Well, it’s been almost 10 days since I for­swore my daily fixes of information—Hacker News, Twit­ter and even Google Reader. While there have been with­drawal symp­toms, it’s nowhere near as hard as I thought—nor is it as productive.

Unfor­tu­nately, the leaks I can­not plug at the moment—Facebook, Google+ and stan­dard GMail have enough to keep me satisfied—I might not be get­ting new links as soon as they arrive, but quite a lot of impor­tant stuff seeps in through the cracks: shares on either of social net­works, as part of var­i­ous newslet­ters, and occa­sion­ally even in the newspaper.

I have man­aged to re-read quite a few favourite nov­els in the past few days (Wheel of Time Series, I’m look­ing at you) and get a bit of papers and com­plex prob­lems sorted; delv­ing a bit into Word­Press core code as part of my work on PressTest in the past few days. How­ever a side effect has been that a few days ago I had to stop every­thing because I got a bit men­tally exhausted: I had been jug­gling com­plex num­ber the­ory, rather advanced elas­tic­ity, a his­tory of the world post 1914 (WW1’s begin­ning, if you didn’t notice), a rather engag­ing descrip­tion of the finan­cial col­lapse (Too big to fail)—and irreg­u­lar fla­menco and clas­si­cal gui­tar practice.

Whether appar­ently cause­less phys­i­cal exhaus­tion could also account for this; but this is some­thing I’ve observed: when I truly con­cen­trate on what I read, and what I read is worth remem­ber­ing or sim­ply, pars­ing properly—I can get exhausted soon. The only antidote—or rather, medicine—is pass­ing time as a sim­ple, uncrit­i­cal and pas­sive observer: the rea­son I re-read my favourite fan­tasy novels.

Some­thing about step­ping out of my nor­mal, occa­sion­ally rather bor­ing life into the shoes of an omnipresent yet impo­tent observer in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent world lets me dis­con­nect and look at myself objec­tively when I return.

Another 20 days—let’s see what they bring.