HN user
If you're in the NYC area, I know a bunch of folks who have had a really positive experience with http://www.kenwoodpsych.com/ - it's a practice that helps match you to a therapist that matches your needs, communication style, and financial/location constraints.
The Ted Chiang anthology is sooo good. Every story's premise was so unique - it blows my mind that one person can come up with so many out there ideas.
I know OP wasn't looking for dystopias, but if you like Parable of the Sower, I recently read two excellent new scifi/dystopia books: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and American War by Omar El Akkad. American War was really cool - it's by a journalist who covered military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring, who transposes the stories/atrocities he witnessed as a reporter onto the future US.
For content-based buffer opening, I use fzf's Tags command - it fuzzy searches ctags and open the file containing the definition.
I know you said that you like maintaining a super minimal .vimrc, but fwiw there's a couple of plugins that really helped me with the workflow issues you mentioned struggling with:
Jumping around in longer texts: I know the basics, like searching (/), jumping to a matching bracket (%) or jumping to specific lines (for line 10, type 10G), but I still could use symbols more often for navigation.
vim-sneak is real nice for this, and has turned into one of my most-used movement commands https://github.com/justinmk/vim-sneak
Using visual mode for moving text around: Sometimes it can be quite complicated to type the right combination of letters to cut (delete) the text I want to move around. That's where visual mode (v) shines. It highlights the selected text. I should use it more often.
vim-move was a game changer for me https://github.com/matze/vim-move
Tabs: I know how tabs work, but all the typing feels clunky. That's why I never extensively used them. Instead, I mostly use multiple terminal tabs or an IDE with Vim bindings for bigger projects.
This is worth a read: https://joshldavis.com/2014/04/05/vim-tab-madness-buffers-vs.... Buffers + vim fzf is a really nice workflow https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim