Oddbean

As I get older, the less I can study late at night. I think I was about 17 when I made this account? It was near the tail end of my high school time. Back then, I could study all night until 5 AM without any caffeine, and I'd spend so many nights just reading stuff that I thought was cool during COVID. It was a really schizo range of topics, from manga to Aristotle to whatever else caught my eye. I'd crash, wake up at 1 or 2 AM, go work out, and repeat the cycle. I'm in my early 20s now, so I'm still young, but I can barely study until 2-ish. I'm a lot more efficient with my study time than when I was a teenager, but I wish I had my teenager energy back. There's definitely compounding factors. I think I wrecked my body about a year ago taking this one Grad programming class that had 60 hour homeworks on top of a few upperdiv math classes + research. I lost about 20 pounds and barely slept. I'm sure there was some mental stress there too - I would only regularly see two people, my roommate and a close friend of mine who was super concerned about my health because of that semester. While I've recovered the weight and get regular sleep nowadays, I don't think my body has fully recovered from the stress that semester placed on me. I wonder to what extent I enjoy this type of stuff though. I definitely get bored if there's nothing to study. I guess man by his nature likes to stretch himself out towards knowing, but I wonder if I have a disordered attachment towards doing hard stuff. It's when taxing myself to exhaustion that I truly feel satisfied, but it's definitely had its toll on my body. I wonder if I'd tell freshman me to not do the path that I took. But I'd be fooling myself if I thought freshman me would listen to my current advice, if it was against studying until fatigue set in. I don't think I would have been able to live with myself if I didn't develop my skills as fast as possible. I'm not sure. I can pretend to have all the answers, but at the end of the day I'm just a confused zoomer. All I know is that I'll follow my instincts wherever they'll take me, like some sort of animal. That usually works out. https://cawfee.club/media/f291b5f086e1f90bddcc26c0ed18ac0c60618fe770843fb72f0d43a379e0d72c.png