Most Developers Quit Because They Never Learn This One Thing
The Daily Practice That Keeps Developers From Burning Out
Have you ever had one of those days where everything goes to shit and you just want to walk away from your keyboard? Production’s on fire, stakeholders are breathing down your neck, and that “quick fix” you deployed yesterday just created three new bugs. You’re sitting there thinking, “Why the hell did I become a developer?”
The difference between developers who burn out after five years and those who build sustainable 20-year careers isn’t talent. It’s not even luck. It’s having a system that keeps your head straight when everything around you is chaos.
The Philosophy That Actually Works
I used to think Stoicism was just old dead guys saying “don’t worry, be happy” in fancy language. Then I actually started practicing it daily, and I realized it’s more like having a mental framework for not losing your shit when things go sideways.
Marcus Aurelius didn’t write his Meditations for publication. He wrote them as daily reminders to himself because being Emperor of Rome was probably stressful as hell. Every morning, he had to prep his mind the same way we prep our environments before a deploy. Because without that prep, you’re just reacting to whatever chaos the day throws at you.
And that’s where most of us live, in reactive mode. Something breaks, we scramble. Someone criticizes our code, we get defensive. A project gets cancelled, we spiral. We’re constantly dodging bullets instead of actually controlling anything.
The Practice Nobody Wants to Hear About
Here’s what I do, and fair warning: it’s not sexy. There’s no productivity hack that’ll make this effortless. It’s just consistent, daily work that compounds over time.
Every morning, before I even look at Slack, I spend five minutes asking myself one question: What can I actually control today?
Not what I wish I could control. Not what I think should be in my control. What’s actually within my power.
I can’t control if the product owner changes requirements mid-sprint. I can’t control if a dependency breaks with a new update. I can’t control if my PR sits in review for three days while everyone’s “too busy.”
But I can control how I respond to all that shit. I can control whether I write clean code or hack together something that’ll haunt me in six months. I can control if I speak up in stand-up or just keep my head down. I can control whether I focus on deep work or let myself get pulled into every Slack thread.
This sounds simple. It’s not. Because your brain will fight you every single morning, trying to convince you that you need to worry about all the other stuff. That you should be anxious about the deploy. That you should be pissed about that feedback in yesterday’s PR. That you should be stressed about whether the company’s going in the right direction.
I still fail at this constantly. I’ll be three messages deep into a Slack argument about code standards before I catch myself and realize I’m fighting about something that doesn’t really matter. But the difference between now and five years ago is that I actually notice when I’m doing it.
At the end of each day, I write down three things:
What went well (even if it’s just “the build didn’t break”)
What went wrong and what I can learn from it.
What’s in my control tomorrow?
That’s it. No fancy journaling prompts. No gratitude exercises that feel forced. Just a quick reality check on my day.
The wild part is going back and reading entries from months ago. You start to see patterns. Like, I get stressed about the same types of things over and over. I make the same mental mistakes. I waste energy on the same uncontrollable bullshit.
It took me years to recognize some of these patterns. I can look back at decisions I made 10, 15 years ago—like sticking with Flash development way too long, or how I handled certain production incidents—and I cringe. But that’s the point. I can’t change those decisions. All I can do is not repeat them.
The Part That Saved My Ass
Before any major deploy or release, I spend five minutes imagining everything that could go wrong.
Not in a doom-spiral anxiety way. More like a disaster recovery drill for my brain. What if the database migration fails? What if there’s a permissions issue we didn’t catch? What if traffic spikes and the new endpoint can’t handle it?
Then I mentally walk through: Okay, if that happens, here’s what I’d do. Here’s who I’d notify. Here’s the rollback plan.
I had a perfect example of this recently. We pushed a deploy, everything looked great. All tests passed, smoke checks came back clean. I felt good about it.
Next day? Production issue, the API broke. We had to push a hot fix that night.
Old me would’ve panicked. Would’ve felt like I fucked up, like I should’ve caught it, like everyone was judging me for breaking production. But because I’d already mentally prepared for the possibility of things going wrong, I just... handled it. Reset, refocused, figured out the issue, fixed it.
That’s what negative visualization does. It’s not about being pessimistic, it’s about removing the shock factor when shit inevitably goes wrong. Because it will go wrong. Your code will break. Your estimates will be off. Your assumptions will be wrong. That’s not failure, that’s just software development.
Why This Is So Hard (And Why That’s Okay)
Look, we live in a world where everything is instant. You want food? DoorDash. Need a ride? Uber’s there in five minutes. Want to learn something new? Here’s 47 YouTube tutorials right now.
But Stoicism? Philosophy? Mental resilience? That takes years.
You don’t read Marcus Aurelius once and suddenly have unshakable calm. You don’t journal for a week and cure your imposter syndrome. This is daily practice that compounds slowly over time, and there’s no fucking shortcut.
The philosophy itself is simple. Brutally simple, actually. Focus on what you can control. Let go of what you can’t. Show up consistently. That’s like 90% of it.
What makes it hard is doing it every single day. When you’re tired. When you’re frustrated. When you’re off work and just want to decompress. Every moment becomes a choice: Am I going to react to this, or am I going to respond intentionally? Am I letting anxiety control me, or am I taking ownership?
I’m not perfect. I still have days where I’m completely reactive, where I let small frustrations derail my focus, where I worry about shit I can’t control. But I have fewer of those days than I used to. And when they happen, I recognize it faster and course-correct.
The Bottom Line
Ten minutes of daily practice beats reading philosophy for six hours once a month. Make it routine like your morning coffee. Simple practices, done consistently, over years.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
No magic bullet. No life-changing epiphany. Just showing up every day and doing the work of staying aligned with what actually matters and what you can actually control.
Now I want to hear from you:
What’s your biggest struggle with staying focused on what you can control?
Do you have any daily practices that help you build resilience?
What’s a time when you completely lost perspective and how did you get it back?
Drop your thoughts in the comments. Because chances are, whatever you’re struggling with, someone else here is too. And sometimes just knowing you’re not the only one fighting this battle makes it a little easier to keep going.
Quote of the Day:
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” - Seneca
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