Meditation on a Wave
When a wave starts out in the deep ocean, water starts moving but finds little resistance. The energy mostly just travels along through the water, rippling out from its origin point. It’s not until it starts getting close to land that anything interesting starts to happen.
As the land rises up from the sea bed, the energy from the wave pushes the water further upwards to the point where its momentum chaotically tips, and it tumbles over, face plants onto the beach or rocks comprising the shore, and retreats. The water stills and draws back.
I guess life energy and purpose can do that. You hit too many obstacles and things flip over and run out of steam. Everything feels like it’s too hard.
On Hard Things
At work we have a dedicated two hour slot every Friday for learning and professional development. The easy vehicle available is through that one social network with the specific job-searching focus and their learning platform (link not provided because I’m not interested in sending them any link-juice), and I’m generally relatively neutral on the material on that platform. Some of it is good, some is meh. I watched one particular video series on DevOps, not because I needed more training for myself, but because I was looking for some good talking points or examples to spread throughout the organisation for folks who were still doing things in a more archaic and less productive way.
One of the things that jumped out to me and rang true was that if some step of delivering your software was hard, teams tended to respond by doing it less often. The classic example was deploying to production. If your deployment process is risky and prone to mistakes and problems, the natural conclusion from your organisation’s leadership is likely to be to deploy less often. But you should in fact push yourself to do that thing more often, because it forces you to look at optimising the process, making it more stable and work better for you.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t go in for that hustle-culture B.S. that insists on working 80 hour weeks and making productivity into a sacrament. My whole philosophy about making software is that you build things in such a way that you don’t have to kill yourself in order to make stuff. Making stuff should feel just challenging enough to be a little spicy but mostly should just flow smoothly. Use the tools that are out there (and there are many) to work smarter and not harder, as cliché as that phrase can be.
However, this point about tackling the hard stuff I thought was really clever, because there is a part of me that sees things with friction as a red flag. It does make sense to me that the natural impulse is to shy away from that friction and just avoid it and leave it alone. But if we can set aside the immediate avoidance, then look at what is causing that friction and remove it, we can make life so much easier for ourselves by tackling the friction head-on instead of just procrastinating. Indeed, the efforts to avoid the thing that seems to cause friction are themselves likely to cause more long-term pain and effort over time, but in an insidious and subtle way that’s easy to sweep under the rug.
The Last Five Years
This particular wave crash has context, just like any set of waves on the ocean. Maybe there was an earthquake, or a big wind storm, and the energy of that movement translated into the water.
In 2013 I had twins. It was a planned thing to have a kid, but the $Spouse and I really did not have the support or structures in place to take care of two babies at once. We struggled a lot and it was exhausting. We beat the odds and did not separate / divorce, but we spent most of that time in pure survival mode. We loved our kids and didn’t ultimately regret our choices, but that didn’t make getting through the day-to-day logistics and emotional rollercoasters any easier.
By the time 2019 rolled around it was like we were starting to emerge from a long, dark tunnel. We were squinting at the bright sunlight and thinking of all the things we could do to start getting our shit back together. We were finally thinking about traveling again, we were going to get to some house projects that had been malingering, we were going to declutter all the baby and toddler stuff finally, we might start having a social life again, now that the kids had started school.
Then there was a pandemic. My father-in-law died from pancreatic cancer. Someone committed arson on a neighbouring building in the middle of the night, and three people died, traumatising our sensitive son as we scrambled into a neighbour’s living room for shelter, wondering if our home was safe to get back into. Then we had a bed bug infestation — maybe you think that doesn’t sound so bad, but we were getting repeatedly bitten and sleeping terribly and I was thoroughly cleaning out our bedframes for over a year. We had multiple pest spray operations to try and kill them all off.
The land kept rising up. A million little things that would have just been minor hiccups under normal circumstances threw everything into further disarray: a scary incident where I was biking home in the dark and a car cut me off in a roundabout, causing me to slam into it because I couldn’t brake hard enough. It culminated in a frozen shoulder but luckily the bike and the kid on the back of the bike were fine.
