I like the reference to Sisyphus! And of course, the best strategy is to write an idea down and have a summer intern do it. :P

I definitely relate to this! Have you heard of the 'rationality' community or the 'ea' community. They are all about pushing the limits of reason. Some example podcasts/blogposts if you haven't heard of them: Podcasts: clearerthinking, 80000hours, rationally speaking podcast Blogs/websites: astralcodexten (and its predecessor slatestarcodex), lesswrong, putanumonit.com And lastly, here are humanist 'prayers/sermons' that somebody wrote: https://blog.jaibot.com/secular-solstice-call-and-response/ https://blog.jaibot.com/secular-solstice-eve-speech-stories/ https://blog.jaibot.com/secular-solstice-dawn-speech-only-human/ If you want, we can have a chat sometime and geek out about this stuff.

I also switched from teaching (maths not linguistics) to programming and data science recently! Good luck with the transition