The Discipline of Desire
How Stoic Wisdom Can Save Your Sanity (and Your Deployments)
It's 5 PM on a Friday. The code's tested, the pipeline's green, and someone asks the question that makes every developer's stomach drop: "Should we push this to production?"
After 25 years of watching releases go sideways and learning to find peace in the chaos, I discovered that the ancient Stoics had the best deployment strategy of all: wanting what you get, not getting what you want.
In deployment terms, this means accepting that shit's going to break and finding peace in that reality rather than desperately hoping for perfect releases.
That Moment When Everything Goes Wrong
Let's be real, we've all been there. You're staring at error logs at 10 PM, wondering how the hell a simple feature update just took down half the system. Your heart's racing, Slack's blowing up, and that voice in your head is going, "Why didn't I just leave this until Monday?"
But here's where the Stoics were onto something. All that anxiety and build-up? It's actually useful if you channel it right. When I dealt with this just recently with a teammate, I realized those what-if scenarios aren't there to paralyze you, they're your brain's way of doing reconnaissance.
Think of it as negative visualization in action. What if the database migration fails halfway through? What if that third-party API decides to take a nap? What if the load balancer has a moment? These aren't doomsday predictions, they're your deployment checklist in disguise.
Turning Anxiety into Action
The trick is not getting stuck in the "what if" spiral. Instead, take that nervous energy and turn it into preparation:
Is your rollback strategy solid, or are you crossing your fingers and hoping for the best? The Hope Strategy is not a good option
If there's a migration involved, can it handle failures gracefully and be rerun without creating a mess?
Do you have monitoring in place that'll actually tell you when things go wrong, not just when they're already on fire?
I've learned to make migrations as resilient as possible so that if something does go sideways, you can just hit retry without making things worse. It's about putting together a plan, writing it down, making your list, and then—this is key—being done with the worry part.
The Art of Deployment Detachment
When a deployment does go wrong (and it will), you have to practice what the Stoics called detachment. And no, this doesn't mean shrugging your shoulders and saying "whatever" while your users are screaming.
It's about understanding that this time next week, this crisis won't matter. This time next month? Nobody's even going to remember it. But right now, in this moment, you need to deal with what's actually happening, not what you wished was happening.
I had a deployment blow up spectacularly a few months back. One of those perfect storms where three different things failed in sequence. My first instinct was to panic, but then I remembered: these feelings are temporary. The system being down is temporary. The angry messages are temporary.
Once you get that, you can actually start thinking clearly. You can triage the bug reports, handle the critical issues first, and work through the chaos systematically instead of just reacting to whatever's loudest.
What You Can Control vs. What You Can't
There's a massive difference between caring about the quality within your control versus obsessing over user reactions that are completely outside your control. You can write clean code, test thoroughly, and have solid deployment processes. What you can't control is that one user who's going to complain no matter what you do, or the random network issue that decides to happen right after your release.
The only thing you can actually focus on is doing the best work you can do. There's always going to be people who want more features, faster fixes, perfect uptime. And there's really nothing you can do about that insatiable appetite except keep doing good work.
Deployments as Life Cycles
From a career perspective, deployments are just like life cycles. We work on features, squash bugs, merge everything together, create a release, and push it to production. Then we sit back and see what happens, evaluate the feedback, check the error logs, see what we missed.
Life works the same way. We're constantly trying new approaches, learning new skills, putting plans together. We execute those plans, then look at the results and adjust accordingly. If things are going well, we keep going down that path. If stuff needs improvement, that's where we focus next.
Sometimes things just fail, and that's actually valuable. When a deployment crashes and burns, you ask: why did it fail? Was it misconfiguration? A scenario we didn't think of? Or just one of those random acts of digital chaos—network outages, data center issues, the universe having a bad day?
You adjust, learn, and try not to make the same mistake twice. The goal isn't to never fail again (because that's impossible), but to fail better each time.
Finding Peace in the Chaos
The Stoics understood something we often forget in our always-on, instant-everything world: you can't control outcomes, only your response to them. That Friday afternoon deployment might go perfectly, or it might turn your weekend into a debugging marathon. Either way, you'll handle it.
Because at the end of the day, the person who can push your code to production is the same person who can learn from whatever happens next: you.
The key is recognizing that deployment anxiety, production issues, and user complaints are all just temporary setbacks, not permanent disasters. Every outage ends. Every bug gets fixed. Every crisis becomes a story you tell later about "that time when everything went wrong."
So next time you're staring at that deploy button, remember: want what you get, not what you want. The deployment will do what it's going to do. Your job is to be ready for whatever that is.
Now I want to hear from you:
What's the worst deployment disaster you've lived through, and what did you learn from it?
How do you stay calm when everything's on fire and everyone's looking at you for answers?
What strategies have you found for turning deployment anxiety into useful preparation?
Share your war stories in the comments. Your experience might be exactly what someone else needs to hear before their next big release.
Quote of the Day:
“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." - Epictetus
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