In Elizabethan England, didn’t a lot of women wear lead based makeup? I’d be interested in seeing how that affected crime rates or other metrics, if that data were available.
I learned recently that when elephants are very hot, they need to wildly flap their ears to cool their blood (as the blood flows from the body to the brain by way of the ears.) Maybe they hypothesized a similar effect?
It seems like you get a lot of your feeling of meaning and contentedness from social interaction. From what you’re saying about how travel, projects, etc don’t seem as fulfilling anymore, it really seems to me like you have some depressive tendencies.
I’m not a doctor, but just as a friend, I think you should really try to think of dealing with that existential sadness as a priority - not as an annoyance. Spending real time and energy towards improving your mental health could have real impact on every other aspect of your life.
It says that the snails retracted only briefly as a baseline, but learned to retract for longer periods of time to avoid the jarring electrical stimuli. I’m totally unfamiliar with this stuff, but it seems to me that injecting a snail with RNA would also be a jarring stimulus. Therefore, wouldn’t it be learning from the injection itself to remain in its shell for longer at a sign of human touch?
When dealing with burnout, you should identify what specific stressers exist for you in relation to programming, and then work to cut those stressers out from the process. I’m afraid that from person to person, programming burnout can come from different sources, so we’ll need more information first. For instance, is it specific aspects of the job / management? Is it the codebase itself, or a specific project you’re working on?
Going into the microservice aspect above, it provides a nice abstraction of remote function calls, so that you can write microservice code that looks like it's executing a local function, but is really just expecting a remote server to implement the method name. In general, that's just RPC calls though. Google's implementation has proven very intuitive to learn, and has a nice size community online for help debugging, etc.