The $Spouse’s job got really stressful. My job got really stressful. By 2024 things reached a fever pitch when the $Spouse lost his job and I was getting so stressed out I had to drop down to a four-day-week, and that still wasn’t enough. The worst moment was an episode where I was coming down with Influenza A and still working for most of the day when I should have been off sick, bailing out a deployment that had gone sideways.
It was all unsustainable. Friction was everywhere. The wave was crashing. Everything felt too hard.
The Obligatory AI Tangent
I really don’t feel like expounding much on AI, or rather the clever statistics-based generation tools that we’re collectively calling “AI” through a bit of sophistry. But I feel like it ties in with my reflections on where I am at so I feel like I’m not just amplifying the hype machine.
I don’t particularly dislike the LLMs and image / video generation tools that are rising in prevalence, but I do feel like their utility has been vastly over-estimated. I think there are a few interesting possible applications, but I don’t think they are as fundamentally critical as many seem to believe they will prove to be, even the ones who claim they just want a little robot friend.
And, ultimately, I think some of the ways that GenAI tools are being used, smack of those tactics we humans employ to spend a lot of energy avoiding things that seem like they’re going to be hard. The more I learn about AI, the more it seems like there’s a lot of up-front and ongoing effort to make the tools work, from training the initial model to ongoing tuning of it to crafting the perfect prompts. It’s hard to say whether that effort is worth it in the light of the growing body of evidence that relying too much on AI output can reduce our own cognitiion.
We are avoiding the friction of doing cognitive tasks that feel hard in a way that emulates relying on another person for help. By doing so, in the long run, we are making things harder for ourselves.
Building Up Muscle Again
The last five years have definitely been a period of physical and emotional decline for me. I have spent much of 2025 just trying to build myself back up again, starting with scraping together a very basic foundation.
Part of that was just trying to motivate myself to tackle things that felt hard again. I really had to focus on breaking things down into baby steps. I’m still terribly out of physical shape but I’ve got my little routine of 7-minute workout, swimming once a week, and riding my bike as much as I can. I can feel myself on the cusp of trying to add the next ingredient into the mix (probably some form of weight training to build up more muscle).
Another part of that foundation that’s really starting to take shape is my creative life and enrichment of my mind. The spinning wheel is out and operational! I can actually see my way through to spinning enough yarn to knit myself a jumper. I have some non-fiction books I’d like to read and I’ve been listening to podcasts more often. Producing my own podcast has helped me research things, dive into ideas, and articulate myself more. And I have this blog again.
I’m focusing as much as I can on taking the small wins and using that as motivation to carry on and do more. Every time I balk at something seeming hard, I catch myself now. Is it really too hard? Or can I have a look at why I am feeling like shying away and unpick it a bit more? What can I do to make that thing seem less intimidating? If I feel like it’s not a worthwhile effort, of course I don’t need to do it. But so many things I am just pushing on with: just get those dishes in the sink washed. Just don’t think about how much I don’t want to do my exercises because I know they will actually benefit me and make me feel better in the long run. Even by mid-last year I was probably spending more time feeling overwhelmed and that everything felt too hard, and I would never catch up.
But in the last few months, with the help of the EAP sessions and a bit of intertia gained by forward momentum, I feel like I have finally hit a tipping point. For the next few months, at least, I am finally breaking through to a space where I consistently feel like most things are not too hard.
Looking back on my archives I count 12 blog posts this year. That’s 12 more than 2024! All I have to do this year is post on average twice a month and I will have increased my blogging rate by another 12. That seems imminently achievable. I shall blog more often and face the sources of friction in my writing and in my life.
Waves Never Stop
I know another wave crash is lurking somewhere in the future. I just want to build up enough muscle right now to hold firm when it hits. I want to spend as little time in survival mode as possible going forward. I’m going to enjoy the lull in the trough.