Most of what I write about here has something to do with software: systems, architecture, tools, failures, and the occasional attempt to understand why something that looked perfectly stable suddenly isn’t.
This one is different.
Over the past few months, several of the things I considered stable parts of my life have either disappeared or started to move at roughly the same time. Not all of them are technical problems. In fact, most of them cannot be fixed with a better abstraction, another test, or a carefully planned migration.
Still, I noticed that I kept thinking about what was happening in the language I know best: systems, dependencies, redundancy, cascading failures, architecture and rebuilding.
So this is not really a software article.
But it might be an engineer’s way of thinking about what happens when the system in question is your own life.
What happens when life does not collapse all at once, but loses its structural support one pillar at a time?
There are things in life that we rarely think about as long as they work. A relationship, a career, a home, family, friendships, health, plans for the future. They form the structure around us so naturally that after a while we stop seeing them as separate things. Together, they simply become what we call my life.
It is only when one of them disappears that we notice how much weight it was carrying.
When that happens, the first reaction is usually not to question the whole structure. We compensate. If a relationship ends, work suddenly becomes more important. It provides routine, purpose, people, problems to solve and a reason to get up in the morning. If work becomes difficult, perhaps home and family become the safe place instead. If the future becomes uncertain, familiar routines keep the present predictable.
In other words, we redistribute the load.
As a software engineer, I cannot help seeing a familiar pattern in this. We design systems with the assumption that components will fail. A resilient system is not one in which nothing ever breaks; it is one that can tolerate something breaking without taking everything else down with it. We introduce redundancy, isolate failures and try very hard not to create single points of failure.
Human lives work surprisingly similarly, except that nobody sits down at twenty-five and draws an architecture diagram for the next fifty years.
We accumulate dependencies instead.
A partner gradually becomes responsible for most of our emotional intimacy. An employer provides not only money but identity, structure, social contact and a sense of usefulness. A city becomes synonymous with home. Family represents continuity. A particular idea of the future gives meaning to decisions made in the present.
None of this feels dangerous while everything is running.
Then one component fails.
And usually, the system survives.
The interesting part begins when another one fails shortly afterwards.
When Failure Stops Being Isolated
There is a significant difference between having several problems and experiencing cascading failure.
If one important part of life disappears, the remaining parts absorb some of its weight. That is one of the ways we recover. But it also means that those remaining structures suddenly matter more than they did before.
After losing one source of stability, it is natural to think: at least I still have my work. At least I still have my family. At least I still know where I belong. At least this part of my future is certain.
Those sentences are comforting because they define the boundary of the damage. Something has been lost, but the rest of the map still exists.
If one of those remaining certainties then starts to disappear as well, the effect is strangely disproportionate. The second loss does not merely add another problem. It changes the meaning of the first one. What previously looked like damage to one part of life starts to look like uncertainty about the structure itself.
The question changes from How do I deal with this? to What exactly is still stable?
That is a much harder question.
In engineering terms, redundancy only helps while redundant components remain independent. If one failure increases the load on another component, which then becomes more likely to fail, you have the beginning of a cascade.
Life does not follow engineering diagrams, of course. A relationship is not a service, a family is not a cluster and an employer is not an availability zone. You cannot replicate your father across three data centers, and there is no sensible SLA for friendship.
Still, the analogy exposes something that I find uncomfortable: many things I think of as parts of my identity are actually infrastructure.
- “I am a software engineer.”
- “I am someone’s partner.”
- “I work for this company.”
- “This city is my home.”
- “This is what I will probably be doing five years from now.”
These sentences sound like descriptions of a person. But they also describe relationships between that person and external systems. Employers can disappear. Relationships can end. Cities can become unaffordable or unfamiliar. Families change. Bodies change. Plans become obsolete.
When several of those things move at once, it can feel as if identity itself is being dismantled.
Perhaps it is not.
Perhaps what is being dismantled is the structure that made identity easy to describe.
The Urge to Rebuild
This is usually the point where advice starts arriving.
