In my 20s I had this mindset that I always needed to be learning a new tool or language. After a decade plus of that, I found a tech stack that I liked enough

In my 20s I had this mindset that I always needed to be learning a new tool or language. After a decade plus of that, I found a tech stack that I liked enough to stick with long term. I didn't plan it that way, I just found one that made work enjoyable again and decided none of the technical improvements other tools might offer would outweigh the quality of life I'd found. What I found after sticking with the same language and toolset for 5 years was that there was a new level of mastery I'd never known before. I was writing code as fast as I could write English. I was spending up to 100% of my dev time on a given day working on purely the functionality in my project. Little to no time spent looking up how to do things. Nobody deserves any shame for looking up info to help them code. We've accepted it's an important and reasonable part of the job. And it never bothered me. But when I experienced for the first time that I'd truly memorized and internalized nearly everything about my day to day work, I found a surprising and unprecedented level of focus on what really mattered. All those context switches throughout the day hopping between coding and figuring out how to do something, they'd become so normal to me and to the field that it didn't occur to me that they were not strictly necessary. I could switch to a new language today and be fairly productive with it a week from now. It wouldn't feel weird to anyone that I was spending a lot of time looking up info to learn how best to work with it. Even experienced devs do that. But what I understand now is the true cost of being on that treadmill to chase skills I think I'm supposed to have because they're newer and fit one of the subjective definitions of "better". Feeling less pressure to spend my free time constantly upgrading my skills hadn't been a motivating factor, but it was a bonus. You still want to learn new things, but you should understand that much of what we're bombarded with are new ways to do things we already know how to do, in a supposedly better but really just different way.