“If you only ever fixate on the problem, you make it bigger and bigger!”
(Richard Seidl)
You could easily despair of this world. Terrible things are happening in so many places right now. The global political order seems to have come completely apart at the seams and to be at the mercy of pure arbitrariness. The economy is, let’s say, tense, and supermarket prices are high. And in IT? Well, for almost three years now we’ve had a new toy that keeps making more and more waves. The internet is full of generated texts that make you wonder, while reading, why you’re spending your time on them. SEO on steroids. YouTube full of bad AI videos. And in software development, vibe coding keeps giving us more and more artifacts of questionable quality.
In my mentoring and coaching sessions, I notice more and more that this overall climate stresses people out and scares them, which of course affects their work and their lives. And these fears aren’t always concrete. They’re more diffuse. An uncertainty that still feels threatening.
I’m not exempt from this at all. I have days too when I ask myself: where is all this going? What’s the point of it all? And, quite simply: how can people cause so much chaos and destruction despite all our progress?
When I look at these questions, I realize: they don’t do me any good. Except to make me feel even worse. A downward spiral. So how do you counter it? Well, we humans can change our behavior and learn new strategies. Three of them, which I keep reminding myself of (a change of focus, a step back and the Stoics), 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 online. And as a software tester, I see a huge wave of junk software rolling toward us thanks to vibe coding.
But then I can also remind myself how much routine work AI and my little agents take off my hands every day by now. Or that we finally have a democratization of software development: anyone can write software now, what an achievement.
These two shifts in thinking alone open up the space for new, positive ideas again!
A Step Back
Another strategy that always helps me: take a step back and look at the whole thing from the outside. Everything comes back around (and disappears again). The metaverse, 3D printing, centralized vs. decentralized IT… everything is in fashion at some point… then it isn’t… then it is again… and something productive always remains.
There’s also a nice saying pinned to my board: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” We’re probably at the beginning of the last phase right now. But that also means: afterwards, it starts all over again.
Stoicism
And again and again, the ideas of the ancient Stoics:
- Distinguish between what you can control and what you can’t. Act on what you can influence and accept the rest with equanimity.
- It’s not what happens but how you respond that determines your happiness.
- It’s not things themselves that disturb us, but our opinions about them. So:
Use your head.
Yes, everything is wild right now. But that’s no reason to lose heart. Humans have only ever grown through crises. That’s where new things and innovation come from.
Doesn’t always help. But often.
