It’s 2:30 AM. I got into bed at one, put my phone down, closed my eyes, and my brain started thinking on its own. The more it thought, the more awake I got. Still not asleep.
So I got up to write.
Yesterday at noon I was too tired to keep my eyes open, so I went down for a two-and-a-half-hour nap. Woke up with a model scoring bug waiting for me, chugged a cup of coffee to snap myself awake, and thought nothing of it. By the time the cup was empty it was already past four, and I went straight back to digging through the problem.
But blaming the coffee isn’t fair. It was just the last straw. Thinking about it, I’ve been staying up too late. I can’t name the day it started; I just kept going to bed later and later. 12:30, 1:00, 1:30. During the day I’d tell myself I’d catch up at night, and when night came it felt like the day was over and there was still so much I wanted to do. The list kept growing. Sleep kept sliding to the back of the queue. Especially lately, with new things coming at me from every direction — dazzling, but I never get past the surface of any of them.
The tinnitus probably came from all this. I can’t remember when it started. Lying down at night, with the room quiet, there is a thin layer of sound in my ears, like the static from an old TV, or someone far away slowly drawing a bow across a long string. Covering my ears only makes it louder. It doesn’t hurt or itch, and it doesn’t get in the way of anything. But it’s there. At first, two days of catching up on sleep and it went away on its own. Then, as I stayed up later and later, more and more irregularly, it showed up more and more often, until it just stayed.
The days aren’t great either. Around two or three in the afternoon my eyelids get heavy and my mind starts to wander; I snap out of it with no idea what I was just thinking, and I’ve started forgetting things. I used to fix a week of late nights with two extra hours of weekend sleep. Now no amount of sleep leaves me feeling sharp.
I used to think staying up was free. You’re just a bit tired the next day, you push through, it’s gone. Turns out the body keeps a ledger, and it only shows you the total when it’s ready.
The most recent time I felt genuinely good, no tension at all, was the day before yesterday in the afternoon: I took an ibuprofen at noon, lay down for half an hour, and with the cold gone and the medicine kicking in, I finally felt at ease.
Attention is finite. Try to want everything and you end up with nothing.
When will I finally internalize this: three days on, two days off gets you nowhere. Persistence is the only way to win.
The body is the one thing that matters, the one thing that needs looking after.
So, a small flag: no Zhihu and no Bilibili next week. And maybe I can build a small plugin to track myself and keep me from slacking.
The brain does get sharper with use. But since AI came along, I feel I spend much less time actually thinking; my time has been shredded into fragments. Especially when juggling several things at once — that part needs work too.
