How to Quiet a Vampire… Phone
On a school night at 2:13 a.m., the rectangular glow on a teenager’s face looks a little like faith and a little like interrogation. Their thumb performs its nocturnal liturgy—scroll, tap, scroll, watch—as if some unseen officer were “waiting for a confession,” the only act that matters, the rest—breathing, thinking, sleeping—“peripheral.” In How to Quiet a Vampire, Borislav Pekić gives the interrogation-room its chilling operating manual: keep the captive focused on one outcome; permit “purposeless” distractions that repel thought; above all, control the air. Gen-Z does not live in cells, but the feeling is uncomfortably familiar. In a decade when adolescence moved indoors and online, the primary function became engagement; the algorithm’s question (“confess your attention”) never stops.
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| Jean-Baptiste Santerre’s “Girl Reading a Letter by Candlelight” (c. 1700): A solitary glow, a stolen night — from secret correspondence to the endless scroll, the posture of distraction has scarcely changed. |
Pekić’s SS Standartenführer Steinbrecher warns interrogators to remove everything that might create an uncontrolled process: a spider to watch, an ant trail to follow, a glinting shard to think with. Better to issue a ball of twine—something repetitive, self-canceling—than to risk the prisoner discovering a life that exceeds the script. Translate this to the bedroom ecosystem circa 2025: the infinite scroll is our ball of twine, the push notification our industrious ant. And sleep—the body’s sovereign process, not easily brought to heel—becomes the stray fly that can ruin the plan. If you are trying to break a mind, steal the night first.
We don’t need metaphors to see the cost. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that a clear majority of U.S. high-school students fail to reach the recommended eight hours on school nights. Insufficient sleep is the norm, not the exception. The agency’s youth surveys, refreshed in 2024, show short sleep as a persistent and widespread pattern across age, sex, and geography.
Sleep sits at the hinge where attention economies meet adolescent mental health. A growing body of research finds that heavier social-media and screen use correlate with shorter sleep duration, delayed bedtimes, and poorer sleep quality—and that sleep, in turn, mediates part of the association with anxiety and depression. The details are nuanced (causation is hard; vulnerability varies), but the broad outline is now consistent across systematic reviews and longitudinal models from the past few years.
Meanwhile, physiology supplies the old-fashioned mechanism. Evening smartphone use suppresses melatonin and shifts circadian timing; adolescents recover faster than adults if the device goes dark, but the hour lost to “just one more” video is still an hour lost. Consensus statements and experimental studies alike converge on the same bedtime advice our grandmothers gave—screens off before lights out—but with better diagrams of the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Zoom out to the public-health view and you hear an even plainer alarm bell. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on youth, social media, and mental health—updated in 2025—says what parents already suspect: safety is unproven; risk is credible; sleep and body image are among the most immediate harms; and we should act accordingly. The advisory doesn’t claim a single villain; it calls for guardrails and transparency in a landscape where almost all teens are online almost all the time.
But an advisory cannot explain the strange shame of two a.m.—that sour feeling of having bargained with your better self and lost. For that, Pekić is unexpectedly perfect. In a 1979 conversation, he insists that art’s job is not to deliver solutions but to examine premises; he distrusts “small compromises,” not because they are quaint, but because they scale. His narrators invite us to identify with their distortions precisely so we can notice the moment our own souls tilt toward convenience. The trap is built from increments: an hour ceded here, a principle softened there, a vampire of the past you decline to face until it climbs into bed with you.
Put differently: the interrogation room is not a place. It is a protocol.
If you’re sixteen today, you did not choose to grow up in a building where every hallway leads to a feed, and every feed auto-plays. Grown-ups like to frame your predicament as a failure of will. (Why not “just stop scrolling”?) But willpower has always been a brittle instrument against engineered environments. The more honest analogy is urban planning: we widened the attentional highways, removed the stop signs, abolished night. What did we think would happen?
