standup
i read Belle Burden’s Strangers, a memoir of a rich woman whose husband suddenly and surprisingly leaves her and their children at the beginning of the pandemic, in just a couple of sittings on a few afternoons last week. i was late to the book and the discourse has already ended but Deborah had read it when things were popping off and i was still curious. i’m not going to say it’s Tolstoy but, if nothing else, it moved quickly and held my attention throughout and, in 2026, this is not nothing!
sometimes when i am so cracked out on screens i think of what i’m doing as “medicinal reading”, not in the sense that the book is making me a better person or driving me to action but where it’s like, regardless of the content, if i am stringing paragraphs and then pages and then chapters together with my eyes moving over them and not looking at my phone over a series of some minutes, then i feel that i am, on some low level, healing myself and moving my life towards a better place, and that the longer that i can maintain this state, which is basically meditation, even if i am reading bad genre fiction or a buzzy memoir or whatever, the closer i will be to being a healthy person again. which is maybe real on some neurological level and maybe just a placebo of projection, but if there aren’t harmful side effects, i’ll take any pill that can make me think it works.
a lot of my psychological experience of reading Strangers was the dance between being seduced by the details of her life as a hella rich person (which, as a voracious American media consumer who was not born rich, fantasizing about rich people and the details of being rich has been a huge part of my life for my entire life) and being alienated by the details of her life as a hella rich person. even at the depths of her despair about the divorce settlement, Burden does not have to have or even really seem to consider a real job; the only question is how much she will make selling her stake in one or more of the incredibly valuable properties she bought with one of her trust funds and how much of an emotional loss it will be to exchange the incredibly valuable property for a large sum of money that is more than many people will ever make in their entire lives (and spoiler alert: turns out she gets to keep them both!). she does do pro bono legal work on immigration cases, which she introduces as saying that it’s something she’s done a minimum amount of to keep her law license from lapsing but eventually seems to find true meaning in. that’s genuinely admirable, but, based on the book, it doesn’t seem to usually take up much of her time. there’s a long stretch where it seems like, by her own description, the only thing she does every day is take a really long walk. she is depicting this as her emotional and spiritual rock bottom but i’m sure for a lot of people it’s like “man, I’d love to have time to take a three hour walk every day as i otherwise devote my life to processing my trauma on the beautiful wealthy island where i live rent free and have a key to a private beach that cost more to acquire than many people’s homes do.”
i am not as rich as Belle Burden, but reading her book did make me also think about myself (to be fair, every book does). for one thing, i’ve been taking a lot of three hour walks of my own lately (though mine are much more joyful). i have time to do that and and to play guitar into a loop pedal and to read a memoir in the middle of a weekday afternoon because i left my previous job two months ago with two months severance/paid COBRA. i had been working at the company for more than six years and was the literal reigning company “MVP” and no one (including me) was expecting that i would leave. when i very suddenly decided that i was going to (i had basically one day from learning of the possibility of an exit with severance to having to decide whether i was going to take it), i told myself i was going to not immediately rush into getting another job. the whole point of taking the dramatic opportunity of leaving in this way at this time was that the severance was giving me a concrete ability to say to myself: “okay, but really, you can take a minute for yourself before figuring out What’s Next.”
which in some ways is not like me. i’ve always had a lot of money and job anxiety. my mom mostly stayed at home when i was growing up and my dad, who was very good at what he did but in a turbulent and increasingly precarious industry, switched jobs every few years in my adolescence. when i told them i was quitting my job, on Facetime, my dad, who is not generally one for giving advice (which is good because i am not generally one for taking it (we’re both Scorpios)), said, “the thing i wish i had done during the periods when i was out of work was to actually enjoy it.” i understand why he couldn’t actually do that—our situations differ in that he was the sole income earner for a family with school-age children and i am a DINK renter with no real responsibilities or dependencies—but i appreciated the generosity of the sentiment nonetheless.
