The Atrophy Problem

There's a moment that happens quietly, not during a crisis or a late night deploy, but in the middle of an ordinary 1:1. Your engineer is walking through something technical, explaining an approach, and somewhere in the second minute you realize you've been nodding without actually following. Not because you stopped caring. Because the thread between your brain and the work has grown thin in ways you haven't been tracking. I've had that moment. More than once. Not as a conscious choice to diseng