Sitting in a Quiet Room While a Parade Goes By Outside

There's a specific kind of mental whiplash happening right now, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one feeling it.

Lately, my mental state feels like I'm sitting in a perfectly quiet room, but outside the window is a parade. Except the parade is on fire, half the floats are driven by AI, and the other half are geopolitical crises.

Professionally, it feels like trying to upgrade an airplane's engine while it's in mid-flight. I'm putting everything I have into upskilling in a tech landscape where Claude seems to drop a world-altering tool every 12 hours. My timeline is flooded with AI "gurus" promising you can turn $1 into $100,000 with autonomous agents. And yet, the reality is that massive companies are simultaneously laying off thousands of brilliant veterans into the exact same talent pool the rest of us are trying to swim in. The math is exhausting.

But then, you log off the IDE or your timeline, and you are immediately hit with the weight of the actual world.

You go from reading about astronauts returning to the moon, straight into reading about escalations between the US and Iran. You watch people engagement-farming with fake news just to get a payout check, all while the real-world economic shocks are quietly suffocating everyday life here in Nigeria. You try to focus on your sprint, while simultaneously processing the deep, heavy frustration of watching profoundly disconnected leadership mishandle real human tragedies, like the recent response to the Jos massacre.

It is absurd. It is deafeningly loud. Everyone is screaming for attention, whether what they are saying is true, false, or entirely fabricated.

We spend so much time online talking about "crushing it," "optimizing our routines," and "10x-ing our output." But honestly? Right now, the world is a mess.

If you are feeling completely, spectacularly overwhelmed by the noise - hi. Me too.

Sometimes, the biggest achievement of the week doesn't go on a resume. Sometimes, it's just surviving the noise. It's staying grounded, doing your work, protecting your peace, and making it out of the week with your sanity intact.

"His sadness soon gave way to determination." - From Basho and the Fox. Even the greatest poet in Japanese history had to walk home with a lump in his throat before he could write anything worth reading. "I am a great poet! he told himself."

If you're just trying to keep your head above water while the world spins off its axis right now: you're doing great. Keep going. Take a breath.

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I write about tech, identity, and staying sane in a noisy world. If this piece sat with you, you might find something else here that does too — explore more writing.