the zurkie show - how to stop staying up till 2am

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

if you hate the fact that you stay up latebuild a life worth waking up for.sending you all lots of love and peaaaace!https://linktr.ee/thezurkieshow

I'm so bad at going to sleep on time. I never do it. I always tell myself I'm going to go to bed at like 11 p.m. That seems like a normal time that if you told somebody you were going to bed at that time, they'd be like, oh, you're very responsible. Wow, you're probably in a run club and you do high rocks, whatever. Typical Austin conversation, typical, you know, Gen Z conversation. Also, the inside of a pineapple is probably one of the coolest fruit insides I've ever seen.

It's just unbelievable. Anyways. And yet, 11 p.m. will hit. I will look at the clock. I'll recognize it. I'll do like one of those nods. Like you ever like walk by somebody and you just go like that. And then they also go like that.

Why don't we just say hello? I don't understand why people do that. Maybe it's not to be like in, you know, I guess instigating anything. But I don't know. Either way, the time will come. I will be super excited to go to bed and then I just won't. I just won't. And it's not because I don't want to.

Well, actually, no, it's entirely that. Why would I go to bed at 11 p.m.? When you can go to bed at midnight. You can have another hour watching, you know, aviation documentaries on different catastrophes that happened and how pilot errors are the main cause of most aircraft, you know, catastrophes and crashes. Why would I not do that? Scratch that.

Why don't I just call somebody at 11 p.m. And then I can talk with them for another hour. And if they're on the West Coast, I don't have to worry about it too much. I'm just talking to someone. I'm doing something productive. I'm doing something good for myself. The problem arises the next day when you wake. up and when you realize that you didn't go to bed at 11 you went to bed at 2 a.m.

And you just, you tell yourself, okay, I am going to have the best day today. I have to like make up for how terrible the day was before. And then maybe you have a good day. You burn yourself out and the same thing happens again. I think it's a relationship with sleep. It's a relationship with taking care of yourself. And I don't think that I have loved myself enough to give myself the care that I need because instead I am just focused on the temporary pleasures. What can I do now? Oh my gosh. Dude, the flies are already on it. Get away. What the heck? Oh on, I'm going to put this away. I'll be right back. But I've learned now in my adult life that self-care is something that isn't really taught to you. Like going to bed when

you were younger, getting a full night's rest, you did that because your parents like demanded that of you. You didn't have a choice. And for a lot of us that didn't want to go to sleep because maybe we didn't feel like we had enough free time to just like be children because we're at school for the entirety of the day learning about things that we're going to forget for a test that we're having that same, you know, week. It was important to have some kind of time to just wander around and feel like we can exist without needing to do something. And I think that that has become the root of this addiction to not sleeping. I like burning the midnight oil because it feels like throughout the day I don't make enough time for myself to wander around to just like have fun.

And today I was feeling very similarly of like, oh my goodness, I just don't feel like I'm doing enough, yada, yada, yada, you know, the whole shebang. And then I told myself, you know what, I need to get groceries. I'm going to go to a grocery store. So I went to the grocery store. and I have wanted to for a while propagate a pineapple. And the way that you do it is you can actually grow your own pineapple. You cut off the top of it. You have to kind of shave it.

And then you go through and you pick these leaves until there's a little bit of kind of open pineapple wound for it to grow roots out of. Anyways, all of this to say, me going to the grocery store, created a moment that I'll never forget. Imagine that, you know, you are chilling in the fruit aisle and you witness someone speaking English. You live in America, everyone speaks English. But they have an accent, and their accent is strong.

And imagine that you think in your mind, I think they're from New Zealand or they're from Australia. They have this certain kind of tone, this certain kind of vibe to them. I want to say something because I have a lot of friends that are from Australia and New Zealand and I've always wanted to go and one day I will go. Not yet, but one day. And you wait for the opportunity to go and say something and then you go up to them. And it's an older lady, not super old.

