– Some cows in the fields.

My brain is not the same as it was a few years ago. When I started working as a Software Engineer, everything was novel and mentally demanding. I notably remember how during my first professional months I’d come back home and just go straight to bed due to the mental exhaustion of learning so much stuff and trying to solve software engineering problems that were mostly alien to me at that point in my career.

But now, I’m on the opposite end. Nothing is that novel anymore, and solving day to day problems, more than requiring mental exhaustion, mostly require spending some time at them. Add to that the usage of AI. While I know I’m way more productive than during those first months, my thoughts are getting slower, less profound, lazier.

Plus, dopamine is available at just a tap on my phone. There’s a ton of content in shorts that interest me and require little to no investment on my end, both time and effort-wise. Add to that videogames, comics/manga, TV shows, etc, and I literally just can’t get bored anymore.

One key metric for me is the amount of books I (don’t) read. Before I entered university, I used to devour books before going to sleep. Then, during university I was reading 1200+ pages per week for my History undergrad courses. When I started programming as a hobby I added online documentation, and Computer Science/Software Engineering books to the mix. But then, when I started my first job as a Software Engineer I was way too tired for reading. I spent a hefty amount of time reading during my dayjob, but it was mostly documentation.

About 8 years have passed, and I’m afraid I haven’t read that much since then. I still love reading, but as I mentioned, there’s an overabundance of distractions that I’ve fallen into that aren’t that compatible with books, specially doomscrolling before sleeping.

Over the last year I’ve tried to introduce new habits to avoid brainrot and keep my brain sharper: handwriting (both for pleasure and planning), making sideprojects, and writing in this blog. And while I’ve found some improvement, I still find my thinking and learning skills far away from what they were 8 years ago.

So for these vacations I wanted something different for my brain. We spent them visiting family in the country-side and celebrating my wife’s birthday on one weekend and my mother-in-law’s birthday the next one. This was the perfect opportunity to slow down and double down on new habits I wanted to grow.

These were slow vacations. I spent a lot of time in nature with my dog (I even saw a bunch of horses fighting vultures that were trying to eat the placenta of a newly born foal), socializing with family while drinking mate, and playing board games, football, and roblox (yes, roblox) with my nephews.

For this vacation I took two books with me: Mary Beard’s SPQR to reminisce on my time during university, and Francisco Claro’s “De Newton a Einstein y algo más” to scratch my itch about knowing a bit more about physics. Both heavily recommended.

I had so much fun reading them that I finished them during the first of my two weeks there, so I had to buy new books: a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories, and Atomic Habits. Those were much faster to read for me so I finished them early on the second week. Surprisingly for me during that week I also found a new hobby that I wasn’t expecting to be so keen on.

I had so much fun reading the mathematical proofs and explanations in “De Newton a Einstein y algo más” that I was left wanting more (or “algo más”). So I started going through Stewart’s Calculus: Early Trascendentals. I noticed my algebra and trigonometry was quite lacking, so I went through the books appendix on trigonometry, and their site’s resources on algebra.

Going through a maths textbook on my laptop or phone was a subpar experience, so I researched other web-native alternatives and landed on Paul’s Notes and Active Calculus. And to scratch my itch on physics I’m going through a textbook called University Physics. So far I haven’t found a web-native alternative but so far so good.

I spent the rest of my vacations working on my pre-calculus knowledge and doing maths/physics exercises.

For me this feels when I started programming as a hobby. Just learning for the sake of learning and having fun in the process. I have to admit that the remote possibility of being able to find a job in software engineering was also a motivation for learning programming, so this time it’s also different. I’m not sure how this could affect my career, specially with AI, everything career-related in Software Engineering and Data Engineering is way fuzzier than it used to be 8 years ago. So I feel like I cannot plan much ahead.

For now my goal is to some day being able to fully understand advanced physics concepts, and even be able to read new papers on some field I’d discover on this physics hobby.

I don’t know. But I’m having fun and I’ve noticed I’m less intellectually lazy during my day-to-day activities.