I was reading in "Ein Himmel voller Zahlen" (Pi in the Sky, John D. Barrow) an excerpt from Russels autobiography, in which he tells about his efforts to find a solution to the logical contradiction in paradoxes (like: does "the set of all sets not containing themselves" contain itself?) to finish his work, the Principia Mathematica. He writes how, day after day, he started with a blank sheet of paper, thinking... and often ended up in the evening with the paper still blank... In the summer months of 1903 and 1904: two years...

I remembered how I grew desperate and wanted to give up after only several days of thinking about a problem without getting anywhere (and felt ashamed...

I was reading in "Ein Himmel voller Zahlen" (Pi in the Sky, John D. Barrow) an excerpt from Russels autobiography, in which he tells about his efforts to find a solution to the logical contradiction in paradoxes (like: does "the set of all sets not containing themselves" contain itself?) to finish his work, the Principia Mathematica. He writes how, day after day, he started with a blank sheet of paper, thinking... and often ended up in the evening with the paper still blank... In the summer months of 1903 and 1904: two years...

I remembered how I grew desperate and wanted to give up after only several days of thinking about a problem without getting anywhere (and felt ashamed a little bit)... and the pressure to finish the work and produce several papers/publications within a certain time span...
I thought about how after some time "to find anything new and publishable" becomes the goal (instead of solving the initial problem)... how all the fun and pleasure of "thinking" and "working" dies under the pressure and one starts feeling like a "solution producing machine" (if this pressure really promotes scientific progress, I'm not sure)... and that this should be changed and things should be slowed down...

But "slowing down" has become a luxury nowadays...