The Hatch

My kid has blackout curtains and no clock in the room yet she still wakes up at 7am on the dot. I asked one morning how she knew when it was time to wake up. "The birds wake me up," she replied. "Same," I said with a laugh. And even though I could not explain it at the time, I loved this quiet proof that something real was still getting through the blackout shades.

A few weeks later I was at dinner with coworkers. Someone mentioned their Hatch alarm clock, the one that wakes you to the sound of birdsong. Someone else said they hated the bird setting. I asked without thinking: "Why not just put a feeder outside?"

The answer was immediate. The seed makes a mess, bird poop around the feeder. The Hatch is just easier.

I didn't say anything else. But I thought about it the whole way home. I guess I'm still thinking about it.

Why host the animal when you can license the sound? Why accept the mess of something alive when you can have the curated version, volume-adjustable, on a timer, scheduled to stop at 7:15 so you are not late for your first meeting? The Hatch costs about a hundred and sixty dollars. It comes in four colors. It syncs to your phone. It will play birdsong, or rain, or glow a gentle sunrise, at whatever frequency of nature you have decided fits your morning. Oh, and it stops when you tell it to.

A feeder costs twelve dollars and requires a bag of seed and the acceptance that birds are, in fact, animals, and animals make a mess, and the mess is part of the deal.

I think about this a lot: the moment something real gets identified as desirable and then immediately converted into a product that removes the inconvenient parts. The birdsong without the bird. The warmth of a fire without the ash. The feeling of being in nature without the mud, the insects, the thing that just moved under the leaf litter over there. We have gotten extraordinarily good at this. At locating the part of an experience that people actually want and selling them that part, isolated and packaged and guaranteed not to poop on the ground around it.

I am not outside the machine. I have bought the version before. I understand the appeal of the thing that works reliably, that does not require me to also accept the parts I did not sign up for. Life is full of mess I did not sign up for. I get it.

But I keep thinking about my kid, still half asleep, hearing the birds come through the window and deciding that meant it was time. No product involved. No subscription. No preference settings. Just the actual morning, doing what mornings do, and a child listening for it because at some point they learned that it was worth listening for.

XOXO,