Microdosing rest

I have a shelf of Chinese tea at home. 2012 shu pu-erh, longjing from Hangzhou. Brought it back from trips, picked it out at tea markets, I know the difference between the first and fourth infusion.

For the past 2 years I've been drinking it from a thermos mug between calls. Pour boiling water, forget about it for 40 minutes, finish it cold. An expensive aged pu-erh going down like a Lipton teabag.

12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Weekdays: main job. Weekends: personal projects and studying. Vacations got worse — the last 3 I worked more than normal weeks. During the May holidays we hackathoned 24/7 for 14 days.

Classic FOMO. The genuine, physical kind. The feeling that right now is the moment in AI, comparable to the industrial revolution, and if you stop for even one day you'll miss it.

So I didn't stop. 2 years.

At some point I noticed that projects which used to energize me had started feeling like another ticket in the backlog. Stopped distinguishing Monday from Saturday. Stopped distinguishing pu-erh from boiling water.

In retrospect: I forgot that rest was a real thing. Genuinely believed you could ignore exhaustion if the goal was important enough.

So I ran an experiment. Microdosing rest. 4 days, Thursday through Sunday, in Dagestan. No laptop. No "just one call."

On the second day I sat on a terrace above the Sulak Canyon. Brewed shu pu-erh in a gaiwan. Just because. Poured out the first infusion. Waited 15 seconds for the second. Thirty for the third.

Same tea I have at home. But for the first time in months I could actually taste it: the earthiness, the smoke, the dried fruit, the slight age. The exact thing I'd chosen it for at a market in Kunming.

And then I understood what had actually happened: I'd spent 2 years chasing the moment, and gradually lost the ability to notice anything around me. Exhaustion doesn't steal your time. It steals your attention.

4 days in the mountains and one gaiwan fixed it.

Stay tuned 🥷🥷🥷