Find a new job. Meet someone new. Move somewhere else. Start a project. Set goals. Establish routines. Reinvent yourself. Look forward instead of backward.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Eventually, some form of rebuilding is necessary. Human beings need attachment, purpose, structure and other people. The goal cannot reasonably be to become independent of everything that might someday disappear.
But I have started to wonder whether rebuilding too quickly has its own risk.
If a building collapses and the first priority is to replace every missing wall exactly where it used to be, there is not much opportunity to ask whether the old floor plan was actually good.
A new relationship can occupy exactly the same structural position as the old one. A new employer can become the same source of identity and security. A new five-year plan can restore the reassuring illusion that the future has agreed to cooperate.
The materials change, but the architecture remains untouched.
This is where the metaphor of an empty field becomes more useful to me than the metaphor of ruins.
An empty field initially sounds bleak. There is no shelter, no obvious orientation and nothing telling you where anything belongs. If you have spent years maintaining a structure, the absence of one looks like failure.
But an empty field has one property that a finished building does not have: it has not yet decided what it must become.
That does not automatically make loss a gift. I dislike the tendency to turn every painful event into an inspirational lesson. Some losses are simply losses. Things that mattered are gone, and there is no obligation to be grateful for that.
Freedom itself is not always pleasant either. Freedom that you deliberately choose can feel exhilarating; freedom produced by losing things you wanted to keep can feel remarkably similar to abandonment.
And yet both can be true at once.
An empty field can be frightening because nothing is there, and valuable because nothing is fixed.
You do not have to thank the bulldozer to notice the horizon.
What Can Be Carried?
Maybe, then, the first question after a collapse should not be "What do I build next?".
Maybe it should be "What survived?".
Not in the sense of searching for some mystical, immutable “true self” underneath everything else. I am not convinced such a thing exists. People are shaped by their relationships, environments, work and history. Remove all context from a person and there may not be some perfectly preserved essence waiting underneath.
But some things are more portable than others.
An employer can disappear, but skills travel. A project can end, but experience remains. Plans can fail without destroying curiosity. A relationship can end without erasing the capacity to love. Institutions can disappear while values remain. Creative work can survive circumstances that completely change the context in which it was created.
Perhaps these things are not pillars at all. Pillars support us from outside. These are things we carry.
That distinction seems increasingly important to me.
The usual story about personal crisis has a satisfying narrative arc. Something collapses, the protagonist struggles, learns what really matters, rebuilds a better life and eventually looks backward from a position of renewed stability. It is a good structure for books, talks and films because it has an ending.
Actual life has an inconvenient middle.
There is a period in which you know what has ended but do not yet know what begins next. The old blueprint no longer applies, but there is no new one. There may be possibilities without preferences, freedom without direction and hope without anything concrete to attach it to.
We seem strangely uncomfortable with that state. We treat uncertainty as a temporary defect that should be resolved as efficiently as possible.
I am no longer sure that is always useful.
There may be value in spending some time between buildings.
Not indefinitely. Not as an excuse to withdraw from life. But long enough to look at the old structure without immediately trying to reproduce it.
Which parts actually supported me? Which parts merely occupied space? Which compromises had quietly become load-bearing? Which rooms had I stopped entering years ago? Which dependencies were unavoidable, and which ones did I create because they made life easier to predict?
And perhaps the most important question: if nobody handed me the old blueprint again, would I really design the same building?
I do not have an answer yet.
That is partly why I wanted to write this now rather than years later, when memory might have rearranged everything into a clean story about adversity and personal growth. I am more interested in the unresolved part: the point at which enough familiar structures have become uncertain that rebuilding the old life no longer seems like the only imaginable objective.
Losing one pillar makes you reach for the others. Losing several can make you question the architecture.
Maybe that does not mean everything has failed.
Maybe it means there is finally a difference between rebuilding stability and rebuilding the past.
If you ever find yourself standing on that empty field, there may be no reason to start pouring concrete immediately. You can stand there for a while. Look at what is still with you. Look at what you actually miss and what you only assumed you were supposed to replace.
Then, eventually, decide what deserves to be built again.
This article has also been published on Medium.
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