and, in my way, i have mostly succeeded in enjoying it so far (humblebrag). i did have a brief panic spike during my notice period when i experienced what i can only describe as like watching my funeral from the afterlife in terms of the amount of people saying incredibly nice things about me and sometimes literally crying that we wouldn’t be coworkers anymore (i cried too). that was on the one hand beautiful for me emotionally, a lovely expression of the bonds i’d built over half a decade, and on the other hand, it was so lovely that as the notice period came closer to a close, my internal monologue increasingly got stuck in a panic loop of “wait…so, in 2026…in this economy…when your once very stable and lucrative profession is going through an identity crisis and may no longer exist in the same way quite soon…you left a job you were very good at…where you had so many dear friends and basically everyone loved you…and you were paid pretty well…and you worked from home and occasionally got to take nice global trips to hang out with your friends…where even if the company wasn’t on an amazing trajectory, your position in it was as safe as one could be…without even having a plan for a next job, much less an offer…WHAT A TOTALLY INSANE FREAK YOU ARE WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS!?!” and that felt really Very Bad and if i thought i could have walked it back at that point, maybe i would have, but at that point, i was committed to the decision and, if nothing else, i am good at committing (this is a software engineer joke).
i occasionally continue to feel waves of despair about my prospects as a worker and this will likely intensify and become more frequent as i shift from this wonderful summer without a job into the active process of trying to convince people to hire me (Deborah was a bit down this morning after hearing that she didn’t get an interview for a job she had applied for, though working out helped and i know she’s going to find somewhere that appreciates how great she is). i think maybe part of the reason i’m writing to you here now is that i’m trying to write my way to my next thing? not in the sense that these posts are going to be actually instrumental in getting me my next job (though i did get my first big tech job thanks in part to e reading my newsletter), but in the sense of finding the next version of me. i know my understanding of myself is deepened by writing; that when i’m writing regularly, i generally feel less dread and anxiety and more excitement and hope for the future; and that my ability to express myself and represent myself to others is a crucial skill that i’m doing reps to build in these notes, even if i’m writing about like Geordie Shore and how bad my TikTok feed has gotten and not React state management or agent harnesses or how best to communicate to stakeholders when there are dependencies on a project blocking progress.
there are many sicko things about my relationship with work. sorry to be gross but a hilarious one is that i have long had a very regular, some might say too regular, digestive system, and one of the things i quickly learned after leaving my job was that clockwork regularity was in some way driven by the huge amounts of anxiety that would build up in me overnight as i braced myself to do another day of labor. upon waking, i would race to the bathroom to purge this physical representation of my anxiety from my bowels and start the day. at one point, i chased this down with my doctor and did some “testing” and only stopped pursuing it when she asked whether i might be lactose intolerant and i said “well if that’s the reason, i’ll just accept it as a cost of doing business. i don’t want to stop eating butter and cheese” and she said, “well nobody wants to.” but what’s funny (/fucked up!) is that this pretty core biological fact of my life just kind of…immediately changed once i stopped having work every morning and so stopped having work stress every morning (don’t worry, i have supplemented with probiotics and additional fiber).
another sicko thing about me and work is that i really like doing standups? in case you’re not familiar, the daily "standing meeting” that i’m sure was/is a feature of a lot of traditional offices evolved, in the tech world, into the “standup”, a daily “ceremony” associated with the Agile project management framework where a team syncs to make sure that everyone was progressing through the two week sprint of work as planned without blockers. this initially was an actual short in-person meeting or synchronous video call, and at some places still is, but at the international tech companies where i’ve worked remotely for the last 10 years, when we’ve used standups, they’ve been Slack messages you post in your team channel every day about what you’re doing.
there are a few variations on the form: some people post a standup at the end of the day, covering what they did that day; some people post a standup at the beginning of the day, covering what they plan to do; some people do a hybrid where they try to bridge the two (this always seemed like too much work to me). i’ve tried a variety of styles but i would generally do beginning of the day because i liked having a plan and also because i was often working on whatever actual thing i was working on until the last possible minute at the end of the day and then i wouldn’t do it that day and then once you haven’t done it one day it’s easy not to do it for two days and then it’s like “maybe i’ll just do an end of the week update” and then it’s the next quarter already and i don’t know why i’m telling you guys this, you know my newsletter publishing schedule.
