I'm sort of experiencing that now, and not in a good way. I'm out of work ATM, and so when I work on something technical, I work on it because I want to and when I want to.
I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date.
For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon.
I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date.
For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon.
You'll have to follow your own nose to get past this link to Bacon. It's not that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character
That isn't directly craft-building, but it does contribute to an appreciation for my craft.
Disclosure: I am not an HPE.