Having just returned from vacation, I’ve been struggling to find the level of outrage I usually associate with work.
Maybe it’s post-holiday calm. Maybe it’s the slow realization that leadership only moves once the building’s on fire. Either way, the engine that used to run on frustration suddenly feels empty.
The Mountain and the Meeting
A month ago, an old friend and I made our annual escape to somewhere remote. We rose at dawn, woken by birdsong and the kind of silence you only find far from cell service. The hut had no food or coffee - only gas-station foraging sustaining us on the drive to the trailhead. Before the sun cleared the treeline, we were already climbing: four hours of steady scrambling across rock face. The climb itself was meditative - simple in its goal, devilishly challenging in its execution.
By lunchtime, we had crested our final ridgeline and reached the summit. Sitting on a boulder, looking down at the world below, I checked my watch. Thursday. Which meant I should have been in a Scrum of Scrums.
That’s when it hit me - how ridiculous all the manufactured urgency of “mission-critical” deadlines really were. From up here, it was all just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Back at work, things didn’t look any less absurd - just more expensive. All those “strategic initiatives” and KPIs boiled down to one thing: optimization masquerading as progress. Every number had a team fighting for relevance, a justification.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been so tired lately. Outrage is hard to sustain once you realize how much of the game is make-believe.
The Cost Centres
That thought stayed with me when I came across an interview with a former Amazon executive. In it, he was asked why he left a perfectly normal company with a perfectly acceptable paycheck - the sort of place where he could have easily run out the clock until retirement - and instead joined a tech company during its build phase.
His answer, concise and devastating:
I was working at a company where tech is a cost center.
Damn.
That one sentence has been living in my head rent-free ever since.
He’s 100% right.
In any traditional company, IT, software, tech - they’re just cost centres. Line items on an expense report.
As he expanded:
Anything you want to do, the default answer is “no.”
What would any half-sane executive do?
Reduce costs on their cost centres.
Naturally, you drive optimizations.
Through this lens of cost optimization, outsourcing, off-shoring, and lowest-price bids all make sense.
It’s only those of us who’ve had to work with those low-cost resources - and redo everything they touched - who realize just how penny-wise and pound-foolish it all is.
Over the years, none of the organizations I’ve worked for - none of my clients - have had tech as their core business. They’ve all been legacy companies, looking to leverage a bit of tech to save a few dollars here, move a bit faster there.
But as Dan Sullivan pointed out over twenty years ago, 10x is easier than 2x.
The Optimization Paradox
In my recent projects, I’ve seen what happens when optimization becomes a worldview. Every inefficiency is treated like a moral failing; every process, a spreadsheet cell.
At some point, my team of AI consultants quietly became a software development shop. Clients, wary of risk, now separate innovation into neatly isolated silos: one team to build the thing, another to deploy it, another still to monitor it. None of them talk. None of them can afford to.
The result feels less like modern engineering and more like reinventing 2003 - developers lobbing code over a wall, operations catching it blindfolded, everyone congratulating themselves on collaboration.
Entropy with better branding.
And maybe that’s the real paradox: optimization doesn’t eliminate chaos; it industrializes it.
In my experience, the human condition offers two coping strategies. You can internalize dysfunction until it corrodes you - sadness disguised as duty. Or you can externalize it, burn bright with outrage.
I used to do the latter.
Society calls it passion when men get angry. Anything else requires an apology.
But you can’t fight the tide. You can’t fight entropy forever. The chaos always wins.
So these days, I just watch it roll in.
If IT is a cost centre, then maybe outrage was too.
The Meritocracy Lie
When systems break down, the people inside them reach for meaning. For years, mine came from believing in merit - that skill and effort would be enough.
But as I edge toward forty, it finally feels like I’m coming up for air. For twenty years, I kept my nose to the grindstone - fixated on doing the thing. Even when I never really knew what I was signing up for. I started on the path to being a scientist because I was good at it in school and liked the idea of curing cancer one day. I avoided IT because I thought it would mean life as another drone in a cubicle farm.
So I kept my head down and just kept going. My generation was always told to just work hard.
Work hard in school so you get the grades. Work hard so those grades get you into a good university. Work hard so you get the good job. Work hard so you can get the good mortgage on the good house.
Just. Work. Hard.
After twenty years, I’ve had some success. I’ve achieved almost everything I ever set out to achieve from that checklist I mentally made at twelve. I have the wife, the two kids, the car, the mortgage - everything except the white picket fence. But once you have those things, once you’ve found a bit of comfort and security, the drive that built everything starts to slip. When the tasks that once consumed you become muscle memory, you finally have space to ease off the accelerator. Inevitably, you start questioning the assumptions that got you here.
