De-Brainrot Vacations

A software engineer decided to use vacation as a kind of reset. Not a luxury trip, not a binge of shows, but time in the countryside with family, a dog, books, board games, football, and even Roblox with nephews. The goal was simple: push back against the steady flattening effect of constant phone-level dopamine and see if the brain could feel sharper again.

He’d already noticed a pattern. Early in his career, work was exhausting because everything was new. Eight years later, the exhaustion had changed shape. The problems were more familiar, but so were the distractions: shorts, games, comics, TV, and the easy habit of doomscrolling before sleep. Reading had taken the hit. What used to be a daily thing became something squeezed out by tiredness and noise.

So on this break he tried to be deliberate. He spent time in nature, socialized over mate, and read two books he’d brought along: Mary Beard’s SPQR and Francisco Claro’s De Newton a Einstein y algo más. He liked them enough to finish both in the first week, then picked up F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories and Atomic Habits for the second. That reading streak led somewhere he didn’t expect.

The real surprise was math. After enjoying the proofs and explanations in Claro’s book, he started working through Stewart’s Calculus: Early Trascendentals, then went back to trig and algebra through the book’s appendix and online resources from Paul’s Notes and Active Calculus. He also began University Physics. The work felt less like studying for a deadline and more like the old version of learning for fun, with one caveat: career plans in software and data engineering now feel fuzzier than they used to, especially with AI in the mix.

By the end, he wasn’t claiming a cure. But he did feel less intellectually lazy. That may be the whole point: not a miracle, just enough friction to make the brain act awake again.