How to Spend the Night?

There are two hurdles to get through in a PhD. The first is the research itself. Now that agents have become genuinely useful, writing and coding no longer eat up time the way they used to, which makes research taste an ever more valuable quality. Sometimes you approach a problem from the wrong angle or wander into a dead end, and weeks pass with no progress. The anxiety builds up and the long nights become sleepless.

So how do you spend those nights? I think building a good habit helps: constantly reading and distilling ideas from other papers, especially well-regarded ones from the community. As a very junior PhD student I can't offer a step-by-step playbook, only personal experience. I collect paper lists by keyword from recent conferences, then spend one or two days filtering 20–30 papers down to about 5 that I find elegant, and read those carefully. When I first did this in 2025, each round of filtering took 3–4 days; now it's roughly 1–2, a ~50% speedup.

The second hurdle is loneliness. When I visited Berkeley in 2024, there was a gap of over a month between the end of the semester and my summer research, so after classes ended I got up early every day, went to a distant library, and studied until late at night, maintaining zero social contact for a full month. That's only a trivial example. Much of a PhD student's loneliness comes from prolonged low social energy and the helplessness of handling everything alone. Every now and then you see posts from PhD students looking for a partner. Part of it is a hollow, lonely heart desperate for another soul to lean on and confide in; part of it is simply wanting the energy that comes from no longer being alone in daily life.

I'm a pretty optimistic ISTJ and manage negative emotions fairly well, yet some nights are still hard to get through. To ease the loneliness, I'd recommend two things for now. First, go for a walk and listen to some relaxing jazz. I follow a lot of jazz playlists that I originally used as background music while working, but I was surprised to find they're remarkably effective at easing anxiety and loneliness. Second, watch a movie, a TV series, or anime. Yesterday was Saturday. I noticed everyone around me had social plans, and that put me in a terrible mood. To cope, I rewatched the entire Attack on Titan series in one evening and felt much better by bedtime. Today there was still some lingering emotion, so I reviewed my favorite anime, Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness. I was still moved, and it struck me that I should write down this nice way of letting feelings settle.

Night is beautiful, and night is lonely. Night belongs to everyone, yet it belongs only to you. Perhaps most adults have to slowly learn how to spend the long hours after dark.