Everybody Hurts. That Was the Deal.
Pain was the sense organ of craft. We removed it and called it progress.
Howdy, folks.
I read a piece this morning called Thoughts on slowing the fuck down by Mario Zechner. It’s ostensibly about coding agents and how they’re quietly eating production codebases alive — booboos compounding at unsustainable rates, distributed across nobody, until one day you turn around and the whole thing is held together by hope and snapshot tests neither of you should trust.
Good piece. Worth the read. Go read it.
But about three paragraphs in, an old R.E.M. song popped into my head and would not leave.
You know the one. Stipe at his most achingly direct, telling you to hold on, hold on. That song was a suicide-prevention anthem dressed in slowcore. The whole point — the whole point — was that pain is the evidence of being alive, of being human, of being in the room with everybody else who is also in the room. Pain was the connecting tissue. The thing you weren’t alone in. The thing that meant you were here.
Everybody hurts. Sometimes.
And reading Zechner this morning, the thing that hit me — the actual thing — wasn’t agents are bad. It was that we just spent eighteen months engineering the pain out of the loop and calling it progress.
The agent doesn’t hurt when it ships the booboo.
The orchestrator doesn’t hurt when the codebase rots.
The product manager doesn’t hurt when the feature lands and nobody uses it.
We removed the only sensor that was telling us anything was wrong, and we patted ourselves on the back for the bandwidth gains.
Layers, like ogres
Here’s where it gets layered, because this thing is not a coding agent piece. The coding agents are just the magnifying glass. The thing the magnifying glass is showing you is much, much older than 2024.
Layer one — the code. Zechner’s argument. Agents make small errors. Humans also make small errors. The difference is humans hate pain, so eventually the pain reaches a threshold and the human refactors the thing or quits the job or screams at the wall until somebody else does. That threshold is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the immune system. Remove the bottleneck and the booboos compound at the speed of inference, distributed across an orchestrator that feels nothing. Now nobody hurts. And everything is broken.
Layer two — the enterprise. I have spent twenty-five years inside the kind of organizations Zechner is describing, except the rot took ten years to arrive instead of ten weeks. Same disease. The committee feels nothing. The deck gets made. The deck confirms what everyone already knew. The PowerPoint is a beautiful, glossy organ for not feeling the thing. By the time the pain reaches anyone with the authority to act, it has been distributed so thin across so many people that nobody quite knows whose problem it was supposed to be. Pain that nobody owns is pain that nobody fixes. Welcome to digital transformation.
Layer three — spiritual bypassing. The good-vibes-only crowd. The “high vibrational” community that has surgically removed every member who introduced friction. The yoga teacher who can’t tell you anything is wrong because that would be negative. This is the same move. The community engineered out its pain organ in the name of love and light, and now the community is unable to detect that the founder is a predator, the finances don’t add up, and the practice has become a personality cult. Nothing hurts. Everything is broken.
Layer four — the writing. The AI-generated newsletter that didn’t hurt to write. You can feel it the second you start reading it. There’s no friction signature in the prose. Nobody wrestled with anything. Nobody chose this word over that word and felt the trade-off in their body. Which is exactly why it doesn’t hurt to read. Which is exactly why nobody remembers it. Which is exactly why the whole content economy is currently drowning in a beige tide of perfectly grammatical nothing.
I keep peeling. Each layer is the same shape.
Pain was the sense organ of craft. We removed it and called it progress.
The deal we just opted out of
Here’s the thing nobody is naming. Pain wasn’t a bug in the system of being alive. It wasn’t an inefficiency the universe forgot to optimize. It was the signaling layer. It was how the body told you the stove was hot. It was how the codebase told you the abstraction was wrong. It was how the marriage told you the agreement had drifted. It was how the writing told you the sentence was a lie.
Take away the pain and you don’t get freedom. You get a body that can’t feel the stove. A codebase that can’t feel the rot. A marriage that can’t feel the drift. A sentence that can’t tell when it’s lying, written by someone who can no longer tell either.
This is not nostalgia for suffering. I am not romanticizing the grind. I am the guy who spent the last three years building an entire personal cognitive scaffold specifically so I could stop suffering for no reason. I am pro pain reduction in every place where the pain was paying no rent. I’ll burn down the unnecessary hurt with you. We can hold the lighter together.
But there’s a difference between the pain that wasn’t supposed to be there and the pain that was load-bearing the whole time. And the move we just made — collectively, culturally, very fucking quickly — was to remove all of it. The good and the bad. The signal and the noise. The whole thing. We outsourced the hurt and we did it without asking what the hurt was for.
The hurt was for knowing. The hurt was the way the system told you it was alive. The hurt was the deal.
Everybody hurts. Sometimes. That was the deal — the deal we just opted out of, and the bill is coming due.
Opting back in
I don’t have a five-step framework for this. I’m not going to tell you to delete Cursor or quit your job or unsubscribe from the AI newsletter that hasn’t hurt anyone in months.
I’m going to tell you what I’m doing, which is the only thing I know how to honestly tell you.
I am putting my hands back on the things that matter.
The architectural decisions on this software get made by me, in a notebook, with a pen that smudges if I press too hard. The agent helps with the boring parts after I know what the gestalt is. I feel the friction of the design. I let the friction be information. When something hurts, I follow the hurt to the thing it’s pointing at, instead of routing around it.
The newsletter you are reading right now was written by a person who is currently kind of pissed off and a little bit sad and unreasonably attached to an R.E.M. song from 1992. None of those things would survive translation through a model. All of them are the thing that makes this worth reading, if it is.
The coaching conversations get the full bandwidth of my actual nervous system in the room with the client’s actual nervous system. Not because that’s nobler. Because that’s where the signal is. The signal is in the wince. The signal is in the catch in the throat. The signal is in the moment I notice I’m uncomfortable and have to decide whether to name it. Take that out and you get a chatbot in a hoodie, which is fine, but it isn’t the thing.
The spiritual practice involves the cards that hit hard and the dreams that won’t leave and the rituals where I don’t always feel great afterward. I don’t get to skip that part. I am not interested in a practice with the pain surgically removed, because what would be left wouldn’t be a practice. It would be a brochure.
So here’s the move, if you want one.
Find the place in your life where you are currently using a tool, a system, a substance, a workflow, or a relationship to not feel the thing. Notice it. Don’t shame yourself. Just notice. And then ask the heretical question:
What was the pain trying to tell me?
Not so you can drown in it. Not so you can perform suffering as virtue. The hustle bros already monetized that and it’s worse than the thing it was reacting to. Just so you can let the signal in long enough to learn what it was carrying.
Because everybody hurts. Sometimes.
And that — that — was the deal.
Stay feral, folks.