Why brilliant people lose their touch
Working a lot, especially on one thing, makes us stupid, I think.<p>Although I was emotionally immature until ~25 years old, I actually believe that I was more intelligent and knowledgeable in my youth.  Because I didn&#x27;t have to work for a living, I could spend more time meddling in various subjects and activities.  I never got particularly good at anything except programming and native plant identification, but I had more opinions on subjects with the absorbed knowledge to back up my thoughts.<p>These days, I have little time for anything else besides programming for a Fortune 100 company and searching for other means of supplementary income.  I feel like my intelligence has been reduced to the next lowest standard deviation; the most I seem to be able to understand about anything that society deems important is at the periphery of the big picture.  Good luck getting me to remember all the names of the political crooks I used to know like the back of my hand.<p>Worse yet, <i>I&#x27;m not as good at my career</i>, either.  I think I was a better programmer when I was working for peanuts but doing equally complicated things.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that I&#x27;m brilliant, by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that people, brilliant or not, can &quot;lose their touch&quot; both because people <i>simply change</i> and because focusing on one thing for too long cuts loose the neural pathways that we took for granted when we could afford to make connections between all sorts of ideas at a time in our lives when <i>the stakes were low</i>.  If this isn&#x27;t a form of actual brain damage, it certainly seems like it to me.<p>And I&#x27;m not burned out, as far as I&#x27;m aware.  I just <i>suck</i> more than I used to, and I do think that&#x27;s the result of becoming a &quot;subject idiot&quot;.