Today, I want to talk about something that has absolutely nothing to do with code, system engineering, or software architecture. Or maybe, if we look closely enough, it has everything to do with it.
We live and work in chaotic times. Sure, today’s modern toolsets and AI assistants allow us to offload some of the tedious, day-to-day syntax, making the core technical work slightly more relaxed. Yet, anyone in our industry knows the harsh truth: burnout is always lurking just around the corner. The screen stays on, the backlog grows, and the cognitive load compounds.
There is a song by an Italian songwriter, Luciano Ligabue, called "Metti in circolo il tuo amore" (Circulate Your Love). A specific stanza has stayed with me for years:
“E ti sei opposto all'onda / Ed è lì che hai capito / Che più ti opponi e più ti tira giù / E ti senti ad una festa / Per cui non hai l'invito / Per cui gli inviti adesso falli tu”
In English it sounds more or less like this:
“And you fought the wave / And that's when you realized / That the more you fight it, the more it pulls you down / And you feel like you're at a party / To which you have no invitation / So from now on, you make the invitations yourself”
These few words triggered a deep reflection in me, and they eventually shaped my personal survival philosophy: "Fare il morto a galla"—doing the dead man's float.
When you are far out at sea, exhausted, and the currents take over, fighting the water is a mathematical error. The more you thrash, the more oxygen you burn, the denser your body becomes, and the faster you sink. The only scientifically and existentially correct strategy is to stop kicking. You flip onto your back, offer your maximum surface area to the water, and let the sea hold you up.
In our profession, doing the float is the only real way to catch your breath when you are drowning in inputs. It is a strategic timeout. It’s not giving up; it’s an extreme optimization of your remaining energy when the system is in thermal throttling.
But Ligabue’s lyrics go further: “So from now on, you make the invitations yourself.” That line carries a profound, almost architectural weight. It’s about shifting from a purely reactive state to an active one. It means stopping the constant scramble to meet external expectations, and instead, redefining the rules of your own space. I could spend paragraphs explaining exactly what this means to me, but I prefer to leave it open. In engineering, we value clean abstraction; in life, some concepts are best left for the reader to implement in their own way.
I know this is incredibly difficult to practice. The external inputs—the notifications, the metrics, the pressure to always perform—are overwhelming. The world demands constant computation.
But sometimes, the most productive thing a senior mind can do is to drop the frequency to zero, lie back, and float.
And you? When the waves get too high and the current is strong, how do you catch your breath?
Top comments (5)
Hey Marco. Hope you are well. I tend to make sure to focus on thing at a time before I even start doing the task I needed to do. That way, I have more focus on the thing I needed to do instead of worrying about other things. Been doing so for almost a year and I felt more productive than before!
p.s I saw your concerns about AI usage. Please leave the question on this post so that everyone can see it and may share the same situation as you. I will respond in a timely manner with your questions. Posting it there will help others to understand when to use AI and when not to. dev.to/francistrdev/ask-a-dev-comm...
@dannwaneri comment:
That's actually a cleaner solution than the current text disclaimer. A platform-native badge that signals AI assistance without requiring the author to write their own disclosure — standardised, consistent, machine-readable and visible to readers without being buried at the bottom of the post. @fm 's "detect quality not AI" and your banner idea are pointing at the same thing: structural signals rather than text enforcement. Worth putting directly in Francis's post as a suggestion since Ben and Jess are watching that thread.
Ciao @francistrdev i am ok. and you...? How are you? Yours is an excellent strategy: focusing on one thing at a time, creating priority queues. But sometimes burnout occurs because inputs come from different sources. Sometimes we need to deal with complicated situations that asynchronously come from different areas. That's when burnout really sets in, and that's when I implement my strategy. Thanks for your attention.
P.S. I wrote my comment and some other insights in the thread you suggest.
the backlog growth as a cognitive tax is the part most people underestimate. i started treating my task list like a memory leak - you need to GC it before it takes down the whole system.
It's a bit like when an LLM saturates its context window and hallucinates. There you open a new chat session. But a human brain works a little differently.
fair analogy but i think the gap is bigger here. with an LLM the hallucination is visible - something obviously wrong in the output. with a human the dropped item just disappears. no signal, no error, nothing to flag. that is the harder problem to manage.