I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.

Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.

That must be a horrible thing.

One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.

In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.

Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.

We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.

But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.

We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.

I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.

I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.

A number of years ago I had a period of my life where I decided to shut my laptop for a while.

I was working as a line cook and trying to find time and energy to code study so I could land a role in software (no degree). I was really struggling with my mental health and was having issues making or maintaining progress in pretty much any area of my life.

I got a new job, cooking breakfast in a small mountain town at a bakery. Before I left I sold my laptop and borrowed a bunch of books from some friends.

I really did feel much better a few months later. Taking the time to decompress allowed me to get my priorities in order and surface some biases / blind spots I had. I ended up re-enrolling in school the next spring and am now happily employed in software.

I don’t think the modality is particularly important - coding vs reading vs anything else - but taking the time to put your goals away for a little while and decompress can make you more effective in actually reaching them

I spend a big chunk of my summers in nowhere cow-ville France (la Creuse). No Michelin star restaurants, no art galleries, no shopping worth note. Just landscapes, hiking, lakes and slower life. BUT what surprises me most is how often I describe this to people, even the French, and they’re like “why / pourquoi ?!” Is it not obvious? There’s a reason people say they need a vacation after their vacation. I think it’s that people are expecting too much of their vacations.

This is the first time I see webmention used anywhere. Idea seems to be good, but it is not used for some reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention

Last year I took my parents' caravan and put it in bumfuck retirement home nowhere, spent a week just riding my motorcycle through that section of the country, reading, listening to music, and painting Warhammer figurines. Little human contact. It was boring and unstimulating, but also almost the opposite of my usual daily grind.

> Nothing is that novel anymore, and solving day to day problems, more than requiring mental exhaustion, mostly require spending some time at them.

You're the largest fish in your bowl, time to move to a larger bowl. It's OK to be comfortable but if you're unhappy there's always another level to aim for.

Yes. This is my favorite way to vacation, and I'm glad someone has found a better name for it. I do not enjoy simply sitting around idle and occasionally going on a trip, I end my time off feeling drained and need a vacation from my vacation. One year, I had an itch to try my hand at Godot and game programming, and I saved it for my next vacation. I'd never felt more relaxed after a vacation, it's the same as what the author describes: I like being intellectually stimulated, I just needed a break from work, not from trying new things.

This article has helped me figure out some of what made that work, and has given me some ideas of how to try to capture that again.

The intro paragraphs talking about the mental disengagement or decline or whatever we want to call it really resonated with me. It's something I've also taken measures to counter. In fact I'm on vacation right now to Basque Country. I read "A Basque History of the World" to prepare for the trip and that act reassured me I'm not getting less capable of engaging intellectually, I just have different intellectual interests now than the most intimate details of making websites for and serving them to customers at varying scales.

Just this this weekend got a cabin on the Mississippi and went totally no phones or tv. Wife and I spent the weekend reading, doing yoga and playing checkers.

Good post!

I spent my vacation reading From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew.

And I have a couple of university textbooks (Physics and Biology) lying about, waiting for me to keep working on them.

I concur with the general feeling of it being difficult to plan much ahead. I think that learning and reading is good, and has been good basically always (just because someone else knows something doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn it too, even if this someone else is an LLM).

Anyway, I enjoyed your post and mostly feel the same (and funnily I have similar interests).

Plenty of places to de-brainrot in Chile. I miss it very dearly tbqh

My daily de-brainrot vacation is .. playing with synthesizers. Nothing gets the webs cleared out faster than a quick jam, maybe laying down a couple loops, getting some ideas fleashed out into a bigger structure.

Music-making and musicianship in general is great de-brainrot.

Thirty five upvotes, only one comment. It's like everybody read it, and immediately got off HN. Which sounds like people really took it to heart.

I need De-Brainrot Vacation.