You Need Slow Days in your Life

As 2025 ends, I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend the next year. During my year-end break, I noticed that doing fewer things felt better and more fulfilling than the constant motion of the past few months. Going fast is fun in the moment, but it’s overstimulating and leaves me tired after a few hours.

I love tech, and being a software engineer, I can’t fully escape it. But I believe we can reduce our dependence on it to live more meaningfully. Here’s what I’m trying:

• Reading physical books: Slow learning is more fulfilling. I started reading in the mornings before work, and I’m finding I can handle increasingly complex topics.
• Reading a physical newspaper: I subscribed to the NYT weekend print edition and disabled all news notifications. For daily news, I sometimes read the Washington Post’s print edition on a tablet.
• No music/youtube while working: A hard one, but I’m getting into it.
• Be intentional with AI-assisted programming: Using AI is fine when you’re clear about what you want it to do. It becomes draining when it generates too much code and you need to review several changes you don’t fully understand. Using AI as a search tool has been working better for my learning, as it can answer custom questions specific to the current codebase.

The book Ikigai mentions this too. People who live well prefer to live in the moment without worrying about the future or the past. They don’t rush towards the future and enjoy the present.

The gist: the more I reduce distractions, the more bored I feel, the more intentional my work becomes as I focus on a singular thing more. There’s always going to be fomo to try and do multiple things as the productivity gurus say, but that feels like a recipe for burnout.