Note: This is an AI-generated translation from my original Italian article: La stanchezza che non è stanchezza

When you can do everything, the first luxury you lose is the desire to do something.

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The grid

Thursday evening I was on the couch. Still. Not the kind of still of someone relaxing: the kind of still of someone who can't move.

I had spent the day inside a grid of terminals. Three projects open in parallel, each with its own worktree, each with its own context. Write here, verify there. Switch window. Go back. Check the log. Open another session. Meanwhile you're thinking about two things you'd like to experiment with, you jot them down somewhere, then return to the terminal that's waiting. Switch context. Again.

It wasn't a bad day. It was a productive day. I was doing things, real things, things that worked. I had that familiar feeling of code flowing, pieces fitting together, problems being solved one after another. What I used to call flow.

Then evening came. The time when I usually pick up the Kindle and read. I love physical books, I prefer them to any screen, but in the dark, in bed, the Kindle is a convenience I can't give up. Or I pick up the computer and write something for the blog. I like writing, I always have. For years I did it by hand, in notebooks, with a pen. Lately I've started doing it on the computer, because I can do it anywhere, even in the dark, even on the couch with the lights off. A small compromise of efficiency that I allowed myself almost without noticing.

But that evening I didn't open the Kindle. I didn't open the computer. I didn't turn on the TV. I didn't scroll through my phone. I stayed on the couch, with stiff shoulders and a brain that felt like it wanted to explode, staring at some vague point in the room without thinking about anything in particular.

It wasn't sleepiness. It wasn't physical fatigue. It was something different, something for which I didn't have a ready name. A kind of emptiness, but not the calm emptiness of someone meditating. A saturated emptiness. Like a full disk that can't write anything anymore.

And the most absurd thing is that in the middle of that emptiness, a little voice kept saying: you can't waste time. You need to try that thing. You need to finish that other thing. Did you see that project on GitHub? You should look at it.

I couldn't do anything, and I felt guilty for not doing anything.

The two tracks

There's something I've always known how to do, even though for a long time I didn't know it had a name.

I can maintain two mental processes in parallel. Not in the vague sense of "thinking about two things," but in a very concrete sense: I can read a text while writing something else, without making mistakes in either. When I read aloud, my eye runs far ahead of what my voice is pronouncing. I mentally read the next sentences while saying the previous ones, and this helps me anticipate the tone, the pauses, the emotions to convey. Two streams running on separate but coordinated tracks.

I don't say this to brag. I say it because it's part of the problem.

I built this ability over the years, largely by playing chess. Calculating variations means exactly this: holding in your head two, three, five lines of play simultaneously, each with its own branches, without losing the thread of any of them. Evaluating "if I play here, they go there, but what if instead..." requires a kind of deep multitasking that isn't doing many things at once — it's thinking about many things at once while maintaining control. Cognitive psychology calls it attentional control: the working memory's ability to keep multiple contexts active and to switch between them with minimal cost.

For years this was my secret weapon. At work, in life. I could concentrate for hours on one problem while letting another part of my mind work on something else in the background. Like having a foreground process and a background process running silently, and every now and then it returns a result you weren't expecting.

Here's the thing: Thursday evening, that machine stopped. Not slowly, not with a gradual deceleration. It stopped abruptly, like an engine seizing. And for the first time I understood that even parallel processes have a limit. That the ability to keep many contexts open doesn't mean you can keep them open forever. That the cost, at some point, comes due all at once.

The hunger that can't be satisfied

The thing nobody tells you about superpowers is this: they create hunger.

I'm talking about the ones AI gives you, obviously. I wrote about how it changed the way I work. I still think so: it's the most powerful tool I've ever had. Prototypes that used to take days now take shape in hours. Ideas that stayed in the drawer because "it would take too long" can now be explored in an afternoon. The boundary between "I'd like to do" and "I'm doing" has become paper-thin.

And I'm crazy about it. I discover new things. I do things I couldn't do before. Every day there's something new to try, a model, a tool, an approach. The curiosity that has always defined me now has a turbo engine underneath.

The problem is that before, time was a natural filter. You wanted to make a prototype? It took days. You wanted to experiment with an idea? Weeks. That slowness forced you to choose, and choosing meant giving things up, and giving things up meant that the things you did had weight. You carried them forward with care, because each one had cost you something.