i haven’t taken a poll or anything but i would suspect that most of my coworkers really hated doing standups (and some of them have literally said to me “i hate doing standups”)! when i came into my most recent team, full of people i felt such respect and love for, and they didn’t do standups and some people in fact gave signals that they didn’t like doing standups, i tried to be very carefully in introducing it, like, “i know most people don’t like doing standups but i personally kind of need to do standups and if i don’t have the obligation to post them every day publicly, i will not do them. but i don’t want my posting them to make you feel like you have to do them.” (which in retrospect was a nice sentiment but also kind of a selfish cop-out in terms of solidarity: whether or not i wanted them to have to do standups, me doing standups created an expectation of people doing them that affected them)
why did i like doing standups? a few reasons.
the first is that despite being consistently high-performing and well-praised, i always had a lot of anxiety about my performance and whether i was doing enough or fast enough (not impostor syndrome so much as “expects way too much of myself given the limits of space and time” syndrome). writing my standups was a kind of hedge against this anxiety: i told myself that anyone who wanted to could see what i was saying i was doing every day, which would prevent me from going too far down the wrong path or getting stuck. if i write every morning that i’m still working on this thing that i thought was going to take less time, the post creates the natural space to have a conversation about it and then it’s no longer just my problem. in other words, the standup is a way of using transparency to distribute responsibility so it doesn’t feel like the pressure is all on you.
the second is kind of the flipside of that; it’s so easy, especially when you work from home and when you’re working on complicated things all day that exist only as 1s and 0s inside this box of light shining into your eyes, for a day to go by and for you to feel like “i’m exhausted but what did i even do?” the standup helps here because it provides this very concrete list of things you can tell yourself you did (or tried to do, or were going to do before something else higher priority popped up). i’ve written here before about using gratitude notes as a way to reveal to myself that even during what i would describe as very “bad” days, there are tons of good moments, and that this overarching abstraction of “bad day” is a totally arbitrary and inadequate label that becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (if you believe you had a bad day, you did)! i think standups kind of serve a similar purpose for me? by regularly enumerating the concrete things of the day, when things get bad, i prevent my mind from fully blurring into the abstraction of “today was a bad day i feel like i accomplished nothing.” (a side benefit to this is that when it’s time for performance reviews, you have a ton of raw material to harvest that hasn’t been lost to the slipstream of your memory).
but while those are both important and valuable things, i’ll be honest, mostly i love writing standups because…it’s personal blogging! i do standups as standup, riffing, memeing, doing bits. i like writing about myself and posting about it on the internet and knowing other people were going to read it. i always tried to make my standups not just informative about milestones and progress, but also personal, fun, funny, an opportunity to state preferences and have disagreements and start conversations and to be known by my coworkers and to make them feel known by me.
some time in the near future i will hopefully be back to doing that, but for now, you’re my coworker, so my standup for today is mostly that i thought about and wrote this note to you lol. i also ran 8 miles on the treadmill, washed dishes, filled my weekly pill organizer, texted with friends, made a frozen pizza for lunch (the Wirecutter ranking of Di Fara as the best frozen pizza is, i think, correct, on first try! even though they're fucking dead to me after describing my beloved Trader Joe's Coffee Lovers Espresso Beans as tasting "of cheap, low-quality chocolate"), and read this unnecesarily (but impressively) exhaustive analysis of the controversy over the book Charity and Sylvia that Deborah was reading. once i send this to you, i will try to squeeze in some work on my app (but maybe just read a book: I’m currently juggling Nebraska by Monica Datta (novel), The Frenchmen: Or My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin (biography), and Bring That Beat Back by Nate Patrin (history)) and then Deborah is making larb for dinner and we have an episode of 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After to watch. signing off for the day now, bye!