This morning I happened upon two different pieces about Aaron Swartz: Quinn Norton's very personal, hard to read piece about her role in the case; and Larissa MacFarquhar's New Yorker piece about Aaron. This paragraph jumped out at me in the latter:

In the last years of his life, he decided that he disliked programming, that computers were awful in many ways, and that there were things more interesting than freedom of information. He would have liked to give up computers altogether. In the summer of 2009, he spent a month offline—no computer, no phone; mostly he just sat in his apartment and read—and he always described this month as the happiest of his life. But whenever Taren suggested that he do it again, or do something else that would make him happy—go for a hike, move to Boston—he would say that he didn’t care about being happy.