in her, you know, 40s and has children. And you ask her, hey, are you, are you an Aussie? Are you a Kiwi? And she says, neither. And you look at her kind of dumbfounded, because you were convinced that she was from that corner of the world. And she tells you, I'm actually Czech. And your eyes light up because you are Polish,

which is right in that same neck of the woods of Europe, okay? Central Europe. It's right there. And you say, no way. I'm Polish. I've been to the Czech Republic, now Czechia. I've been there. That's so cool. And then in that same sequence of events, another woman comes by and says, I'm Slovakian. And now three of you are pointing at each other with this like Spider-Man meme of, oh my gosh, same regions of Europe in Austin where you don't really interact with, you know, there's people

from other countries, yes, but in that region of the world, yeah, right, forget about it. It was so surreal. You exchange numbers and then you're going to go grab a beer later this week and just become friends. That happens from a decision to go out and venture into the world with no expectations except getting a pineapple. And the funny thing is, I would rather fill my life with those kind of experiences than the ones of me mindlessly consuming from the hours of 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.

And it also just derails the rest of my day. It makes me feel terrible. So why do we continue to do it? Why do we continue to indulge in these addictive habits? Because it is an addiction. I will be the first to say it. It is an addiction. And it's very, very hard to get over bad sleep patterns.

It is. Because it takes consistency. And it also takes like this desire to switch things off. And for me, a big thing, I get fomo. Well, what if there's a, you know, a scenario in the future where, Some of my friends are in town here in Austin, and they're like, dude, let's go out. Let's, let's hang out on the town. What I'm going to say no to that?

I'm going to saying no to hanging out with them overnight. No, we're going out and we're bawling, okay? A little drink maybe, who knows? You know, a little two step. I'm going to do the two step. You know, screw it. But that's something that's never happened. That has never happened to me so far.

that I haven't been asked, but there hasn't been a situation where I was really like, oh my goodness, I can't do this because my routine is so locked in. Any time that there's been a, you know, something I've wanted to go to, I've gone to it. So now I think the issue becomes we're not listening to what we want. Because do we really want the midnight to 4 a.m. due, consume episode? Probably not. Probably not. We probably want to go to bed. It's just that shut off of that kind of like dirty oil. It's so difficult to get past. It is, man. I'll be the first to say it. It's been such a battle throughout my adolescence, throughout my, even my early adult life to set the boundary of like, I'm done. I'm done. I don't want to, I

don't want to do this right now. I don't want to do this. And instead, I think a big problem is, I don't think we fill our lives with enough time to kind of engage our minds in ways that aren't work, sleeping, and eating. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on

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And gooning. Okay. But it's kind of a sad truth. It's kind of a very sad truth. And it really scares me because there kind of isn't enough time. you really think about the way the adult world is set up, unless you work for yourself and you have your own schedule, my goodness, I mean, you are in an office from nine to five. Hopefully you don't commute much, but you probably do. You got to go work out. You got to go meal prep. You got to go eat.

How much time do you really have to spend with your loved ones or even with yourself? You don't get a lot of time with yourself. So it becomes this, this fly is really tough. Do, go away. It becomes this battle of like, do I spend time with myself? Well, no, if I'm too much time with myself, I'm a loser. But then do I spend time with other people? Yes, I spend time with other people.

But when I'm with other people, I feel like I'm actually alone, and I'd rather be doing something for myself. There is no common kind of like, all right, I can split this into two. And you know what it all comes down to? It's following what you want. It's following what you want. This is something that I think people for a long time when I was growing up, they were very much, at large, the world was against it.

Like when I would tell, you know, other old people in my, older people in my circle, I want to live a life where I'm not working in an office building. That'd be really nice. They were like, it's impossible. We've tried it. It's impossible. Good luck. but it's impossible.

I love that for you. This was before, I love that for you was a common thing that people would say as like a, you know, bless your heart,

basically. They would say, I hope it works out for you. And it did. It did. It worked out great. My parents were always pushing for it, though.

They were like, dude, if you can do anything to have control over your own time, that is the biggest level of freedom that you can have.

