Revenge bedtime procrastination is just drinking salt water

It’s a familiar story. I got home from a meeting at 10:30PM and everyone was asleep. I hadn’t been home since early that morning and was dead tired. The obvious, mature, adult thing to do was just to go to bed. But to go to bed felt like some kind of admission that my life had just become work and I wasn’t ready to admit that to myself so I gave in to my inner Peter Pan, got some chips and beer and gamed till early in the AM. The feeling in the moment was defiance. The feeling going to bed was regret. Like I said, it’s a familiar story.

It turns out that this kind of madness has a name…they call it “revenge bed-time procrastination”. The term grew out of China’s professional class who commonly work on the 996 schedule (9AM til 9PM, 6 days a week). It’s a term that describes a behaviour among “people who don’t have much control over their daytime life [and] refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours”.

On one level it’s a behaviour that’s very understandable. Of course, if work feels bad, we want to feel good. And yet, on another level, it’s irrationally self-defeating. If work feels bad, going to bed late is going to make it feel worse the next day…which plunges us into the self-perpetuating work/leisure binge death spiral. Why on earth would we do this to ourselves?

We do it because we need meaning to live and if we can’t find meaning, we’ll opt for its weird cousin: pleasure. But drinking in pleasure when what we really need is meaning is like drinking salt water when are dehydrated. When life feels like a meaningless grind we need something that gives us a sense of meaning and rest.

This is the very thing Jesus promised when He said “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:27). Jesus promises that there is a peace and a rest found in him, that can be found no where else…the kind of rest and peace that weary people are desperate for, the kind of thing that no amount of revenge bedtime procrastination can produce.

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