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The idea to avoid fun things seems off the mark. Perhaps:

1. Avoid facile things.

Things that aren’t facile involve difficulty which in turn can involve learning, challenge, mistakes, or other things your brain finds painful. To know more tomorrow than you knew yesterday, you may have to remember why it seemed fun to touch the stove.

Have a hard look at what you do rather than work and whether each is genuinely fun. If it’s genuine fun, you likely don’t regret the time spent. More often, the things done instead of work, when looked back on, were not meaningfully rewarding. You’re not the better for having spent time on them.

This also helps you decide among “fun” things. For instance, between these two guilty pleasures: binge Netflix, or binge an airport novel?

The second one subconsciously reminds you that reading can be fun, and rehabilitates your ability to focus on reading at length, so primes you to be able to read and learn rapidly as needed to maintain mastery in your profession.

Anecdata suggests that for coming back from burnout on activities, facility-based alternatives are better than abject avoidance.




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