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“For every diet, there is an equal and opposite binge.”
Geneen Roth
I gave up rest days and paid for it with 3am binges.
The harder a day runs, the more I need to decompress before bed.
I know I should sleep. I stay up anyway.
This week I was researching for an essay about my late nights when a tweet stopped me.
In June 2020 a journalist named Daphne K. Lee translated a phrase from Chinese social media: revenge bedtime procrastination. People who lack control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early, to win back a sense of freedom in the late hours.
The phrase was born inside China’s “996” work culture, where the schedule runs 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. That’s 72 hours a week.
I read the definition and it described my evenings.
The day filled up so I took the time I wanted at midnight.
In April 2020 an Hermès store in Guangzhou reopened after China’s lockdown ended. In one day it took in 19 million yuan. About 2.7 million dollars, believed to be the biggest single day any boutique in China ever recorded.
The press called it revenge spending. The urge to buy built up through months of closed stores and came out all at once when the doors opened.
Preachers’ kids carry a reputation: the strictest rules growing up, the hardest acting out after they leave home.
My mentor at my first job out of college grew up in a house where his parents didn’t allow TV and handed him books. He was wildly successful by the time I worked with him.
And now he loves TV the way I love chess.
In 1944 a scientist named Ancel Keys put 36 volunteers on half rations for 6 months to study starvation.
The men got obsessed with food. They stayed up reading cookbooks and menus. One collected more than 100 cookbooks.
When the 6 months ended, some of the men ate 7,000 to 10,000 calories a day and still said they were hungry. One needed about 3 years to feel normal around food again.
Push a want down in one place and it shows up in another.
- “Me time” moves from the day to after midnight.
- Spending moves from the months the stores were shut to the day they opened.
- The hunger moves from meals to cookbooks to eating all day and still feeling hungry.
I know it’s revenge bedtime procrastination and I still stay up too late.
The habit you keep losing to at midnight usually starts at noon.
🌊
Which recurring problem could you fix at its root?
