Why I don't despair

"If you focus solely on the problem, you make it bigger and bigger!" – Richard Seidl

It's easy to despair in this world. Terrible things are happening in so many places right now. The political world order seems to have completely fallen apart and be at the mercy of pure arbitrariness. The economic situation is – let's say – tense, and prices in the supermarket are high. And in IT? Yes, here we have had a new toy for almost three years now, which is causing more and more of a stir. The internet is now full of generated texts that make you wonder why you are investing your time reading them. SEO is on steroids. YouTube is full of bad AI videos. And in software development, vibe coding is giving us more and more artifacts of questionable quality.

In my mentoring and coaching sessions, I'm noticing more and more that this overall situation is stressing and frightening people – which, of course, has an impact on their careers and lives. And these fears aren't always concrete – they're more diffuse. An uncertainty that feels threatening.

And I'm not exempt from this. I also have days when I ask myself: Where is all this leading? What's the point of it all? And quite simply: How can people cause so much chaos and destruction despite all the progress we've made?

When I look at these questions, I realize that they don't do me any good. Except to make me feel even worse. It's a downward spiral. But how can we counteract this? Well, we humans have the ability to change our behavior and learn new strategies. Three of them, which I keep reminding myself of, help me not to sink into despair, but to smile optimistically at the worrying unknowns of the future.

Change of focus

I often get annoyed when blah-blah AI texts steal my time on the internet. And as a software tester, I see a huge wave of junk software rolling toward us through vibe coding.

But then I can also reflect on how much routine work is now being taken off my hands every day by AI and my little agents. Or that we finally have a democratization of software development—anyone can now write software, what an achievement.

These two shifts in thinking alone expand the scope of possibilities for new, positive ideas!

A step back

Another strategy that always helps me is to take a step back and look at the whole thing from the outside. Everything comes back (and disappears again). Metaverse, 3D printing, centralized IT vs. decentralized IT... everything is fashionable at some point... then it's not... then it is again... and something productive remains.

There's also a nice saying that hangs on my bulletin board: "Hard times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. And weak people create hard times." We are probably at the beginning of the last phase right now. But that also means that afterwards, we will start all over again.

Stoicism

And again and again, the ideas of the ancient Stoics:

• Distinguish between what you can control and what you cannot. Act on what you can influence – accept the rest with equanimity.
• It is not what happens, but how you behave that determines your happiness.
• It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our opinions about things. So:

Switch on your brain.

Yes, everything is crazy right now. But that's no reason to despair. Humans have always grown in times of crisis. That's how new things and innovation come about.

It doesn't always help. But it often does.