A Software Engineer's Vacation Cure for AI-Era Brain Fog: Books and Calculus

A developer with about eight years of experience describes a creeping cognitive decline he attributes to modern working life: problems that once felt novel now feel routine, heavy reliance on AI tools has made his thinking faster but shallower, and an endless supply of short-form video, games, and other on-tap dopamine has eroded his ability to sit with boredom. His personal barometer is book-reading, which has cratered since the days he devoured 1,200 pages a week as a history undergrad.

To counter this, he used a slow, family-centered vacation in the countryside to deliberately rebuild attention-heavy habits. He read four books across two weeks—including Mary Beard’s SPQR and a Spanish-language physics primer—and unexpectedly rediscovered a love of learning for its own sake, diving into Stewart’s Calculus, Paul’s Online Notes, Active Calculus, and University Physics to shore up rusty algebra and trigonometry. He frames it as echoing how he first fell into programming as a hobby.

The piece is candid about uncertainty. He can’t say the experiment measurably restored his sharpness, only that he’s having fun and feels less intellectually lazy day to day. He also notes that AI has made software and data engineering career planning far fuzzier than it was eight years ago, so this time the learning is driven more by curiosity than by any concrete professional payoff. It reads as one engineer’s small, honest data point on a widely felt anxiety about how always-available AI and infinite content reshape how technical people think.