Age, wisdom, and exhaustion

Published 2025-06-27

tag(s): #random-thoughts

As I mentioned in the last post, we just moved. We are now residents of Secaucus, NJ.
It wasn't a planned move[1], and it all happened very quickly since we got the keys to the new place on the 15th and last weekend.

This week, there was a hackathon at work. I have to applaud that it was done properly: all planned work was put on hold, meetings canceled. There was a lot of buzz about it. Even someone as cynic as I've been for the last few years had some level of excitement about it!

I made a pretty small, very doable, proposal to improve something in an existing app.
Yet personally, my hackathon was a bust. And I have a couple theories why.

Definitely tired

I was tired. Really tired. I slept like crap the week before starting the move, extremely anxious. Then I had to deal with the move itself, lifting boxes and furniture. Moving things up and down the stairs, etc...And I am certainly NOT in shape.

The end result was that I found myself exhausted, not only physically, but more important, mentally.
During the hackathon I was sometimes stuck looking at some code or configuration, wondering why it didn't work, and ten minutes later I would look at it again and realize my mistake was very obvious.

Maybe too old

Of course I am over 40 now[2] and recovery takes longer.
Maybe I should have taken just one more day off after the weekend, to recover.
I have no evidence, of course, but I am almost convinced that resting more, I would have done a better job in 4 days than what I did in 5.

(Certainly?) wiser

A realization I had many many years ago, is that sometimes the best solution to a problem is to walk away for a bit, rather than trying to push through at all costs. Heck, I have a friend that credits me with passing him that lesson.
But of course, aren't "lessons" what we learn from our own mistakes?
And aren't those mistakes the results of our own inclinations to do "the wrong thing"?

  1. Do the wrong thing. At least a few times, usually a lot of times.
  2. Learn from it. Hopefully.
  3. Help others avoid your past mistakes.

So even though I stopped using "do more, harder" as my only tool to overcome a challenge, I might revert myself to that basic behaviour if...

  1. I am emotionally invested in whatever the problem is.
  2. I am tired.
I have learned that those 2 are in the top 3 of factors that cause bad choices.[3]

And guess what? In the hackathon I wanted to succeed (because I cared), and I was tired.

An unanswered question

What prompted this post is that I was chatting with a friend at work, and I told her - what if the point isn't that I take longer to recover, but that I am more reflective and recognize that I am doing a poor job?

In my 20s, with less experience, I had no baseline to know when I was writing good code. So I just kept forcing myself to the keyboard and probably delivering sub-par solutions, without realizing.

There is room for both possibilities too, and that is the most likely scenario... I do take longer to recover and need more rest because I am older (undeniable), but with that age comes the self-awareness to see that I am overdue a rest.
Self awareness...except this week 🤦 when I needed it the most.

Footnotes
  1. The idea was to move at the end of our lease, in December, but stuff happened.
  2. 42, to be precise.
  3. I have no idea what is the third one, I wanted to make sure I left room for something obvious that I am missing, just in case. And that is also wisdom, by the way.

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