Stress and Burnout: Why 2026 Is Different
Life in tech has always been fast, furious and stressful. This year is different. Some notes on the forces creating more stress than usual this year.
“It’s too much. I can’t keep up” - client, describing the onslaught of AI news.
“We used to work at 150%, now it’s 250%” - client, on their workload and the workload of their CEO.
“Clients keep cancelling. They’re just overwhelmed” - highly successful coaching colleague on his client roster.
The Stakes
Financial, personal, business, you name it, the stakes are higher than they have ever been. We’ve had significant disruptions before, but this time companies are growing to trillion dollar valuations in a few years, tens of billions in months, entire categories of jobs are being threatened, and, if we dig deeper, the exact meaning of what it is to be human is being questioned.
Personally, we may be looking at the possibility of wealth beyond anything we’ve ever imagined. Or we see it happening to others and wonder “why not me?”. None of this is trivial, no matter how much we try and claim “it’s not about the money”. Perhaps it’s not. But when the money is right there, in our faces, it won’t be ignored.
At the other end of the scale, we may be facing the loss of not only our job, but our entire profession.
“I used to know that I would be doing this for the rest of my life. Now. I don’t know. Maybe” — Coaching colleague.
Entire crafts - writing, coding, design - tough to learn, difficult to master, are being reduced to niche specialities: necessary, but mostly performed by a few wizards of the clan when the machines need some guidance.
Companies that a year or two ago were successful, built from the ground up to billion+ valuations are suddenly yesterday’s news, “struggling SAAS businesses” because they are merely profitable and growing at 30% a year.
We are all facing great potential gains, and huge potential losses.
Our bodies, our nervous systems understand this as an emergency. We are designed to live in the status quo, reacting to significant change only when necessary. The possibilities of enormous change vibrate through us, wake us in the night, constrict our breathing and override our intellects, that weak sibling of our souls, as it tries to figure the odds.
Unpredictability
In 1970 Dr. J. M. Weiss gave some rats a hard time in the lab. He set up triplets of rats in separate cages: Rat 1 would get a shock, but a 100% reliable warning tone was sounded before the shock. Rat 2 got shocked, but they got shocked randomly without any warning. Rat 3 got the warnings but no shocks.
His summary:
"Rats that received electric shocks unpredictably showed greater somatic stress reactions and more stress-induced pathology than animals that received the same shocks but could predict their occurrence by a signal”
In a similar study in 1972:
"Rats given a choice for predictable or unpredictable shock chose predictable shock and developed fewer stomach ulcers than rats who could not make this choice, and received only unpredictable shock”
In Attachment Theory, the worst thing you can be is unpredictable (a “disorganized attachment style”). We can more or less live with partners or parents who are reliably close or distant, but those who unpredictably jump between the two drive us nuts.
Our nervous systems can deal with difficulty. But unpredictable difficulty affects us at a physical level:
Reducing uncertainty requires cerebral energy… Accordingly, in times of uncertainty, the selfish brain demands extra energy from the body. If, despite all this, the brain cannot reduce uncertainty, a persistent cerebral energy crisis may develop, burdening the individual by ‘allostatic load’ that contributes to systemic and brain malfunction. Achim Peters a, Bruce S. McEwen b, Karl Friston 2017
Living and working in 2026 involves navigating an environment that is highly unpredictable: for a few weeks we are tokenmaxxing, then, oop, tokens are expensive! Mythos is going to unpick the security of every system ever written, then it's released anyway (?), then it's blocked. We're going to get rid of management, a system we've relied on for over a hundred years. And then, maybe not so much.
We get primed to be constantly reactive, always wary, always ready. We are in a constant state of emergency, ready to be shocked but not knowing when and from where.
Narrative Whiplash
Stories move us. They’re designed to. We watch movies, read books, listen to the lives of our friends because we are wired to learn about the world through the experience of others.
Stories create what we believe, at a deep level, to be true.
The tech world at the moment is in the hands of some master story-tellers, whatever you think of them as innovators or moral actors. Their stories are of the future, stories of the form: Imagine this, if you would. Create in your mind this image of how we will live:
"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." — Statement of risk, 2023, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Geoffrey Hinton etc.
"We cannot safely build a superintelligence... it is an existential threat to humanity." — Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI Researcher
"AI is the most profound technology humanity is working on. More profound than fire or electricity." — Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google
"There will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want a job for personal satisfaction, but the AI will do everything." — Elon Musk, Entrepreneur
"The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing... This is going to accelerate." — Geoffrey Hinton, Computer Scientist
"The idea that AI will destroy jobs is a fallacy... Technology creates new industries and more wealth, which leads to more jobs." — Marc Andreessen, Venture Capitalist
"AI will liberate us from mundane tasks and allow humans to focus on uniquely human traits like empathy and creativity." — Ginni Rometty, Former CEO of IBM
Every day we are swept up in an unprecedented vortex of stories of great triumphs (the end of all disease!), great tragedies (the end of all humanity!), great adventure ("Scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”). It's a daily full volume IMAX of narrative.
