Issue 60 - The Fear of Falling Behind and How to Fix It.
Context Management. The Last Software Engineer. IC Work Is the New Career Flex. Building Pi in a World of Slop. I Started Using Stacked PRs. Smarter Tools and Dumber Us. TV Series Graph, and much more
Everyone in my network...software engineers, content creators, students, and business people feels like they are lagging behind.
But why? Why do we have this fear? The short answer, which everyone says nowadays, is social media. And the simple solution is not to use it.
However, I want to dig deeper into why we have this fear in the first place. Today, it’s social media. Tomorrow, it can be something else. Finding the core issue will have more potential to get it fixed.
If you ask any big YouTuber today (which most youngster aspire to be) what their biggest fear is, they will answer along the lines of “Being Relevant”, which means staying up to date on what’s happening around all the time which creates an underlying fear of falling behind.
Let’s see how we can fix it.
Build Self Awareness
Consuming social media is harmful because its amplifies fear and anxiety. That’s because we humans give more importance to those feelings, and it is inbuilt since we lived in caves.
“Power resides where a man thinks it resides.” - Game of Thrones
The majority of life’s problems are emotional problems. Everything is inside our heads. The world remains as it is, the only difference how our mind perceives it.
The first thing is to identify why these feelings are emerging in ourself. If we have this knowledge, then fixing it become easy.
Nobody can describe an exact solution for this. This is a “self-awareness” problem. Because my fear of dogs would sound stupid to you if you are a dog lover. My point here is do a lot of self-reflection to build self awareness.
Tech Moves Faster Than Ever
Even if you don’t use social media, you can’t escape this reality. Moore’s Law is in full swing. Computers are getting smaller and smarter every year, and AI has made that a lot faster. Every day a new model is released, solving all the past problems.
The rate of change in tech is a classic Pareto 80/20 principle at play:
Over the last 21 centuries, 90% of progress happened in the last 200 years
Within those 200 years, 80% of progress happened in the last 40 years
That is the speed of change in tech.
So what’s the solution here? Focus more on outcomes. Focus on tools that improve your outcomes on bigger picture. For example, Ask yourself while creating document using AI that:
Does this documentation improve team communication?
Does it help the organization onboard someone new using that document?
Or is it just another document lying around?
Keeping this perspective will allow you to focus only on necessary tools which create outcomes and discard everything else.
Our Brain’s Capacity is Limited
The human brain is designed to be creative, to think up ideas, and not to store information. For that we’ve books, and now hard drives.
Creativity comes from the free space in the mind. Our brain consumes information, then wanders off into different thoughts and builds creative connections between those thoughts, which we then implement it.
If we keep absorbing new information all the time, the brain won’t a have space to do that.
And there is a limit to it. On average, our brain can do deep work for only 3-4 hours a day. If we flood that time with new information every minute, the brain will start to rot and feel tired. And when we are tired, all the negativity creeps in.
Trivia : “brain-rot” has been the highest-searched word in 2026.
Like the body, our brain requires cognitive fitness, something I’ve adopted...inspired by a Cal Newport video and have poster on it on my wall
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Know The Difference Between an Influencer and a Teacher
Examples of Teachers that come to my mind are Andrej Karpathy and Andrew Ng. Whenever I watch their videos, I end up learning something new rather than feeling behind or anxious. Their incentive is to improve and share knowledge. Educate people.
Influencers (I’m not going to name them) have incentives tied to views, likes, and comments, so they design their content accordingly. Their titles will be along the lines of “If you don’t do this NOW you will be replaced.”
My simple way to identify the difference is to notice how I feel after watching their content. Does it make me feel “Oh, that’s interesting” or “Oh my god, what is happening”?
And If it’s later than it’s an influencer.
Who is one teacher (not an influencer) that leaves you feeling smarter rather than anxious? Drop their name in the comments.
✍🏻 Articles to read:
1. IC Work Is the New Career Flex by Elena Verna
I do agree that managers’ roles will be scrutinized more. Organizations will demand more IC work from them. However, we will still need managers because we humans need that kind of hierarchy; without it, we will keep losing direction. We need someone to cross-correct. This article has some really strong points, but it seems like it’s selling an idea that you don’t need managers at all, which I don’t agree with.
2. Smarter Tools, Dumber Us by Darshan Pania
The only defense is the unsexy one: take accountability. Learn the thing. Read the docs. Use the smaller model to change the variable. Question the output. Notice when AI is filling a gap you should be filling yourself.
The illusion of intelligence is comfortable. Real intelligence rarely is.
3. The Last Software Engineer by Kent C. Dodds
I resonate with most of the sentiments in this article. As I’ve mentioned before, we currently require more product engineers who comprehend the business domain and can decide what to build without being overly concerned about how to build it.
📺 Videos to Watch:
1. Building Pi in a World of Slop — Mario Zechner
Funny and on the point about why AI agents suck and produce a lot of slop.
2. I Started Using Stacked PRs - Now I Can’t Go Back
Recently, I discovered that GitHub introduced Stacked PRs. I watched a video but couldn’t grasp its purpose. The video explained the importance of Stacked PRs and how they are used. I believe this is particularly beneficial for full-stack developers making changes across multiple microservices or different tech stacks, including backend, frontend, or infrastructure.
🔖Post I Found Useful
1. Using Claude Code: Session Management & 1M Context
I haven’t used rewind much, but now it makes more sense when AI makes a mistake or wrong assumption. It’s better to go back and start from there.
2. Last week, I hit rock bottom. I was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy
📦 Code for Packages
1. Prince-Mukunzi/screend
Local-first screenshot organization daemon for macOS.
Watches for screenshots, OCRs them, intelligently renames them, categorizes them, and indexes everything for instant search. Optionally uses Ollama for AI-powered analysis.
🛠️ Tool I Found Useful
1. Seriesgraph
😂 Fun and Memes
1. AI Will Replace Dancer
2. Patatap is a portable animation and sound kit
👋🏻 That’s it, Folks
I am currently open for consultation part-time/full-time, specialized in mobile development with Android and Flutter. So if you are looking for someone to:
Build product architecture from scratch
Train existing developers to level up
Fix major bottlenecks in legacy codebase
Improve code quality
And most importantly, ship things faster
then reach out to me at info@burhanrashid52.com.