Software induced stress

Maybe ‘who am I’ is not a helpful question. The answer to the question who am I is always something which exists as a relationship to others.

Who am I? A brother (to a sister), a son (to parents), a train driver (to a train), a doctor (to patients)…

The true question beneath ‘who am I’ is ‘what am I part of’. As the thing you’re part of is be definition larger, and so more significant, than you.

Maybe it is embedded in human life for the boundary around our self to be fuzzy, to expand to the system we’re in and to blend into the the thing we’re part of. My kidneys are part of me like I am a part of the company I work for.

Now what if you’re part of a system you don’t click with, a system you can’t keep up with, and a system you can’t feel truly worthy of. This to me describes the feeling of work stress.

But I don’t think it’s for inter-personal reasons. I think this feeling comes from an excessive use of computer software.

Software is quick, in the ChatGPT age it can think a thousand times faster than me. Marvellous as this is, where does it leave me. If I click a link and it takes more than 5 seconds to load I start to get frustrated. What must this do to my patience for myself?

I feel it makes me a slow, clumsy organic blob who’s productivity will never feel like it can keep up with the system I’m part of. The system that gives me the answer to ‘who am I’. Because when I’m using software all day I am ‘a user’ in a system whose goal is to ‘do work’. I am an extremely weak link in a very advanced chain that wants nothing other than to ‘do work’.

But when I go for a walk in the woods on a sunny morning, I am for an hour part of the woods, a walker, a human under the trees. This label is still not as salient an identity as my job title, but during that time it grows in its relevance and it becomes to feel more like who I am. Unlike software, the trees are slow and their goal seems to be to adapt to seasons at their own pace.

I didn’t when I was 25, but now I understand why its almost a cliche to hear of software devs abandoning tech to go start a farm or become a meditation teacher.