Schiller completely understood the predicament Peter was facing. He truly was a genius. But as long as he lived as an ordinary person, he had to confront the thing ordinary people feared and avoided most: aging.
Peter was no longer sixteen. He was nearly thirty. As he grew older, he had passed the age when his mind was at its sharpest and his energy at its fullest, becoming a middle-aged man who needed rest and careful maintenance just to stay in shape.
But this was actually a paradox. Peter was not a businessman; he was a scientist. He needed to spend all year in the laboratory, and when he got busy, he lost all distinction between day and night, without even time to sleep, much less work out.
Yet if he did not maintain a certain amount of exercise and kept irregular eating and sleeping habits, he would eventually slip into a subhealthy state. Then he would need even more time to recover his energy, further squeezing his research time. If he could not finish his work for a while, he would become even busier afterward, with even less time to exercise. His health problems would worsen, requiring even more time to rest. This was the vicious cycle of modern subhealth.
When Peter was still young, he naturally felt as if he had endless energy. Even without Spider-Man's power, he was still bursting with inspiration and vigor, able to work continuously for twenty or thirty hours without feeling tired.
But once he got older, that clearly no longer worked. When his energy could not keep up, his brain slowed down too. That made him slower when thinking through problems, so naturally he did not have as much inspiration. Anyone who had worked in a creative field had probably experienced this.