And they're right. They're right. You might think that having, you know, a job that makes you a lot of money, that is, oh my goodness, like you made it or you have, you have the dream, right? Like you have a bunch of capital. You're making a heck of, you know, a lot of money. You can buy, you know, a G-wagon or you can buy one else is like a rich person car. I don't know, like a, you can get a Porsche, Kyan and drive it to the office. office, oh, that's awesome. You can get Chipotle every day. You don't even think about it. It's like 120th of your income. But still, your time is spent working. It is entirely spent working. You don't

have control over that unless you really do have control over your schedule and you don't have certain deliverables at certain times. And the driving force for a lot of those people isn't their own. It's not, man, I love aerospace, so I made an aerospace company. Man, I love plants, so I have a plant business. It's, I love money, so I work as an engineer. I love money. So I work in consulting. And it's kind of this just pursuit of keeping yourself going and keeping the lifestyle

creep increasing. But at what point is that really that much more valuable if you can't experience anything? Because you don't have any time off, because you're, you know, you're becoming a doctor and you have to study for 40 hours, 80 hours a week. And I think that there's another side of this where there are people that like take it to a point of being kind of financially irresponsible and being like, Yolo. I have one life. I'm going to go get a camper van. I'm going to do van life. And then you're 29 living in your van. And you're kind of like, I think I'm a little bored of this. It'd be nice to have, you know, a girlfriend or something. And, you know, that's cool. You still experienced all those things. You have heck, a lot of dad lore

to set yourself up. But also the pursuit of that of this kind of like, I'm lost and I'm in my 20s. I'm going to go backpack across India. I'm going to go backpack across the United States and find myself. It reaches a point where you're like, okay, I don't want this anymore. I don't want this anymore. Give me something else. And that's why it's so important in my life.

It's become very important that the root of why you do things is because you actually want. It's a pursuit that actually feels like this is, I'm not just doing this to feel some kind of temporary happiness. I'm doing this for a bigger, a bigger cause for myself, for my younger self, for your parents, be careful with that. Because sometimes what you think your parents want isn't even what your parents want. They just want you to be happy and to sustain yourself. They don't need you to, I'm going to pay off my parents' house.

I'm going to get a Lamborghini. I'm going to get him Rolls-Royce. Dude, you need to survive, okay? That is, like, that is the first step. You can do all of those things. But this, like, toxic, like, repay your parents. You didn't even ask to be born. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't do nice things for your parents.

You absolutely should. You absolutely should do those things. But I was so susceptible to that whole brainwashing and the alpha male space of, like, you got to work extra hard. You got to find. some kind of business with AI because you want to, don't you want to buy your mom a house? Like, yeah, everyone wants to buy their mom a house.

But if I hate myself and I am destroying my life to buy my mom a house, would my mom want that? No, I don't think she would. I don't think she would care about the house. She'd be like, dude, you are, you are destroying yourself. And not all of us have the same parents. Some of our parents would be like, oh, yeah, dude, that's awesome. you know, thank you for buying the house, man. That's great. You know, it's, so it's kind of all over. But when you start to frame things in a, from a perspective of this is what I want, like, this is

what I want. I'm going after that. The sacrifices become a lot more clear. And I found that in my life, when I was focused on even something as small as, something as my girlfriend coming into town for a week. We are in a long-distance relationship. That would force me to shift into a gear where I was like, I want to make my house, I want to make my environment really clean, I want to make it look good, because I want her to be comfortable, but I want us to be comfortable. It matters for me, too. I have stake in it, and the way in which my space is clean is a direct representation of me, too. I'm not going to, you know, it's going to look nice. that would make me lock in and wake up early, get everything I needed, you know, from the grocery store, whatever snacks, whatever, get a bunch of cleaning supplies, deep clean, parts of the house that they weren't even going to go, like my girlfriend was never going to go in there. But I still did it because it mattered to me. And in those moments, I was way less susceptible to staying up late and doom binging the night before because,

I was like, I'm going after this thing. And that is just not going to help me. It's not something I can afford to do. But when you lose that and you do not give yourself, even something as small as like, I don't know, you want to start building

like real life gundums. You have some kind of hobby that you're like, I want to wake up early to work on this and listen to some music and build some gendums. I want to propagate plants. Like this stuff, these hobbies and these interests and things that come from you, from you internally, they are so important because they give you purpose.

