Hasn’t time been accelerating more than ever lately? Try thinking about COVID - it feels like the past 5 years have passed in a blink. I’m quite sure you agree with me, unless you’re a retired person living on your farm completely away from the digital world. The growth of quick-dopamine social media, the AI ecosystem reaching new heights, all information being accessible at our fingertips, it’s just gotten us into a never-ending race that nobody wins.
The amount of information available for our brains to process is at odds with the number of hours we have in a day. And one is left always in a state of “I don’t have time.”
I’m heading into a vacation right now with some really existential thoughts and I feel like I’ve been living a lie past 5 years. This blogpost is a not-so-brief reflection about life, time, hobbies, career, family and randomness.
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I’ve always been an extremely ambitious person and I’ve always thrived on the chase to get better. Better work, better friends, better health, better pleasure, better travel, better relationships, better sports, more money, better food etc. This chase for better has always been extremely rewarding - since it forces you to bring your A game, your best self to the table, or at least it compells you to try. If you fail you learn, if you succeed you’re rewarded. A lot of people tell me that this chase drains you out, burns you out, but it really hasn’t burnt me out ever. Yes I have been tired and I have rested, but towards the end of the rest I’d always be jumping to get back on the chase, because that’s just who I have always been.
Until lately.
This was all awesome until the chase was a choice, you know? Now the world has come to a place where the chase is the only way to operate. You either chase, or you quit. You have all the skills, all the knowledge of the internet at your fingertips and now you better do something with it otherwise you’re being inefficient and slow.
Work
At work especially, in tech - this is the story I’m hearing from everybody. AI has made execution so cheap, that everything happens at the speed of thought. Believe it or not, we are already at a place where you think about an idea and the ecosystem is ready to execute it. So now the chase has become about doing more, not doing great. It was still OK when the chase was about doing things fast and balancing velocity with quality. But now it’s about doing more, whatever the fuck you do. Craftful execution is not the bottleneck anymore, strategic thinking is. AI tools are just waiting for your prompts all the time and the onus is on you to give them work. If you aren’t, you’re being slow.
See, I think any work is joyful only when you do it with craft. Craft is pretty much dead in engineering. Yes there are opportunities for craft in building great systems and guardrails so that the fuckups from vibe coders don’t cause irreversible systemic problems. Besides that, it’s quite rare, unless you’re working in zero-to-one companies or projects. If not, your job is just to make plans and keep sending them to AI. I don’t know, it feels pretty “meh” to me. It’s just too easy and obvious and it’s “just work” now.
Your whole job is to consume gigabytes of information that AI presents to you and make high-impact, prioritised decisions. And there’s no end to it. There’s always something to do, right? Gone are the days when you sit and think what to do, how to do, when you think “this will be crazy, let’s do it.” You have to be on all the time because there’s an execution army waiting for your word.
Making strategic decisions for the long term, I tell you, is the most tiring part of any job, because the brain has to work through several dimensions, work through all the anxieties and then commit. Yes you can do a shallow job by making non-committal decisions, but that’s not how professionally honest people operate. When you make decisions, you gotta take a stand and be accountable to it, otherwise you’re just not doing your job well. This is why I say that being a tech-lead is probably the most lund-fakir role any engineer can take. Yes I can say this because I’ve been a tech lead for the past 6 years now, across different teams, across different companies. As a tech lead, your primary job is to make decisions and then be accountable to them if some shit goes wrong. You do long-term things, there’s no joy in “building” - you just gotta “watch” people build and find joy in it. Things you do as a tech lead, if you do them well, show benefits in the long term, which is fulfilling in some cases, but it remains fulfilling only when the work culture cares about long-term investments, long-term progress and is actually thinking and measuring the long-term benefits. If not, you do all the hard work to make certain decisions, and even you yourself forget their relevance in a few weeks, never mind others. And gradually you stop thinking for the long term, you just want to get the job done and move on. Some people persist through it, and I have my genuine respect for them - people staying with the same problem for years, making the product, the company better. But not everybody gets the privilege or luxury of this kind of continuity.
I could keep ranting about the dooms of being a tech lead, but now, guess what, everybody is a tech lead of their army of AI agents, lmao. That’s the reason everybody is tired these days. Nobody sleeps well, nobody has hobbies, nobody is looking forward to work. Maybe founders and managers do, because their jobs have barely changed - yeah they use AI too, but they’re abstracted away from mediocre execution, since they still manage humans and build strategies.
And this is a self-worsening culture loop. Culture is what you reward and punish.
What’s even rewarding for software engineers anymore, I don’t understand. Things I see getting rewarded are: “X did Y in Z days,” “X solved this incident at midnight,” “Executed with full ownership.”
