Why can't contemporary young people break free from staying up late? Because the fear embedded in the system is too deep, and people's intrinsic motivation has been almost completely destroyed.

Starting from college, staying up late, trying medication, exercise, and self-discipline—all can only last a few days. Falling into an extreme steady state: lying down can't sleep, staying up late, feeling guilty when finally able to sleep, and planning to do things differently tomorrow, only to continue the vicious cycle the next day. Even with a fulfilling and accomplished day, it's still impossible to quit.
Staying up late has gone beyond a bad habit, forming an instinct similar to the natural urge to get up and find food—if you don't play, it feels like suffocation and you might suffocate.
Until the self-criticism caused by staying up late reaches an extreme threshold—believing you'll die early, age prematurely, get sick, and life is over. Suddenly, a voice arises in the mind: If you want to stay up late, it means you really need this feeling. Abandon the wrong concept of staying up late; what you currently need is just to pass this period in this way. Do it as you wish, at least make these late-night hours relaxed and easy.
Calmly play until 4:30 a.m., and when sleepiness is full, the voice says again: You’ve played enough, now it’s very comfortable and safe, you’ll fall asleep soon. Turn off all alarms, give up plans for tomorrow, and rest well. Sleep until tomorrow night is even better.
Sleep until 1 p.m. Usually, after staying up late, I wake up feeling groggy and not fully alert. Worse, I regret wasting most of the day and blame myself, secretly deciding I must not stay up late today. But this time, my mind was very clear—no feeling of staying up late and not waking up, nor feeling like the day was wasted. The experience was completely different: I enjoyed playing on my phone, slept well, and now I want to have a good meal to feel even better.
This experience revealed that what keeps people staying up late is the deliberately implanted thought system: the system first tells you that something is wrong, then criticizes yourself for the mistake, and this self-punishment causes you to keep making mistakes. Self-blame is not only about staying up late; fundamentally, it’s an internal belief of self-destructive guidance implanted in people since childhood.
Looking back at the thoughts during late nights, I found that almost everyone lives in an extremely contradictory and absurd perception of time: both fearing time and expecting time. Fearing that time will take away loved ones’ lives, health, and wealth, yet expecting time to bring certainty and security to uncertainty—such as accelerating results and immediately knowing the outcome.
This leads people to both intentionally put themselves into unconscious mental stimulation to "kill time," like playing on their phones and fantasizing about fun; and simultaneously creating a sense of control over time, manifested as an urgent feeling that everything must be done quickly—eat quickly, pour water quickly, walk quickly, finish quickly.
Loving and fearing time at the same time, these two contradictory forces hold each other in a stalemate, like two equal forces pulling a box left and right, causing it to stay in place. People are like prey surrounded by predators, stuck in a freeze position where they can neither move forward nor backward. Animals fall into despair and helplessness, lying on the ground pretending to be dead.
Humans’ act of pretending to be dead manifests as staying up late, aimlessly scrolling on their phones, daydreaming, fantasizing, and ruminating on the past. The feedback from these behaviors is that they temporarily forget and escape from the fear of being trapped from both sides.
This belief about time comes from the "correct education" received in childhood: doing homework is effective use of time, playing games, resting, and even the necessary trips to and from school are all a waste of time. The urgency to cherish and seize time is drilled into every child's mind, forming a highly contradictory cognition.
Time is both my savior, bringing a sense of control over anxiety and uncertainty; and my enemy, slipping away with the slightest slackness, capable of destroying me through wastefulness.
But in reality, time does nothing and may not even exist at all—it's just a name humans assign to the intuitive process of arising and ceasing of all things. What truly acts is the anxiety program relentlessly implanted by the system since childhood, telling everyone: You are not good enough.
You are not working hard enough, so you need to seize time to learn; not successful enough, so you need to work hard; not good enough, so you need to use time correctly to change yourself.
This anxiety program causes people to both love and fear time, trapping them in a state of long-term helplessness. This helplessness leads to a loss of subjective will, making them unable to do anything.
Staying up late is a typical manifestation of alienation—people can’t even naturally sleep and rest like animals. They rely on phone screen locks, self-discipline, mental judgments, and external rules to drive themselves, which is a state where subjective initiative is completely eroded.