They give you purpose. And when your purpose is greater than your self-sabotaging destructive habits, you will automatically do everything to serve the purpose and not fall to the sabotage. When your interests and your kind of, you know, wandering needs to just explore and do stuff fall below your self-sabotage and kind of dopamine, little dopamine hits, obviously you're going to go for what is easy, what will give you that instant hit right off the bat. When I learned this, one, it made me a lot more forgiving of all the times that I would. went off script. And this is another thing too. Like people, you know, will be like how to,

I got to do dopamine detox. I'm going to change my life overnight. Dude, no, you will not. I'm sorry. I'm going to just keep it real with you. You don't change your life overnight. You change your life incrementally over long periods of time. That's actually how you change your life. Okay. Yes, you can find some peptides. You can lock in and start doing, God knows what. and you'll look huge. Okay, sure. It's not sustainable. It's the same thing as like if you have the most productive day ever, you are really just like,

I did everything. I studied for six hours. And then I called, you know, my mom for an hour. And then I went to the gym and hit back and hit legs and hit chest. Like, it's a one-off. I'm sorry. It's a one-off. Prove me wrong.

Go ahead. But it is a one-off. Sustainability is built over one-off. long periods of time. Change is made over long periods of time. So you have to embrace that. And instead of looking at like, oh my goodness, the mountain is so, you know, tall to scale, you have to look at where is my next step on the, on the trail. Where is it? Where is the switchback going? Okay, I'm going this way. All right. This is a nice view. Okay, I got to go back that way. Yeah, that way. I used to trap on a Segway. Okay. By the way, these two plants beside me, sorry I haven't introduced them. It's like

not introducing the band that you're with, you know. This is our propagation. I'm liking how it's looking. This I'm going to let scab over for a day or two, and then I'm going to plop it in some water, and it should give me some roots in a little bit. And then this, talk about something that takes a long time. If you want your pineapple plant to fruit, It takes one to two years. But I'm in it for the long haul, baby. I only do long haul. I don't do these short-distance sprints.

I'm going long. So, you know what? I'm looking forward to the two years that's going to take. These right here, my beautiful aloe plants. I got them from a... Where did I get them from? Oh, I got them from this office space that was just giving them away.

and I was like, heck yeah, I'll take them. I don't know anything about aloe, but I'll take them. And I haven't watered them in about a month and a half. They were in real bad shape, and I had messed up. I'd put them in the sun because me, you know, I went on grok and I asked it, how do I grow this aloe plant? And he was like, Zerk, it needs a lot of sunlight and not a lot of water. Okay, so I put it in the Texas, the broiling Texas sun that is oppressive as heck,

and it just cooked them. have a little bit of sun damage. But I move them indoors. Now they're chilling. I'm going to give them a little water bath. I'm going to give them a little water in here just so they feel a little bit better and their roots can get some water. Important thing about aloes if you ever have them. They need really well draining soil because they are very susceptible to root rot. So if your soil doesn't drain, uh-oh, it's going to be a major uh-oh, because it's just going to rot the whole plant and then your plant is going to become mushy and it's going to die. That's what's going to happen. Oh, it's going to, I guess I can say that, right? It's plants. Um, as you can see, it's dripping.

Ah! Okay. So that's doing its thing. I'm going to put it on this chair because I think it can drip. Yeah, I can drip through it. Cool. I'm going to do the same thing with this guy. This, this one in dire straits, man. I mean, this doesn't even look like a plant. It looks like that sapling that was in Wally. But I checked it yesterday, and it has roots. It's rooting. One of the problems

was initially when I got it, I looked at it and I'm like, dude, this thing is not, it's not doing good at all. I wonder if it's going to survive. And it's rebounding, slowly but surely. And I think it's going to take a lot more time than this other one. This other one's pretty thickums.

But you know what? I love plants because they just take time and they are a great analogy for life. Everything takes time, man. And the stuff that you think is easy and is quick will take longer always. And the stuff that you make out in your brain to be super hard and super impossible usually is like a couple clicks away. It's an email away. It's a question away. We love to mix the two together. and I don't know, I've learned over time to not, not psych myself out with the apparent difficulty of something. Just like, screw it, like, let's do it, you know. So sleeping.

Let's talk about it. You need to go to sleep. You do. You need to make sure that you are well rested. It is very important for your health. Not only for your physical health, but also for your mental health. If you don't sleep, if you don't give your body enough. time on on on on, you know, away mode, it's going to corrupt your entire internal files.

And sleep is such an afterthought, especially in our generation. It's so funny. There's like two camps of people. There are people that do not, they just refuse to ever sleep on time. They're always staying up late. They're always finding some kind of way to, you know, make it past a couple hours past their bedtime. And then there are people that are so disciplined going to bed at 9. Well, that's awesome. My camera ran out of battery. Where was I going with all of this?

