A developer's de-brainrot vacation: four books, calculus and slower thinking

A software engineer writing on the devz.cl blog has published an account of a vacation spent deliberately pushing back against mental drift: two weeks in the countryside, four books, and a return to mathematics and physics he had barely touched since university.

The problem he describes

His starting point is a contrast. In his first months as a software engineer, the work was novel enough to be mentally exhausting: he would come home and go straight to bed. Eight years later, day-to-day problems mostly require time rather than intensity. He is far more productive, particularly with AI assistance, but describes his thinking as slower, less profound and lazier. Short-form content on his phone, along with games, comics and series, means he can no longer get bored.

Reading is his key metric. He devoured books before university and read more than 1,200 pages a week during a history degree; when programming became a hobby he added documentation and computer science titles. Since starting full-time work, that reading has largely stopped — what remains is documentation during the working day.

A slow holiday

The two weeks were deliberately uneventful: time in the countryside with family, days outdoors with his dog, mate with relatives, board games, football and Roblox with his nephews, plus two family birthdays on consecutive weekends. One detail from nature stands out in the post: horses driving off vultures that were trying to reach the placenta of a newborn foal.

He packed Mary Beard's SPQR, to revisit his university years, and Francisco Claro's "De Newton a Einstein y algo más", for physics. Both were finished in the first week, so he bought a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories and Atomic Habits, which lasted most of the second.

Calculus as a hobby

The physics book had an unplanned effect: the derivations left him wanting more, so he began working through Stewart's Calculus: Early Transcendentals. Noticing weak algebra and trigonometry, he went back to the appendices and the book's online algebra resources, then switched to web-native alternatives — Paul's Notes and Active Calculus — because reading a textbook on a laptop or phone was a poor experience. A University Physics textbook followed, and he spent the rest of the holiday on pre-calculus material and exercises.

He compares the feeling to when he started programming for fun, with one difference: this time there is no job at the end of it. He admits the remote possibility of employment was part of the earlier motivation, and says careers in software and data engineering look fuzzier than they did eight years ago, which makes long-term planning hard.

Did it work?

His answer is honest: he does not know. What he can report is that he is having fun and notices he is less intellectually lazy in daily life. The habits he had already been building over the past year — handwriting for pleasure and planning, side projects, writing on his own blog — aim at the same goal. His stated long-term ambition is to understand advanced physics well enough to read new papers in a field he has yet to discover.