"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology."
—— Edward O. Wilson

To force myself to sleep early, I resort to every conceivable extreme. An anti-human scheduled internet-kill script significantly increases the friction of staying up late. Yet, there is one trigger for all-nighters that I simply cannot evade: web fiction.

Obviously, web novels can be pre-loaded, bringing a sense of anticipation; as long as the kill script has a temporary bypass—which it must—I can temporarily allow access, load a few chapters, and repeat the cycle endlessly. When I'm at the edge of my seat and the internet cuts off, I just type a string of gibberish and text to temporarily unblock it. Web novels aren't social media; the internet-kill script is indeed excellent, but its efficacy hits a wall under such "extreme operating conditions."

As for ADGuard Home, its original intent was ad-filtering, doubling as a safeguard to keep brats from watching porn. Expecting it to stop me from reading novels is asking too much. No, actually, it worked for the first few months, relying on sheer willpower to not open the admin page and disable it. But its design is user-friendly to a fault—temporarily disabling the filter for a set duration is incredibly convenient; it takes just two clicks. So, once the Pandora's box is opened, this loophole will be exploited indefinitely. It lacks the complex mechanisms of my kill script, let alone any anti-addiction functionality. Plus, the source code is in Go; hacking, recompiling, testing, and debugging it would cost me too much hair, and it would only treat the symptoms, not the disease.

Treating the disease... So, how exactly is my attention hijacked? Web novels hook readers through "gratification points" (shuangdian) and "resonance"—in other words, "emotional value." Web fiction is not a mere essay; relying solely on prose is futile. It is a precision-engineered project, or rather, an industrialized formula.

The distribution of gratification points requires extreme density, and anticipation must be cranked to the maximum. Books establish clear short-term goals, like winning a tournament, and long-term goals, like amassing wealth, taking revenge, or ascending to godhood. The cyclical achievement of short-term goals gives readers sustained dopamine hits and the drive to keep reading, while long-term goals anchor character development. The overall pacing is fast, typically adhering to a rhythm of a minor climax every three chapters and a major climax every ten. Authors are obsessed with balancing suspense ("edging") and climax. In recent years, the trend leans toward brief tension-building followed by massive climaxes, trading perfectly calibrated frustration for intense stimulation upon release. Every chapter dispenses a specific dosage of information to avoid tedious exposition. Every chapter ends with a suspenseful hook, mastering the art of the cliffhanger.

Character designs prioritize being vivid yet flat, lowering the reader's cognitive load and facilitating self-insertion, while also making it easier for the author to manage. The protagonist and key supporting characters are assigned highly stereotyped traits: terrified of death, handsome, Machiavellian (fuhei), or obtusely straight. Conflicts and resolutions among these traits are permitted—like usually being terrified of death but risking everything for a loved one—but only in moderation. Protagonists are allowed minor flaws, but absolute taboos include being a bleeding-heart "Holy Mother," showing weakness, or being cuckolded, unless used as a brief setup for a satisfying comeback.

The outline dictates the storyline, the leveling system, map transitions, and romantic subplots, preventing late-stage collapse, and unfolds like peeling an onion as the plot progresses. "Cheat codes" (Golden Fingers) are standard equipment, whether it's a System, the information asymmetry born from reincarnation, an ancient ghost in a ring, or extraordinary talents for manipulation (Green Tea), drawing aggro, or absolute rationality. The ultimate purpose of all these tropes is purely to weave a beautiful dream for the reader.

The demands of audiences across different genres are strictly compartmentalized. Fantasy and Xianxia thrive on power systems and grand outlines; Urban fiction competes on gratification points and pacing; Romance focuses on character dynamics and emotional tugs-of-war; Suspense is driven by logic; Historical and Military rely on world-building; Light Novels sell tropes and vibes...

Evidently, with countless web novel authors accumulating experience through trial and error, a clear blueprint for manipulating readers has long been established. The breakout hits in this hyper-competitive arena are mostly masterclasses in these principles. Even third-rate authors writing barely passable prose can hijack a reader's attention. This has always been a war for attention.

Aside from emotional value, web fiction holds very little intrinsic worth. Only a minuscule fraction of authors—to be exact, I've only ever found one—share an outline, characterization, values, and thought process similar to mine, making it feel like encountering a kindred spirit. This requires the author to possess life experience and philosophical depth far exceeding my own, translate it losslessly into text, and even "dumb it down" for readers who refuse to think. The difficulty is unimaginable. Such books can occasionally spark inspiration or provoke thought; as for the rest, they leave behind zero value once consumed.

Even though I know these formulas and recognize their lack of value, it doesn't stop me from clicking the "Next Chapter" button, day and night. Perhaps it's because I've always had an abnormal obsession with reading text—I even enjoy reading manuals and Wikipedia... In short, the prefrontal cortex is no match for the endocrine system; free will is unreliable.

As the ancients said, it is better to channel the flood than to dam it. In previous instances, I would just read the entire book until the anticipation was gone, and the obsession would temporarily subside. Only after a long time, out of sheer boredom, would I look for the next book. But once I start, barring special circumstances, I will read it to the end. Special circumstances include loathing the author's values or the author simply being too stupid. I rarely even drop a book because of a collapsed pacing or atrocious writing. I am practically incurable.

