Last night was supposed to be productive.
Deadlines. Deep focus.
“Just one more thing.”
This morning, I checked my blood sugar. 22.3 mmol/L.
That number stopped me cold.
Not because I don’t understand why it happened — but because it forced a question most of us in tech avoid:
Is this version of productivity actually worth it?
The Logs We Ignore
In engineering, we obsess over observability. Logs. Metrics. Traces. Alerts.We know systems don’t fail randomly. They fail after long periods of ignored signals.
But when it comes to our bodies, we act differently.
Late nights are normal. Skipped meals are “part of the job.”
Sitting for 10 hours straight is invisible.It feels harmless in the moment.
But the body keeps its own logs. And it never forgets.
Managing Diabetes Removes the Illusion
For me, managing diabetes means the cost of overwork shows up immediately — not years later.
Every late night. Every missed meal. Every long stretch of sitting.
Those aren’t small choices.
They’re direct inputs into a system already under load.
In tech, we’d call this biological technical debt.
Ignore it long enough, and the system degrades.
Push it harder, and failures become inevitable.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Tech Culture
We still celebrate the hero who stays up all night to ship a feature.
We rarely celebrate the engineer who:
Logs off on time
Goes for a walk
Protects their health like production infrastructure
Shipping code matters. Delivering value matters.
But waking up to a health alert that says the system is already degrading should make us pause. Because if the stack is healthy but the person maintaining it isn’t, the project is still failing.
An Honest Question
So I’m genuinely curious:
Where do you draw the line between commitment and self-damage?
And do we need to rethink how we define “high performance” before more of us burn out — or break down?
Top comments (0)