My Ancient Genes Will Not Let Me Sleep

I found something embarrassing about myself. On many nights I cannot sleep while my AI quota still has room left.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I thought about why I actually stay up. The honest answer is short sightedness.

Ancient humans hunted every day and always chased the maximum marginal gain. Run one more mile today, catch one more rabbit, and tomorrow has a little more food stored. No long view, no metacognition. Back then that was not short sighted. That was how you stayed alive. If you did not push, you might not eat tonight, and there might not be a you next year.

The problem is that most of us are still run by those ancient genes.

The genes never got the news that the world changed. They only know one rule. Take the gain in front of you now, and let tomorrow worry about itself.

AI made this much worse, because AI gives such strong and fast feedback.

A Claude subscription resets its quota every few hours, with a weekly cap on top. So people start chasing the reset. Only when the subscription is fully used up do they feel at peace and go to sleep. If anything is left unused, sleep feels wrong, like money left on the table.

I later learned that foragers were not endless chasers either. Animals leave a patch once the food there gets thin, because every extra minute costs more than it returns. My ancestors ran a program that knew when to stop. AI breaks that program. The quota refills every few hours, a patch that never runs out, so the stop signal never fires, and I just keep eating.

I do this myself.

At 1 in the morning, eyes hurting, I still think, let me ask a few more questions, the quota is there anyway. I know perfectly well that staying up does my body no good and my next day no good. I still cannot put the phone down.

I later noticed the worst part of a quota. It expires. Psychology has a finding that a loss feels about twice as strong as the same sized gain. When my quota expires unused, I have lost nothing, yet my brain books it as lost money. So of all those late nights, a small part was chasing gain. The bigger part was fear of losing.

AI answers have another flaw. The quality jumps around. One prompt solves the problem in a sentence, the next one circles for ages and says nothing. That jumpiness is the cruelest part, it is exactly how a slot machine works. My hand cannot stop, because the next answer might always be the best one. By the time I come back to myself, an hour is gone.

One more honest thing about those questions at 1 AM. I forget most of the answers by the next day. AI has one great virtue, it always answers, and it never tells me I did something badly. People are different. Real feedback from people is true, and true feedback hurts, it makes me feel ashamed. I was talking about this tonight, when someone says my work is not good, my whole body feels uncomfortable. A machine never makes me uncomfortable. So I would rather stay up until 1 AM talking to a machine than talk a little more with real people in the daytime. It stopped being about saving quota a long time ago. I keep picking the feedback that does not hurt, and then I get addicted to it.

The price of one short night is bigger than I thought. In one study, people slept six hours a night for two weeks and ended up as slow as people who had missed a night or two entirely, and they could not feel it at all. After a night of four hours, the immune cells that patrol for viruses drop their activity by about seventy percent the next day. At 1 AM my judgment is about as good as a drunk person’s. Trading that brain for a few more questions never adds up.

What never crosses my mind is that a human life runs past eighty years.

Eighty years is long. Long enough to watch several industrial revolutions in one lifetime. Steam, electricity, the internet, and now AI. With AI around, there is really no need to chase so hard. You could even lie flat, take it slow, and as long as you stay alive, you will see more things arrive.

There was a French woman named Jeanne Calment who lived to 122. When she was born, the Eiffel Tower was not built yet. As a girl she met Van Gogh. By the time she died, the internet existed. One single life can stretch across that many ages. I do not need 122. Eighty some years is enough to watch several rounds. There is only one condition, I have to actually live to see them.

There is no need to fight that desperately.

I worked out one more piece of math. Quota resets, time does not. The quota I leave unused tonight is full again tomorrow morning. The hours I burn tonight never come back. I thought I was saving money. I was saving the cheapest thing I own and spending the most expensive one. Ancient people never got the chance to do this math. I have no excuse.

When I say lie flat, I mean those one or two hours after midnight, not a whole life lying down. The work that truly compounds still gets done in the daytime. It has never grown out of 1 AM quota.

Tonight, during my reflection, I said I always do a hundred things at sixty points instead of ten things at a hundred points. Chasing quota is the same brain. It counts the marginal gain of this one evening, and never counts the wrecked person tomorrow, let alone the eighty year game.

Sixty points has one more benefit, I only saw it tonight. Fast work gets fast criticism, people call it rough, and it never lands on me as a person. If I pour myself into one thing aimed at a hundred points and people still say it is bad, that bad lands on me directly, and I feel it for days. So a hundred things at sixty is sometimes a shell I keep around myself. Chasing quota is the same trick. The more questions I ask, the more it looks like nothing was wasted, and almost none of those questions are ones I would dare show to anyone.

The genes are not wrong. They carried us through the hardest part of human history. I am the one who is wrong. I live in an age that no longer needs daily hunting, and I still run my life on a hunting algorithm.

The quota resets tomorrow anyway. The industrial revolution will not stop just because I asked a few fewer questions tonight.

Last night I slept really well. This morning my cat woke me, mew mew mew mew mew. She ran away two days ago and spent more than a day outside. Hands, towels, blankets, we tried everything, nothing worked. What worked was a borrowed trap. She walked into it herself. Early this morning my roommate carried the trap home with her inside, heavy, before the sky was fully light. She is in the storage room now, door closed, food and water inside. When I fell asleep last night, I never checked how much quota I had left. Funny, when you think about it. Quota resets itself every day. A cat does not. There is only one of her, and lost means truly gone. The thing that lets me sleep through a whole night never had anything to do with using something up.