The "ancients" also said: what you cannot obtain, you must destroy. In my view, what you cannot control, you must also destroy. A while ago, I saw someone boasting about "borrowing the computing power of AI to steal the wisdom of heaven, consuming one book and one paper a day." I ruthlessly mocked them in my mind: this is, of course, destroying books. For non-niche books, the raw knowledge within is worthless; the true value of reading lies in utilizing neuroplasticity to shape thought patterns and intuition through active contemplation. But destroying books? Destroying books! That’s where my inspiration struck. Web novels contain no knowledge and require no thinking, but they hook readers by providing emotional value. Their addictiveness is built on information asymmetry and the anticipation of the unknown. The best way to destroy a web novel is through forced spoilers—draining it of its emotional moisture and reducing it to a shriveled skeleton of tropes. I just need to use RAG tools to obliterate its emotional value, and then trample on the remains.

Vector retrieval is even more effective than I imagined. Millions of words of web fiction are enough to clog a standard LLM's 1M context window, rendering it incapable of thinking. But in NotebookLM, this is a non-issue. "As a senior web fiction editor, please read the entire text and compile the core elements of this novel, including its tropes, outline, main characters, and world-building." "Drawing on the detailed contents of the book, extract all the punchlines, plot twists, and hilarious moments, summarizing each in a single paragraph." The book is thus digested. Millions of words are condensed into a few thousand. Dry summaries like "The protagonist discovers the villain is actually his biological father, and promptly stabs him to death with a sword" give me a fleeting jolt of satisfaction, followed instantly by a state of absolute nihilism. Satisfied, I turn off the lights and go to sleep. At least for a while, I lose all interest in web novels, and even if I stumble upon a new one, I can just destroy it.

Reading web fiction is about dreaming, and AI is a dream crusher. But why do I need to dream? The value of web fiction rests on information asymmetry; by erasing this asymmetry, AI eradicates the addiction. Often, what I crave is not the outcome, but the emotional rollercoaster of the process. AI strips away the process and delivers the outcome directly. Perhaps, "acquiring information" has become cheap; what is truly expensive is "experience"; of course, the difficulty of acquiring versus stripping away an "experience" is profoundly asymmetrical.

Traditional wisdom always tells us to use delayed gratification to combat the instant gratification of web fiction. The way AI strips away the process and hands over the result, thereby creating nihilism, conversely proves that the human brain does not need delayed gratification. Dopamine doesn't even care about gratification itself; it only cares about the chase. Foregoing immediate rewards for the sake of future gains—but the question is, can staring at a mirage of plums truly quench your thirst? The correlation between setting a goal of scoring a 7.0 on the IELTS and the daily grind of memorizing vocabulary and reading news is simply too weak. It's nothing more than self-deception, a pseudo-effort meant to console oneself. Delayed gratification has always been a highly anti-human and hypocritical concept. Human brain circuitry evolved during the hunter-gatherer era; our dopamine receptors only recognize the wild berries, prey, and mating opportunities right in front of us. They cannot begin to comprehend highly abstract and lagging modern social constructs like "an IELTS score of 7.0" or "a promotion in three months."

In the tug-of-war between the prefrontal cortex and the dopamine desire circuitry, without forced interventions, the former will only occasionally gain the upper hand, but the latter will always win the war. This is exactly why my internet-kill script succeeds: written and deployed during moments of sober rationality, the triggered disconnection buys me temporary lucidity in the dead of night, while the complex logic required to bypass it increases the friction of staying up late.

Relying solely on willpower to battle the endocrine system yields minimal chances of victory; even a Pyrrhic victory might exact a toll like depression. Willpower can only ever be brief and explosive. Its true function is to dismantle delayed gratification into instant gratification, establishing a long-term goal and breaking it down into short-term objectives, thereby exploiting the dopamine control circuitry to accomplish tasks and reap hormones like endorphins. The rhythm of web novels—a minor climax every three chapters and a major one every ten—serves as a perfect paradigm for this. Given the high energy consumption of the prefrontal cortex, using willpower to fight or even replace dopamine is neurobiologically impossible.

I only need to leave myself an out during those fleeting moments when willpower has the upper hand, and that is enough. What keeps me going requires high ROI, a smooth learning curve, and near-instant feedback—at least two of the three. For example, using RSS combined with translation plugins to consume high-quality sources like news. If I can't have all three, I artificially inflate my sunk costs. Like buying a Kindle just to read, or buying an 8BitDo controller just to use Anki. Cranking up the investment to a point where it physically hurts my wallet remains effective—at least until I truly learn to exclude sunk costs from my decision-making; and even if I do learn that, by then I will have reaped enough benefits to gladly keep going.

Inherently, willpower plays a cat-and-mouse game, trying to deceive oneself to wrest bodily control away from the endocrine system. But deceiving oneself is easier said than done. The smarter you are, the better you are at lying, yet the harder it is to be lied to—it's simply a paradox of the unstoppable spear and the immovable shield. I certainly believe that both kill scripts and AI book-destroyers are effective, but how to react swiftly and mitigate losses when faced with a new kind of temptation is a much deeper and thornier problem. Naturally, I remain endlessly fascinated by how to coax and cajole myself. After all, treating yourself like your own puppy, playing the role of both "Sugar" and "Daddy," lets you experience two kinds of fun at once, right?