Now the bottleneck is no longer time. It's me. I can do ten things, and I do ten. I can experiment with everything, and I experiment with everything. The filter is gone. And that hunger to do, to discover, to not waste time, is never satisfied. Because everything you do opens three more things. Every project you finish generates two more. Every experiment that works suggests the next one.

It's like drinking salt water. The more you drink, the thirstier you get.

The full emptiness

That Thursday evening fatigue isn't burnout. I know burnout, at least as a concept: too much work, too much external pressure, too much stress. What I felt was different. I hadn't been under pressure. Nobody had asked me to work on three projects simultaneously. I had chosen to. Nobody had told me to experiment with those new things. I wanted to.

It's the fatigue of someone who has too many possibilities. Not too many things to do: too many things they could do. A brain that spent all its energy not on doing, but on keeping too many contexts open at the same time. On jumping from one to another. On deciding, every ten minutes, what to do now.

There's an enormous difference between being tired of working and being tired of being able to work on too many things.

And here the two-track discussion comes back. That ability of mine to manage parallel processes, that thing I've always considered an advantage, is also what allowed me to reach that point. A less elastic brain would have stopped sooner. It would have said enough at two in the afternoon, would have closed two of the three projects, would have slowed down. Mine didn't. Mine kept everything open, managed everything, jumped from one context to another with its usual ease. Until it stopped abruptly.

It's the paradox of endurance: the more capable you are of holding on, the later you realize you're giving in. And when you realize it, you're already on the couch with stiff shoulders and a brain that wants to explode.

The pen I no longer use

There's a detail that struck me while I was thinking about this. A small detail that seems to have nothing to do with anything.

I stopped writing by hand.

Not as a conscious decision. I didn't wake up one morning saying "no more notebooks." It happened gradually, one compromise at a time. The computer is more convenient: I can write anywhere, I can correct without erasing, I can do it in the dark, I can do it on the couch. Every single reason is rational. Every single step is a gain in efficiency.

But writing by hand was a ritual. It was slow by nature. The pen forces you to think before writing, because erasing takes effort. It forces you to slow down to the pace of thought, not the pace of fingers on a keyboard. It forces you to sit with the words, to feel them forming before putting them down.

I didn't lose it because I didn't like it anymore. I lost it because I optimized it. And optimizing a ritual means killing it, because a ritual is the opposite of efficiency. A ritual is doing something in the least productive way possible, and finding in that slowness a value that speed cannot give you.

I wonder how many rituals I'm losing this way. How many small moments of intentional slowness I'm replacing with more efficient, more convenient, faster versions. And I wonder if that Thursday evening fatigue isn't also this: the signal that something important is thinning out, and I'm not noticing because every single compromise, taken on its own, seems reasonable.

It's not nostalgia (and by now you know that)

I'm not pining for a golden age that never existed. I didn't when I talked about curiosity, and I'm not doing it now.

I don't want to slow down. I couldn't even if I wanted to, and in truth I don't want to. I love what I do. I love the speed at which I can explore ideas. I love having tools that amplify what I know how to do.

But I'm beginning to understand that acceleration has a cost that doesn't show up anywhere. It doesn't show up in productivity reports. It doesn't show up in metrics. It doesn't even show up in your daily perception, because every day seems like a good day: you did things, you created things, you learned things. You only discover the cost when you stop. When it's evening and your body says enough before your mind does. When your shoulders are stiff and the Kindle is right there, on the nightstand, and you don't have the strength to pick it up.

Maybe the answer isn't to do less. Maybe it's to choose more. In the age when you can do everything, the luxury isn't speed: it's intentional renunciation. Deciding what not to do. Letting some ideas stay in the drawer not because you don't have time, but because you've chosen to give weight to the ones you already have in hand.

It's harder than it sounds. When you have superpowers, not using them feels like waste. But maybe the real waste is something else: using all of them, every day, on everything, until you find yourself empty on the couch wondering where the energy went.

The couch

Thursday evening, on the couch, I did something I hadn't done in a while. Nothing. Not the productive nothing of someone meditating, not the strategic nothing of someone unplugging to recharge. Real nothing. The kind without purpose, without a plan, without the little voice telling you you're wasting time.

I don't know if it did me good. I don't know if it was what I needed, or if it was just my brain pulling the plug without asking permission.

I only know that the next morning, for the first time in weeks, I felt like picking up a pen.