Pekić’s interrogator knew the value of “purposeless” toys because purposelessness is the psychological dead end where effort goes to die. Fidget the twine, peel the label, tap the screen—the action exhausts the urge to act. Many of the most addictive micro-behaviors online share this quality of quasi-doing: your thumb moves; nothing advances. The feed returns you to yourself slightly depleted. (Anyone who has ever refreshed an app like a lab rat hitting a lever already knows this.) What makes it sinister is that purposelessness is not neutral. It interrupts the slow, intransitive processes—boredom, mind-wandering, sleep—by which the brain consolidates memory and repairs mood.
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| Pieter Bruegel’s “The Triumph of Death” (c. 1562): A vision of distraction and attrition, where countless small forces undo the living — much like the algorithmic siege of attention today. |
Consider how this plays out across a semester. Adolescents who spend more time on social platforms report more social comparison and greater mood reactivity to feedback; in groups already struggling with internalizing symptoms, these effects are amplified. On average, more time online predicts more time awake and poorer sleep; poorer sleep predicts next-week irritability, anhedonia, and attentional slips; those symptoms make online worlds more attractive still. The spiral isn’t destiny, but it’s a spiral.
Does reducing screen use matter? A randomized reduction of screen media in children and early adolescents recently showed measurable improvements in internalizing symptoms and prosocial behavior—the kind of effects any teacher would recognize from a week at summer camp. The dose–response isn’t tidy, but it’s not invisible. Sleep sits right in the middle of these gains like a silent attorney, arguing that the body’s nightly “exchange of matter”—to borrow Steinbrecher’s phrase—remains our best defense against the day’s interrogation.
When I asked a high-school senior in Belgrade what late-night scrolling felt like, she didn’t mention FOMO or doom. She said: “It’s like tapping on aquarium glass—nothing inside hears you, but you keep tapping anyway.” That image belongs in a Pekić novel. So does the counterimage: walking the dog at 10 p.m. because the dog is a small, insistent democracy; reading three paper pages so the book can refuse to ping you; setting the phone to charge in the corridor because corridors were invented for thresholds. In the novel, Steinbrecher feared spiders and ants because they introduced processes beyond his control. For adolescents, those spiders and ants are the off-screen rituals that puncture a platform’s totalizing loop: a sibling who wants to talk, a parent who wants to listen, a bath that turns your skin back into something you live in.
It is worth pausing on Pekić’s core moral insight, easy to misunderstand and easier to forget: the road to totalizing control is paved with half-justified exceptions. “Mali kompromisi”—the small compromises—are not a prelude to catastrophe; they are the method. Replace “collaboration” with “auto-play,” “party loyalty” with “streak,” and you begin to see why the ordinary texture of youth—homework, friendship, a fragile sense of self—now feels like something forever at the mercy of a design you did not choose. Pekić refuses to absolve anyone, but he also refuses spectacle. His gambit is to let you identify with the compromised narrator until you feel the flypaper on your own fingers—and then make a different move.
Different how?
One answer is biological and boring: oxygenate. If platforms “take the air” by extending wakefulness past the circadian window, then families, schools, and cities can give it back. Teens sleep better when screens leave the bedroom before bedtime; when evening light is dim and warm; when morning light is real and cool; when bus timetables and school bells respect adolescent chronotypes; when coaches treat sleep like training. None of this is glamorous, all of it is effective, and the evidence—while still maturing—points in one direction.
Another answer is civic. In 2024, the Surgeon General floated the idea of warning labels for social-media platforms—less as a cure than as a cultural cue, a way to mark the river as swift. Whatever you think of labels, the advisory’s baseline is hard to argue with: we should not treat an untested, irresistible system as if it were a neutral environment for childhood. Place more friction where friction protects sleep. Demand data access for independent researchers. Build platforms that default to off after midnight for minors unless a guardian says otherwise. This is not prohibition; it’s plumbing.
A third answer is literary, which is to say human. Pekić’s term vampire names the past you try to disown until it returns. For Gen-Z, the vampire is not a private sin but a social design we have all half-accepted: a school night that behaves like a casino afternoon. The only way to “upokojiti”—to lay it to rest—is the way Pekić prescribes: either deny life (the melodramatic route) or accept the past fully and then act differently with eyes open. Acceptance here is not capitulation (“that’s just the internet”); it’s the precondition for revolt. Own the fact that we built the lights that never turn off; then invent the dark again.
