After an 18-Year-Old's Sudden Death, His Family Renamed His Account 'Sleep Earlier'
An 18-year-old in Liaoning died in his sleep after weeks of gaming deep into the night; his twin, who found him at the end of a night shift, quit night work and warned others. The family renamed his account '早些睡' — sleep earlier — and the country's argument about late nights began again.
At three or four in the morning on September 3, an 18-year-old in Haicheng, Liaoning province, came home from his night shift and found his identical twin brother dead in the bed they shared. The elder twin had left his job as a restaurant server a month earlier and spent his days at home — chatting, watching videos, gaming until he nodded off, sleeping until mid-afternoon. On September 8, the surviving brother, speaking to Jimu News, described the moment in a mourning video that has since circulated widely: "Bro, come back, won't you? I can't be without you." (哥，你回来行不行，我不能没有你) He has since quit his own night-shift job.
It was what happened to the dead youth's social account that carried the story onto Weibo's trending list. When the family went through it, they renamed the account with three characters: 早些睡 — "sleep earlier." The renamed profile, sitting under the videos its owner had posted in life, struck readers as a message left behind on purpose. "These three simple characters are not an internet meme," as one commentary post put it; they are the boy's last reminder — aimed, many admitted, squarely at themselves.
The detail that made the story national rather than private is how ordinary the circumstances were. This was not an overworked programmer collapsing at his desk, the figure that usually haunts Chinese discussions of 猝死 — death from sudden cardiac arrest. He was eighteen and, by the standards of the country's overtime debates, barely working at all: unemployed, scrolling and gaming through the night, day and night inverted. The medical posts that gathered under the hashtag pushed back on fatalism — one widely shared explainer stressed that a single late night rarely kills, but that chronic sleep debt stacked on underlying conditions, overwork or intense exercise can. Alongside them circulated a shakier genre: a "stay-up-late self-rescue guide" recommending electrolyte water, Coenzyme Q10 supplements and smartwatch heart-rate alarms — the pharmacy-counter equivalent of drinking while thinking about the driver's license you will need later.
China argues about sleep constantly, and the argument has names. There is 报复性熬夜 — "revenge bedtime procrastination" — the practice of reclaiming hours at 1 a.m. from days otherwise owned by work and commutes. There is the night-shift service economy that employs people like the surviving brother, whose 3 a.m. commute home is unremarkable. What this story added was a third figure: the young person with no job and no alarm, staying up for nothing in particular. If even that counts as the dangerous kind of night, the boundary of the country's sleep anxiety has moved.
The family's tribute has already done what such tributes rarely do: changed at least one visible behavior. The surviving twin, who found his brother at the end of a night shift, has quit night work himself. "Don't make staying up late a habit," he told the reporter — a request that has now been read millions of times.