Not sure how seasoned I am, but I reject any comparison to a cooking utensil!

I do find myself running into lifetime and borrow-checker issues much less these days when writing larger programs in rust. And while your comment is a bit cheeky, I think it gets at something real.

One of the implicit design mentalities that develops once you write rust for a while is a good understanding of where to apply the `UnsafeCell`-related types, which includes `Arc` but also `Rc` and `RefCell` and `Cell`. These all relate to inner mutability, and there are many situations where plopping in the right one of these effectively resolves some design requirement.

The other idiomatic thing that happens is that you implicitly begin structuring your abstract data layouts in terms of thunks of raw structured data and connections between them. This usually involves an indirection - i.e. you index into an array of things instead of holding a pointer to the thing.

Lastly, where lifetimes do get involved, you tend to have a prior idea of what thing they annotate. The example in the article is a good case study of that. The author is parsing a `.notes` file and building some index of it. The text of the `.notes` file is the obvious lifetime anchor here.

You would write your indexing logic with one lifetime 'src: `fn build_index<'src>(src: &'src str)`

Internally to the indexing code, references to 'src-annotated things can generally pass around freely as their lifetime converges after it.

Externally to the indexing code you'd build a string of the notes text, and passing a reference to that to the `build_index` function.

For simple CLI programs, you tend not to really need anything more than this.

It gets more hairy if you're looking at constructing complex object graphs with complex intermediate state, partial construction of sub-states, etc. Keeping track of state that's valid at some level, while temporarily broken at another level, is where it gets really annoying with multiple nested lifetimes and careful annotation required.

But it was definitely a bit of a hair-pulling journey to get to my state of quasi-peace with Rust's borrow checker.