Einstein allegedly said, “The thinking that got us to where we are, is not the thinking that will get us to where we want to be.” And you start to realize that competence isn’t rewarded - compliance and likability are.
The problem with forty is that the next twenty years suddenly come into focus. Without any major intervention, this is it. Just a quiet coast into retirement, into irrelevance. Invariably, the questions - What was it all for?, What will be my legacy? - begin to gnaw.
Maybe this isn’t burnout at all. Maybe it’s the midlife crisis Gilbert and Manson have been politely warning about.
You’re realizing the game was never real, and you’ve been trying to impress a scoreboard that never existed.
The Hype and the Hollow
The thing about realizing the game isn’t real is that once you see it, you can’t un-see it. We keep pretending, dressing the same old games in new buzzwords. AI is just the latest costume, outsourcing thought, risk, and responsibility into investor-friendly innovation. Every headline reads like a parody of progress.
Which brings me to Deloitte and the $440,000 AI-generated fever dream they sold to the Australian government: a 237-page report full of imagined footnotes, nonexistent references, and misquoted judges - “the kinds of things a first-year university student would be in deep trouble for.”
You can picture how it happened. Some intern, with a midnight deadline looming, turns to ChatGPT to pad out the content. “It’s going to the government,” they think. “Who really reads 200-page reports anyway?”
It gets sent for review via PDF-attached email to a partner who opens the preview on their iPhone, swipes past the first few pages, and thinks, “It’ll be fine.” Reply: LGTM.
And they were right. The government only noticed when researchers from the University of Sydney raised the alarm - three months after the report went public.
Machines hallucinate, corporations pretend, and we call it innovation.
This isn’t just about AI; it’s about how we outsource thinking itself.
All we’ve learned is that dishonesty scales just as efficiently as anything else.
The Good Bubble
Of course, there’s always someone ready to tell you it’s all fine - that chaos is, in fact, a good thing. The madness is the method. This is how things get done.
Enter Jeff Bezos, also of Amazon fame, casually calling out the AI frenzy as a “good bubble,” as if the whole industry were a well-timed soufflé.
And annoyingly, he might have a point.
At Italian Tech Week, he gave an hour-long interview with Reuters. He opened with the usual trite remarks about being “busier than ever in retirement.” But his views on LLMs and AI in this moment actually reframed my thinking.
Bezos described the current AI hype cycle as a Good Bubble, comparing it to the dot-com era. Back then, billions in venture capital were burned and hundreds of startups came and went. Only a few names survive today - Google, Yahoo, Cisco - and of those, most are but shadows of their former selves.
What matters is what endured from that era: widespread broadband, fibre-optic networking - the backbone that later made large-scale model training possible - and e-commerce. When the hype faded, the inventions remained - the quiet infrastructure that powered the next two decades of technological and economic growth.
By the same token, LLMs won’t be the panacea that changes everything, but they might just be the foundation for the next decade of innovation. And even if they aren’t the technology, they may have built the superclusters and data centres that enable whatever comes next.
The Absence of Outrage (Reprise)
Listening to Bezos, I realized that chaos isn’t a bug - it’s biology. The natural world doesn’t plan; it just experiments. It tries, fails, mutates, and keeps whatever happens to work.
Maybe our version of that is venture capital and vaporware - a species-level A/B test. The system isn’t broken; it’s just human.
And maybe that’s okay.
Because the more I think about it, the less I miss my old outrage.
I used to need that rage. These days, it’s just… gone.
I’ve been joking that it’s all a newfound Zen - as if enlightenment were just a short hike and a cocktail on the beach away.
But that’s a misdirect. The truth is, I can’t care enough to be angry anymore.
I’ve spent my whole life sprinting away from apathy. No problem couldn’t be outworked. No fire ignored.
As a kid, Batman was the hero. As the years passed, Commissioner Gordon - changing the system from the inside - was the truer one. Lately, I’m starting to think the Mayor who appointed him was the real mastermind - change, but at a deniable arm’s length.
I’m hoping this newfound apathy is just the discernment that comes with age.
It isn’t caring less, exactly; it’s deciding what to care about. More intention, less reaction. A realization that we can’t change the world in every grand, spectacular way, so instead we focus our efforts on the mundane yet manageable.
Maybe that’s all any of us are doing - running little experiments in meaning. Most will fail, some will mutate, a few might survive.
Outrage was just my control group, a variable that no longer works.
Now we begin the next test.
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