Let's be honest.
We all talk about technical debt - bad code, rushed features, and spaghetti logic that haunts our codebase.
 But there's a deeper, darker kind of debt that nobody warns you about:
Mental Debt
-The cost of constantly switching contexts.
-The anxiety of open tabs.
-The guilt of unfinished side projects.
-The burnout masked as "grind".
and the worst part? it's normalized.
Context-Switching Isn’t a Skill - It’s a Trap
Every dev today is juggling:
-Frontend logic
-Backend APIs
-PR reviews
-CI/CD issues
-Slack messages
-"Just a quick call"
We treat multitasking like a flex.
It's not.
It's cognitive sef-harm.
your write 30 lines of code, get interupted,
and then return with zero flow.
But nobody teaches you how to protect your brain from the chaos.
you are expected to "manage"
Learning Never Ends - and That’s Exhausting
Every week, there's a new tool, a new JS framework, or a hot backend trick.
And if you are not constantly learning, then you're "falling behind"
But,
-what if you are tired?
-what if you just want to do good work with what you know?
That's not laziness.
That's sustainability
The pressure to never stop learning can quietly burn you out, even if you love tech.
Side Projects Are Romanticized Guilt Machines
Everyone says: "Build side projects!"
But what they don't say is:
-you"ll doubt yourself halfway through.
-you'll compare it to polished Dribble shots.
-you'll start thinking you're not good enough to build something "worthy".
We made side projects into portfolio, not playgrouds.
We stopped building for fun.
Now we build to prove something.
The Myth of loving what You Do
"you are lucky to code for a living".
Yes we are,
But when passion becomes pressure, it becomes poison|
When "doing what you love" becomes "doing 24/7" - you burn out.
And here's the truth:
You don't have to always love coding.
Your just have respect your boundaries.
The Conclusion is:
We are not robots,
we are not pipelines.
We are people who think, feel, get overwhelmed, and need breaks.
Let's normalize:
-Saying no
-Building slowly
-Logging off
-Not learning every new thing
-Protecting out energy
If you are feeling tired then you are not alone.
And no, you don't need to ship more to matter.
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