I was just going to wrap this up very quickly by saying that maybe the reason you struggle to stay consistent in the good habits that you want to build for yourself is because your purpose is not driven by you. You don't actually want whatever it is. You've convinced yourself you should want. Like a slice of this pineapple, right? Mmm. It's good, bro. So good.

And instead, you're following somebody else's orders. Someone on here, or maybe, I don't know, someone you idolize, someone that seems cool, has made you think that you need something that you really don't. and therefore this falling asleep at 6 p.m., 9 p.m. to wake up at 5 a.m. It's just not you. It's not something that's actually benefiting you for your goals and your aspirations. So just be careful. Be careful about that stuff. You can really get into this deep guilt hole of like, am I just not good enough? Is something just wrong with me? Or am I just not?

am I never going to be good enough for anything in this world? And the truth is, of course you're not going to be good enough. You suck. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Of course not. Of course not, dude. Yes.

The answer is yes. You are worthy to have a good bedtime that works for you. But you also need to be honest with what your lifestyle looks like. You also have to be honest with how are you structuring your life? Are you making enough of an effort to give yourself a reason to get up early? Something that really helped me started taking lessons on language lessons for Polish. And sometimes my tutor can meet only at 9 a.m. I am always awake for that.

I'll make sure that I go to bed early because I want to attend that lesson. There might be something similar for you. There might be some kind of class, some kind of activity, some kind of workout that you know if you had it in your your plans the day, you know, the next day, you would go out of your way to ensure that you are ready to go to bed because it follows your purpose. It follows something that makes you feel good. For me, learning Polish and keeping in tune with my Polish roots, it's a very fun thing. And I honestly get to relive a lot of my childhood as an adult as like someone who's now really deeply interested in all of this stuff instead of, you know, the kid that like, hate it.

going and doing Polish school every Saturday because it was just a waste of time and it really wasn't but I was just you know I wanted to play soccer and play FIFA and Minecraft so I get it I understand where I was coming from it's got to work for you it's got to work for you

you don't need to wake up at 5 a.m. to be productive you don't even need to go to bed at a super reasonable time you just got to feel like it's good for you, and you will know that. For example, today I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm feeling the repercussions of staying up late. I am. And it's kind of making me be like, okay, let me plan the rest of my day, so I tire myself out, so I, I just physically cannot stay up that late.

Another thing is you might feel like you are wasting so much time throughout the day that now at night, you don't want the day to end because of how much you've wasted it. Stop it. It's such a bad way of thinking about time and thinking about your life. So what you wasted a day. So what you've wasted a little bit of time. You have the rest of your life to live. So learn something from it because for a lot of us, we make mistakes and then we just act like they never happen. Nothing to see here. There's plenty of stuff to see here. But nobody is going to change these things for you. You have to kind of take the ownership and be like, all right, I'm done. I'm done staying up super late. Why am I staying up super late? I don't feel fulfilled. I don't feel fulfilled

throughout the day. And so I am finding an escape. I'm escaping. You might have the inverse problem where you're sleeping too much because you're escaping reality because your reality you feel like sucks. You feel like you're a loser. You're a chud, whatever. Stop. that's not going to help you. Sleeping more and just kind of pushing the problem to another day, it's not going to help you. Again, what do you want? What do you want? It needs to be the question.

It needs to be the answer. What do you want? That's where you go. Anyways, I am going to keep you guys updated on how this goes. I don't know how Project Pineapple is going to work out, but dude, these aloes are chilling. They're looking good. switch them around so there's a little bit of difference here this one's a little bit kind of like slanted which is interesting i have to kind of pack the soil around it not too much again

aloe need drainable soil they don't like uh you don't like that root rot so do the things that bring you joy if you're trying something new just know that i believe in you and zirky show i'm sending you lots of love from the garden of zirc here in austin texas It's been nice, man. I really love sharing these kind of videos with you guys. The propagations are going great. If you haven't seen the other video, you should definitely check it out. We kind of propagated a whole pathos vine.

It was very nice. And as always, Zerky Show, I'm sending you all. Lots of love and peace.