When the pillars collapse one after another

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