Staying Up Late: A Cure for Modern Life, or a Curse?
- Jason Chan
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
There is something strangely comforting about being awake when everyone else has gone to sleep. The messages stop, the phone becomes quieter, the traffic settles, and nobody is asking for an answer, a decision, a favour, or another piece of our attention. For some people, midnight is when they finally feel alive. We are constantly told that staying up late is unhealthy: sleep earlier, wake earlier and maintain a proper routine. While there is certainly wisdom in protecting our sleep, perhaps we should also ask a different question: Why do so many of us refuse to go to bed even when we know we are tired?
Perhaps staying up late is not simply a bad habit. For many people, it may be an attempt to reclaim a life that does not seem to belong to them during the day. Think about how an ordinary weekday is spent. We wake up because an alarm tells us to, travel according to schedules, answer messages because people expect replies, attend meetings, deal with clients and complete responsibilities that cannot be ignored. After work, there may still be parents to care for, children to attend to, errands to run, household chores to complete and social obligations to maintain.
We may technically have twenty-four hours in a day, but how many of those hours truly belong to us?
This may be one of the quiet frustrations of modern life. The time we spend during the day often does not belong to us. It belongs to our employer, our clients, our family, our responsibilities, our appointments and increasingly, our notifications. By the time everyone has stopped asking something from us, it may already be 11 p.m. Suddenly, the next two or three hours feel precious. Nobody expects us to be productive. Nobody needs an immediate reply. Nobody needs us to perform a role. For perhaps the first time that day, we are simply ourselves.
When Midnight Becomes Our Personal Time
So we watch another episode, scroll through our phones, read, listen to music, play games or simply sit quietly. From the outside, this can look like wasted time, but psychologically it can feel like freedom. The phenomenon is sometimes described as revenge bedtime procrastination: delaying sleep to reclaim personal leisure time after a day in which we felt we had little control over our schedule. The word revenge is interesting because perhaps we are not taking revenge against any particular person. Instead, we are rebelling against the structure of our own lives. It is almost as though we are saying, “You took my entire day. You are not taking my night as well.”
In that sense, staying up late can almost feel like a cure. The silence of the night gives us autonomy. Human beings do not only need physical rest; we also need moments when we are not employees, business owners, parents, partners, caregivers or problem-solvers. We need time when nothing is expected from us. Late at night, we finally have permission to exist without producing anything. The problem is that we purchase this freedom using tomorrow’s energy.
When the Cure Becomes the Curse
We stay awake because we want more time for ourselves, but morning eventually arrives. We wake up exhausted, struggle through work, become less focused and find that everything requires slightly more effort. Because the day has been tiring, we crave personal time even more when we get home, so once again we refuse to sleep. A cycle develops: we sacrifice tomorrow because today did not feel like ours. What initially gave us emotional relief begins contributing to the exhaustion we were trying to escape.
This is why simply telling someone to “sleep earlier” may miss the deeper issue. Of course, sufficient sleep matters, but perhaps the more important question is not, “Why won’t you go to sleep?” It is “Why is midnight the only time you feel belongs to you?” If someone has meaningful personal time throughout the day, there may be less need to steal it from the night. Modern life has become extremely efficient at allocating our time, yet perhaps we have forgotten to leave some of it unallocated. Even leisure has become productive: we exercise for health, read for self-improvement, network for career development and travel to collect experiences. Sometimes we simply need time that achieves absolutely nothing.
What Can BaZi Tell Us?
This is where I find BaZi offers an interesting additional perspective. BaZi should not be used to say that someone is “destined to sleep late”, nor should it replace proper rest or medical advice when health concerns are involved. Instead, I use BaZi as a framework for understanding how a person naturally operates and responds to the world around them.
Two people can live almost identical lifestyles yet experience them very differently. One may thrive with structure and routine while another feels restricted by it. One person may enjoy constant interaction, while another needs significant solitude to recover. Some people function well in fast-moving environments, while others perform better when they have time to think and process. In BaZi, we examine the interaction and balance of the Five Elements — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water — together with the overall structure and dynamics of the birth chart. Instead of asking only, “What should everybody do?”, we begin asking, “What works for this particular person?”
We spend a great deal of effort managing our money, calendars, businesses and responsibilities, yet very few of us consciously manage our energy. Sometimes the problem is not simply that we are working too hard; we may be working in a way that constantly fights against our natural tendencies. When that happens, the late-night hours can become compensation. Someone who spends the entire day meeting other people’s expectations may desperately seek solitude at night. Someone whose work requires constant structure may crave freedom after midnight. Someone who makes decisions for everyone throughout the day may simply want a few hours when nothing needs to be decided.
Rather than immediately judging these behaviours, perhaps we should first understand what they are trying to tell us.
Heaven, People and Place
This is also why I prefer to look at BaZi as part of the wider traditional concept of Heaven, People and Place — 天、人、地. Heaven represents timing and the circumstances we encounter. People represents our choices, behaviour, mindset and actions. Place represents the environment in which we live and work. BaZi helps us better understand ourselves and the timing we are moving through, while Feng Shui considers whether our physical environment is supporting us. Neither removes personal responsibility; instead, they give us another way of examining whether the life we have constructed actually supports the person who has to live it.
Perhaps the goal, therefore, is not simply to force ourselves into bed earlier. It is to understand what we are trying to recover by staying awake. Is it silence, freedom, creativity, solitude, entertainment or simply the feeling that nobody needs anything from us? Once we understand the need, we can find healthier ways to create space for it during the day. This could mean protecting an hour for ourselves, creating stronger boundaries between work and personal life, changing how we organise our schedule or simply allowing ourselves time that does not need to be productive.
A BaZi consultation can sometimes help with this process of self-understanding. Rather than using BaZi only to ask what will happen in the future, I believe it can be more useful when we ask what our natural strengths and tendencies are, what environments bring out the best in us, where we tend to exhaust ourselves, and how we can make better decisions according to both our personal characteristics and timing.
Understanding yourself does not remove life’s responsibilities, but it can help you stop spending unnecessary energy fighting yourself.
Cure or Curse?
So, is staying up late a cure for modern life or a curse? Perhaps it is both. It is a cure because the night gives us something that modern life increasingly takes away: silence, autonomy and ownership of our own time. It becomes a curse when we repeatedly borrow those hours from sleep and repay the debt with exhaustion the following day.
We often say that everyone has the same twenty-four hours. Technically, that is true. But having twenty-four hours is not the same as owning twenty-four hours. Much of our daytime already belongs to someone or something else, and perhaps that is why we cling so fiercely to the night.
The question may therefore be bigger than what time we go to bed. Whether through BaZi, self-reflection or simply becoming more conscious of how we spend our days, perhaps we should ask ourselves:
Are you building your life around who you actually are, or are you spending most of your energy adapting yourself to the life that others expect you to live?
Because the goal should not simply be to sleep earlier. It should be to create a life where we do not have to wait until everyone else is asleep before we finally feel that our time belongs to us.
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