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Because the fear implanted by the system is too deep, a person’s intrinsic motivation is basically completely destroyed. This is the truth I finally discovered.
Since I started university, I have had this bad habit of staying up late. Actually, I don’t want to do it. I have tried many methods, including taking medicine, exercising, and being disciplined, but the common point of all these methods is that at first they work for a few days, then they no longer work. I don’t want to, but I just can’t fall asleep on time after lying down; I can only play with my phone for a while.
I fell into an extremely steady state of staying up late: lying down but unable to sleep, staying up late until I can fall asleep, feeling guilty about staying up late today, and planning to be different tomorrow, then continuing the vicious cycle the next day.
I have also seen a viewpoint that says people don’t want to sleep because their daytime is not their own time. But even when I did many fulfilling things during the day and felt a sense of accomplishment, I still couldn’t quit staying up late.
Staying up late has become a small cycle system within my large cycle, running precisely. It has surpassed the so-called category of “bad habits” and formed an instinct similar to that a person must find food as soon as they arrive. As soon as I lie down, I instinctively play with my phone. Not playing makes me feel like suffocation, as if I will be stifled to death.
Until one day, because of staying up late, the self-criticism I generated reached an extreme threshold — I will die early, I will age, I will get sick, my life will be over like this.
Suddenly a voice rose in my heart, different from the usual voices of self-blame and regret. It said to me: if you want to stay up late, it means you really need the feeling that staying up late brings. Abandon the critical concept that staying up late is wrong. You currently just need to pass this time in this way, so just do it as you want. At least you can make these few hours late at night easier.
So, I peacefully played on my phone until 4:30 a.m. When I stayed up until I was fully sleepy and put down the phone, this voice said again: you have played the phone games you wanted to play, now you are comfortable and safe, and will soon fall asleep. So turn off all alarms, give up all plans for tomorrow, and let yourself rest well. If you can sleep through until tomorrow night, that would be even better.
The next day I slept until 1 p.m.
Usually, no matter how late I stayed up, when I got up I would feel very sleepy and not fully awake. Worse, there would be a more anxious mood—regretting wasting most of the day, blaming myself, making a quiet resolution not to stay up late today.
But that time when I woke up, my mind was very clear. I didn’t feel sleepy from staying up late, nor did I feel that the day was wasted because it was afternoon.
My feelings were completely different: I enjoyed playing on my phone, slept well, and now I wanted to eat a delicious meal to make myself feel better.
This experience made me realize that the reason people continue to stay up late is a deliberately implanted thought system: the system first tells you that something is wrong, then you criticize yourself for making mistakes, and this self-punishment causes people to continue making mistakes.
This self-blame is not only reflected in staying up late, its essence is an inner belief implanted since childhood that leads to self-destruction.
That day, after having a good full meal, I did nothing but sit quietly and began to review all the thoughts I had about staying up late.
I discovered that almost everyone lives in an extremely contradictory and absurd mistaken perception of time, which manifests as:
People both fear time and long for time.
People fear that time will take away what they currently have, such as loved ones, their life, their health, their wealth.
People also long for time to provide certainty to all the uncertainties they worry about—for example, wanting to speed up the result of something, or to immediately know how things will end with another person.
This leads to very contradictory and chaotic behavior in life. People deliberately put themselves in unconscious mental stimulation to “kill” time, such as playing on the phone, daydreaming, seeking amusement.
At the same time, they need to create a sense of control over time, which shows as a persistent, anxious “urgency” no matter what they do. For example, feeling all daily life is boring; time spent eating is boring, so need to look at the phone; time spent walking is boring, so need to speed up while thinking of other things; time spent sleeping is boring, so need to stay up late for more experience; time spent working is boring, so need to listen to music, and I want to eat faster, pour water faster, walk faster, finish this faster.
Love and fear of time—these two contradictory and equally strong forces pull a box in opposite directions, causing it to be stuck still.
Or to use another metaphor, people are like prey surrounded by predators, stuck in a frozen position where they can neither move forward nor retreat.
Animals in such a state fall into desperate helplessness and play dead lying on the ground.
Human “playing dead” manifests as staying up late, aimless scrolling on the phone, daydreaming, ruminating on past events, etc.
All these behaviors provide feedback that temporarily forgets and escapes the fear of being trapped and squeezed from both sides.
Then I traced back further: this belief about time comes from the “correct education” I received as a child. This education tells people that studying and doing homework are effective uses of time, whereas playing games, resting, or even essential travel between school and home are wasted time. The urging to cherish and seize time is a death sentence drilled into every child’s brain, creating an extremely contradictory cognition.
Time is my savior, giving certainty and control over all anxiety and uncertainty; time is also my enemy; if I slack even a little, it will slip away and I will be ruined by wasting it.