It's very human perhaps the most human instinct we have to be engaged, dazzled. But what do you do when there are so many stories with wildly different visions, changing so rapidly?
Maybe you choose what you believe, and then are forced to defend it. We really don’t like it when our core stories are undermined. It's stressful to defend them, to find them wanting. Maybe you remain ambivalent which is an understandable reaction, but now you have no core story and the future looks like … what? You don’t know.
We need to be rooted in core stories. “This is who I am This is what I am doing, and this is why - this is how the future will look because of what I’m doing”. Without that, life loses its keel.
What To Do?
There’s no magic bullet here. Pick and choose, try them all - up to you.
- Acknowledge this exceptional time.
We are living through certainly the largest change the tech industry has been through, and potentially one of the largest since the industrial revolution. Don’t expect “normal”, and don’t beat yourself up because your response is not “normal”.
This time will pass. Meanwhile, decide how you want to live and work as it unfolds.
- Work with your locus of control.
The tech world attracts those who believe they can control much of the world around them (why else would you start or join a startup?). Trying to control what is outside your ability to change is a recipe for significant stress. Understanding that, perhaps, you can’t, in fact, stay on top of every change in the AI world every day or every week, may feel uncomfortable. But it may be real.
- Take pauses, slow down. Breath.
Yes, the pace of change is incredibly fast. You can afford five minutes to detach, completely, and reset your nervous system. Visualizations are good. Deliberate breathing is good, and quick, and powerful. The iBreath app is your friend.
I'm serious about five minute pauses. Switch everything off. Look out the window. Take the time.
- Move your body.
Stress is physical. Burnout is physical. Get up and walk. Do some yoga, tai-chi, simple stretches, anything. Ten minutes. Your mind with thank you.
- Step back from narratives.
When you find yourself wrapped in a narrative (“ALL middle management has to go”, “software development is over”, “we’re a SAAS company and SAAS is dead”), step back. What is true? What is your best judgement?
Stories are compelling when they convince us of huge challenges, massive change, tremendous risk. Careful judgement provides a useful check. Use it.
- Fast in a direction is good. Fast because Fast is not.
Check if you are moving fast because it feels good, because your Board loves it, because the blogs say so. Fast is good in a considered direction. Fast for the sake of Fast is often anxiety driven, which is not rational and conducive to chaos.
- Choose your own integration of work, life and health.
This is likely to be a once in a lifetime period for all concerned. It makes sense to work with great intensity, to grab the opportunities as they arise. It also makes sense not to ruin your health, physical and mental, and not to ruin your relationships. Choose accordingly. Be careful of “balance” which can, itself, be another unattainable goal.
Here’s Sam Altman: "“I’ve just accepted that life is going to be chaotic for a few years”
A Bubble Story
I worked through the internet explosion, from staring at my first website in 1994, to going public, to sitting in a surfing town in New Zealand in 2000 as our stock crashed 60% in a day.
It was ridiculously stressful and I worked ridiculously hard. I’m glad I did. And I wish I had had more resilience against the speed, the narratives (“the internet will change EVERYTHING THIS YEAR”) and the stakes (having your net worth plummet over 50% in a day will stick with you).
Hit me up if you’d like some coaching through it :-)
A Few Links
Simple things that help founders who last over a decade.
What can happen to your body when you hit a big milestone (collapse version).
One reason founders (and many others) can’t get through Sunday without checking Slack (btw: I sympathize with this post, but I also sympathize with the POV that there's just a lot happening and sometimes you need to check on Sunday. See also Balance as a hard master).
Jensen Huang is exhausted all the time. Good headline.
Uncertainty is more stressful than difficulty. Adam Grant. Providing your team with predictability, even it's to acknowledge uncertainty, reduces stress (this is the rat-shocking experiment result again).
Molly G on whiplash, and the burnout created by management zig-zags.
We don’t talk about the money much. Julie Zhou grabs the third rail, discusses the elephant in the room (choose your metaphor).
A very helpful post from Saanya Ojha on how high-end, large company CTOs are dealing with AI coding. Lots of very considered, sensible stuff - how to allocate tokens, what kind of engineers are most effected etc. etc.
How I Use AI in These Posts
I use AI for research. I don’t use generated text or editing in these posts.