie you can post on Instagram for external validation of your life choices, but after your post is uploaded, throw it away. You might ask, “What do I even put in the smoothie?” Here’s a tip: It doesn’t matter! Really, the only prerequisite for tricking people into believing you’re healthy is that it’s a disgusting shade of green that looks like only people with under 8% body fat enjoy. You could blend up mint chocolate chip ice cream with green food dye for all I care. While you’re at it, check out this insufferable article about what to caption your smoothie sabotage. “My blender is my bestie”? It’s so pretentious it’s perfect, and lets everyone know you’ve invested a lot in the activity of making abhorrent-looking beverages!
BONUS: When your friends tell you about their perfectly normal morning routine, you can retort back with “Yeah, I just couldn’t imagine living like that,” to go above and beyond.
Listen, nothing can actually replace the health benefits of going for a run, eating kale everyday, or the psychological advantages of not looking at a machine that literally only dispenses disturbing news. But life is short, and are you sure you want to spend it in a canoe, eating food you hate or almost puking at the gym? So don’t let your laziness upset you, because everyone else is probably lying too.