But in fact, from beginning to end, time does nothing at all—time itself hardly even exists. People just give a name to the process of cause and effect in all things that appears intuitively, and call it time.
What actually acts is a system that from early childhood tirelessly implants an anxiety program in the brain telling everyone: you are not good enough.
You are not working hard enough, so you need to seize time to study; you are not successful enough, so you need to seize time to work; you are not good enough, so you need to use time effectively to change yourself.
This anxiety program causes people to both love and fear time, so stuck in this state, falling into long-term helplessness, which in turn causes the loss of subjective will, making people unable to do anything.
Staying up late is a typical manifestation of alienation, where a person can no longer even carry out the natural, animal instinct to sleep and rest, and has to rely on phone screen locks, willpower, and mental judgment of the dogma “staying up late is bad” for external driving. This is a state where subjective initiative is completely erased.
So it is not that young people today all like to stay up late, but that their inner subjective initiative has basically been completely destroyed, unable not only to actively rest, but also in life, work, and many other aspects is in a “driven” state.
The result of alienation is that not only can people not actively fall asleep and rest, but also cannot actively work, actively study, or actively create. These activities lost of psychological motivation are replaced by strong external punishments as external drives.
Like a computer with a broken built-in hard drive, but can still function with a USB drive plugged in. Fines for not going to work, elimination by competition and starvation for not attending school—all these punishments allow people to perform correct behavior as judged by the system under the drive of fear.
Because some parts of society have strict punishment mechanisms as external constraints and use fear to stimulate motivation, people’s helplessness and lack of initiative only leads to huge uncontrolled motivation losses in private areas where they can escape public punishment, forming behaviors like scrolling phones, staying up late, and other addictions.
To counter this destroyed lack of intrinsic motivation, the correct method is not to establish a correct viewpoint then forcibly do it with willpower, punishing oneself if failing.
This process is exactly the system’s step of implanting a virus in people.
I feel that the most cruel aspect of education today is presuming that when people are born they know nothing and everything is wrong, treating toddlers as complete idiots.
So the system imposes a set of correct rules, educating the children it deems “wrong” when to eat, what to eat, when to study, what to study, when to sleep, when to get up, then training them like dogs: reward for doing right, punishment for mistakes, under the pretence of “forming good habits.”
But in fact, human growth shouldn’t be like this. The world we live in—even the operation of heaven and earth, the rotation of sun and moon—is perfect. As the universe’s creation, humans come with a precise regulatory system naturally present that tells us when to eat, when to sleep, when to play, when to create.
Those arrogant concepts like “if children are ignored they won’t be self-disciplined,” or “if they don’t study, they will play games all day and hold phones not sleeping,” are actually the result of wrong education and anti-humanity management destroying children’s innate initiative, yet many use these results to argue for the necessity and correctness of the system.
Innate nature and instincts in people can be temporarily obscured by the strong attack of the system, but they cannot disappear. To quit staying up late is actually to awaken from the internalized thinking process, not continue to criticize and blame yourself like the system.
Instead, gently see yourself. Behind scrolling phones, staying up late, addiction, there are many psychological needs ignored by the system and lifelong caregivers. Don’t demand yourself to immediately do the right thing; rather, let yourself feel a bit more comfortable now.
For example, if you want to stay up late, want to play games, want to slack off, want to daydream, don’t tell yourself not to do it because it’s wrong. Instead, tell yourself you have this psychological need now, so you will fully enjoy the happiness this thing brings you.
The true joy people gain will transform into inner energy. When the heart has energy, the innate initiative in humans will be awakened and activated. People will slowly return to a healthy positive cycle.
The only limitation is that the implanted belief system will tell you you are indulging yourself again, you have slipped, you are finished, and you dare to indulge without psychological burden. At least previously when you did it, you knew it was wrong.
But this harsh moral judgment and binary opposition is what brought people into this situation. The difference between gently treating yourself and indulging yourself is:
The latter comes with harsh self-criticism, while the former does not. The former only cares whether your current feelings are good, how to make yourself feel a bit better now.
So the truth is very counterintuitive: people keep staying up late actually because they know staying up late is wrong.
The principle behind any addiction is the same, because addiction is the lower-level compensation unconsciously found after a person’s most essential initiative is destroyed, to maintain homeostasis.
When a person no longer feels they have made a mistake and stops criticizing their mistakes, every moment will be lived in a state where time does not exist, only the present moment’s presence. Whether drinking water, eating, walking in daily life, or during college entrance exams, or the excitement of winning medals, one will feel a sense of calm, completeness, and serenity.
Only under this state can the true meaning of life open — which is behavior originating from the heart, proactive creation.