Some of these things are just how any honest professional operates. The rest, the “did Y in Z days” stuff, felt great in the pre-AI days, but does it even matter anymore how many hours you put into something? AI’s doing it, brother, anybody could’ve done it had they been doing it. Individual prowess, individual growth, all pretty irrelevant now. I don’t know what I’m actually getting better at anymore. Writing better prompts? Writing better documents? Setting up ops systems so companies can migrate off the vibe-coded mess someone else left behind?
The average work cycle earlier used to be: “Make it work” -> “Make it good” -> “Make it fast”
Now it’s something like: “Ship something scrappy without even understanding it in the interest of moving fast” -> “Make it understandable” -> “Make it work”
Make it work is where it ends - nobody makes anything good anymore, never mind great. And then you reap benefits from solving incidents at midnight and improving time to mitigate from 1 day to 1 hour to 1 minute.
I’d thought AI would make us all creative and help us stimulate the dimensions of the brain that we couldn’t earlier, coz AI would be doing shitty menial work.
On the contrary, AI is doing shitty menial work now and we’ve become the QA and SRE team for AI.
Hobbies
Hobbies have been an important target of this plague. Remember hobbies were something you just enjoyed doing? Playing in the sand, collecting newspaper clippings, coins, making crappy drawings, reading books for hours. These days hobbies must be a side hustle or some skill-building exercise for you to even consider them worth your time. Enjoy clicking photos? We think of street gigs and finding your perspective. Enjoy reading poetry? Make an Instagram page, post themed reels, build your niche followers and sell books. Enjoy walking? Put on audiobooks so that you’re also becoming smarter as you walk.
Fuck man. Remember reading novels, crying, laughing, imagining characters, missing book characters when the novel ends. Now most sold books are self-help or non-fiction because reading must make you a knowledgeable and most interesting person in the room, otherwise why would you spend hours and days reading just stupid fantasy fiction.
I’m honestly not calling anybody out - this is me as well. I used to be a voracious reader. I have a library of hundreds of physical books that I read during college and early years of work. Now I only have a Kindle library with “The Courage to Be Disliked,” “Atomic Habits,” “Rewiring Your Anxious Brain,” “Sapiens” and whatever the fuck “useful” content.
Hobbies used to be a chase for me really. As a kid, I used to open video games with a screwdriver just to feel cool - I didn’t understand anything, I’d just dismantle gadgets and assemble them back again - it was just something I enjoyed. It felt like I was enjoying it. Used to sit at the wall with my table tennis racket and ball and try to aim a nail on the wall. Didn’t make me better at table tennis, but just emptied my mind and I enjoyed being with my blade and the ball.
If I do something like that right now, my mind would be all restless saying, “boss you’re losing out on making a hundred million dollars,” “you could be consulting for that startup,” “you could go to the gym and burn more calories, lift more weight.” Stupid shit has happened to me, man. This chase has backfired so badly that I want to go back to my hometown and just completely retire now. There is a house, I can live a low-profile life and be out of all this shit and hang out with sunsets and meadows.
The Decision
So here’s where my head’s at, at least as of right now. I keep coming back to the same thought: maybe it’s time to go back home.
Going home seems to make a lot of sense. And it won’t be a vacation or a break - the real thing. Give up the flat in Bangalore, give up the hustle, go sit in my hometown and be boring for a while, without any “optimization”, chase or any army of agents waiting for my prompts.
Do I know this is the right call? Not at all. Maybe six months into it, the quiet gets loud in its own way and I’m bored out of my mind wanting the chase back. Maybe the money doesn’t stretch the way I’ve modeled it and I’m right back in some office in a year, with a macbook in hand. Maybe I get there and realize I actually like the extravagant, high-output version of my life more than I think I do right now, sitting here angry about it. I don’t know. Nobody knows their own future that well, and I’m done pretending certainty is a prerequisite for even thinking out loud about a move.
What I do know is that staying inside this race, this current version of it, chasing “doing more” instead of “doing great,” feels like the lie. And the idea of going home, right now, today, feels like the only honest thought I’ve got. If I’m wrong about it, I’ll find out how everyone finds out - by actually living it, instead of thinking my way out of it from inside a Slack thread at 11pm.
Funny thing about time, through all this. When you’re inside the chase, years go by like weeks - you blink and it’s five years later and you don’t know where they went, because every day looked the same shade of busy. Who knows if the quiet fixes that? But at least I’ll be present enough to watch the days pass instead of just ignoring them because my attention is fixed on a deadline two weeks away. Right? Who knows!