The Inner Monologue

There is a small, almost laughably trivial irony flickering in bedrooms and hallways across the modern world. The humble LED nightlight—our technological evolution of the soft-glow plug-ins of childhood—often uses more electricity when the light is off than when it’s on.

It’s true. When the light detects dawn or ambient illumination, it dutifully extinguishes its gentle glow. The LED itself draws no current, but the photocell that detects that light, and the circuitry that decides whether to keep the LED off or on, still sip power. Ever so slightly. Microwatts. Pennies a year, if that. But symbolically, it’s almost poetic: we have invented an ultra-efficient light that wastes energy performing the act of efficiency.

This is what happens when modern technology bends not to physics, but to psychology. The LED nightlight didn’t need to turn off. A steady, dim LED could stay lit twenty-four hours a day and still use less power than a single incandescent bulb burning for five minutes. But that’s not how we’ve been raised to think about light.

We were taught—by our parents, our teachers, our culture—that a light left on is wasteful. That illumination is a luxury to be rationed. “Turn that off when you leave the room!” was a moral commandment, not just an energy-saving tip. It was about responsibility, thrift, and a sense of control over invisible forces like the electric bill. In the incandescent age, that made sense: a 60-watt bulb could heat a small meal. Leaving it on was, literally, burning money.

But the LED changed the math. A modern nightlight can run all year for less than the cost of a single cup of coffee. It uses so little electricity that it costs more energy to manufacture the packaging than to operate the product for its entire lifetime. And yet, we have built into it a tiny digital brain whose sole purpose is to stop it from glowing during the day—to simulate efficiency for the comfort of our conscience.

This, in miniature, is the story of human progress. We drag our old habits along with us into every new age, even when the world no longer demands them. The LED nightlight is not merely a product; it’s a shrine to the moral weight of the light switch. We simply can’t bear to see a light burning “for no reason,” even when the reason—the psychological relief of darkness—costs us more than the light itself.

The absurdity runs deeper than energy waste. It’s a philosophical mismatch between human intuition and technological reality. The same thinking infects our entire approach to efficiency: cars that simulate the roar of engines they no longer need, thermostats that mimic the timing of manual dials, and apps that imitate paper calendars. We can’t seem to accept that progress might mean not pretending to conserve, but redesigning what “conservation” even means.

Imagine, for a moment, if nightlights had been invented in the LED era rather than inherited from the incandescent one. They might have always been softly glowing, barely perceptible lights—steady, ambient, always there. Like starlight for the hallway. No sensors, no switches, no phantom load pretending to be off. They would simply be. But that would feel wrong. Parents would worry about waste, even if the math proved otherwise. Retailers would fret about reviews claiming the light “never turns off.” And so, the engineers build the illusion of thrift into the circuit, because design serves culture before it serves logic.

We have reached a point in history where our technology is outpacing our morality. We are still trying to “turn things off” in a world that barely consumes anything to stay on. The guilt of the glowing bulb lingers in our collective conscience, even as the actual cost of that glow evaporates. And so, paradoxically, we spend a little more—on sensors, on logic circuits, on phantom watts—to achieve the feeling of saving.

It’s a wonderfully human contradiction: we don’t actually want efficiency; we want absolution.

Perhaps the next generation will see things differently. Children growing up now, surrounded by devices that sip electricity like a butterfly drinks nectar, might learn that a light left on isn’t always a sin. That sometimes the simplest, most efficient solution is to stop simulating old habits and start trusting new ones.

Until then, our nightlights will keep doing their tiny, ironic dance—wasting energy to prove they’re not wasting energy. Little electric parables plugged into the wall, glowing briefly to reassure us that we’ve done the right thing by making them go dark.