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There's a very specific kind of tiredness that only people in tech truly understand. It's not sleepiness, it's not laziness, it's not "I hate coding." It's that moment when you close your laptop at a reasonable hour, go make dinner... and five minutes later open your phone "just to check" LinkedIn or X. In that personal micro-hell, everyone seems to have launched a side project, contributed to open source, migrated to another framework, shoved AI into everything including their grocery list, and written a thread explaining how you can do it too "if you just get organized".
Meanwhile, you had a normal day: you fixed an ugly bug, helped a teammate, put together a decent API design. None of that generates viral threads. So the little voice shows up: "maybe I didn't do enough today." It's not rational, but it installs itself in your brain like a misplaced while(true).
If that sounds like you, the good news is you're neither alone nor "weak." The bad news is that you are, in fact, playing a game that — as burnout studies and productivity reports have been showing — is rigged: if you measure your worth against an aggregate of other people's highlights, you always lose.
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Title The psychological cost of always being "up to date"
There's a very specific kind of tiredness that only people in tech truly understand. It's not sleepiness, it's not laziness, it's not "I hate coding." It's that moment when you close your laptop at a reasonable hour, go make dinner... and five minutes later open your phone "just to check" LinkedIn or X. In that personal micro-hell, everyone seems to have launched a side project, contributed to open source, migrated to another framework, shoved AI into everything including their grocery list, and written a thread explaining how you can do it too "if you just get organized".
Meanwhile, you had a normal day: you fixed an ugly bug, helped a teammate, put together a decent API design. None of that generates viral threads. So the little voice shows up: "maybe I didn't do enough today." It's not rational, but it installs itself in your brain like a misplaced while(true).
If that sounds like you, the good news is you're neither alone nor "weak." The bad news is that you are, in fact, playing a game that — as burnout studies and productivity reports have been showing — is rigged: if you measure your worth against an aggregate of other people's highlights, you always lose.
Work type Article
Tags blog, programming, software development, software engineering
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Registry info in Safe Creative
Identifier 2602254695575
Entry date Feb 25, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC
License Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0
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Author. Holder Lino Figueroa Villar. Date Feb 25, 2026.
Information available at https://www.safecreative.org/work/2602254695575-the-psychological-cost-of-always-being-up-to-date-
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