There is an image in Pekić that stays with me: the interrogator terrified of a ladybug. Something small, self-propelled, alive. In a teenager’s room, that ladybug might be a metronome on the desk, a paper calendar with blackout tape across the hours after eleven, a parent who knocks before midnight and after breakfast. It might be a school that assigns reading on paper two nights a week, making silence into policy. It might be a friend who texts, at 1:00 a.m., “goodnight, vampire” as if invoking an old ritual, which it is.
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| Caravaggio’s “St. Jerome Writing” (c. 1606): A meditation on vigilance, compromise, and mortality — reminding us that even reason must rest before the vampire is laid to sleep. |
If the past decade taught us anything, it is that sleep is not simply “recovery.” It is governance—the nightly re-articulation of sovereignty over a mind porous to the day’s demands. In the interrogation room of the attention economy, sleep is the prisoner’s lawyer, sometimes the only one who shows up. And like all good lawyers, it works best when hired in advance.
Near the end of How to Quiet a Vampire, the problem is not that the monster is strong; it’s that the living keep pretending they are immune. The cure—if a novel ever grants one—is a kind of moral wakefulness, a habit of catching yourself at the hinge where a compromise begins. That, too, is a form of sleep hygiene: noticing when your soul is about to talk itself out of rest.
We owe Gen-Z more than sermons about grit. We owe them air.
Sources & further reading
CDC, Sleep Facts and Stats and High School Students: Sleep Facts & Stats (updated May 15, 2024).
Ahmed, O., et al. “Social media use, mental health and sleep: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Sleep Medicine Reviews (2024).
Chen, Y., et al. “Screen time (daytime and after lights out) predicts poorer sleep quality in adolescents.” Sleep Medicine (2024).
Bérard, M., et al. “Sleep mediates the association between social media use and adolescent mental health.” Sleep Medicine (2023).
Hartstein, L. E., et al. “The impact of screen use on sleep health across the lifespan: consensus.” Sleep Health(2024).
Höhn, C., et al. “Effects of evening smartphone use on sleep and melatonin.” (2024).
Schmidt-Persson, J., et al. “Screen media reduction and child mental health.” JAMA Network Open (2024).
U.S. Surgeon General Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health (2025 update; 2023 overview).
Pekić, Borislav. Interview with Radoslav Bratić, 1979. (On form, “small compromises,” and art’s moral posture.)
A prisoner exists exclusively for the purpose of signing a confession. All his other functions are peripheral and may be disregarded as long as ignoring them doesn’t hinder the realization of the primary function. (…)One may deviate from the rule that a prisoner may not dispose of a single object that might distract his attention from the confession if and only if a purposeless item is placed at his disposal, which quickly loses its ability to distract his attention with some pointlessly repetitive activity. A ball of twine, a sharp nail, or a shard of colored glass from a bier bottle all have inestimable value for a prisoner. Not to mention social games like cards, dominoes and chess. Animals and insects are especially dangerous to us.Gentlemen, the hunting pursuits of spiders can keep your interrogation transcript at a standstill for weeks. Industrious bands of black ants will discredit your investigative reputation more thoroughly than a prisoner’s mental stability, strength in his convictions, or any possible hypalgesia. Nothing is more fatal for an investigation than some process that is not under its complete control.As we’ve seen process involving the exchange of matter – inspiration and expirations, temperature maintenance and digestion, and even thought – can to a certain extent be considered permissible only if we control them. By depriving a prisoner of oxygen (from the removal of windows and ventilation to a forcible prevention of his respiration – we’ll leave the details to Hauptsturmführer Rotkopf), gentlemen, you’ll make a powerful contribution to the disorganization of the suspect’s defense. He simply won’t be able to come up with intelligent answers. He won’t have enough air.Or let’s take digestion; the exchange of matter involved are completely in our hands. However, gentlemen, a stray fly, a ladybug, anything that crawls and lives in the detention cell without our permission, any of those things undermine a well-planned investigation better than a well-planned defense. In this sense, any bug is more dangerous than the inductive abilities of some professor of classical philology.
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