I.

In 1947, Grace Hopper and her team at Harvard were working on the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. The machine was massive, a deafening clatter of electromechanical relays, and it had stopped working. They opened the casing to find the problem. It was a moth. An actual, literal moth, trapped between points F and 70 in Relay #70, Panel F. They taped the dead insect into the logbook with the notation: "First actual case of bug being found."

The system stopped working because a foreign object intruded. Remove the moth, restart the relay, the calculation proceeds.

If only our internal architecture were so cooperative...

When we try to run the software of our own lives, executing simple scripts like go_to_gym.exe or maintain_stable_relationship.py, we encounter runtime errors. We crash, and we find ourselves staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, running a loop of anxious thoughts that consume 99% of our CPU cycles. But when we open the casing to find the moth, we find nothing but our own wiring. The call is coming from inside the house.

Most of us treat these failures with a superstitious dread. We view our depression, our procrastination, our sudden outbursts of anger as weather events, storms that pass through us. Or we view them as moral failings: evidence of a corrupted soul.

Instead:

We should view the mind as a legacy codebase: a sprawling, undocumented repository of spaghetti code written by an evolutionary process that prioritized survival over readability, patched together with cultural subroutines that may have been deprecated in the Victorian era.

We can't rewrite the kernel, and we're pretty much stuck with the hardware. But we can adopt the methodology of the systems admin. We can stop trying to exorcise our demons and start opening tickets for them.

This is, broadly, the strategy I use to manage my sobriety (six years sober and counting) and my own anxiety // depression.

I hope it's useful.

II.

You can't patch a bug that you can't isolate. A bug report that simply says "It doesn't work" is useless and gets closed immediately. But this is exactly how we report our internal states to ourselves.

"I feel bad."

"I am a failure."

"Why can't I get anything done?"

These are bad bug reports - because they have no stack traces and no context.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes his "bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection." He realized that a vague intention to be "good" was insufficient, so he created a grid. He listed thirteen virtues: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility.

He didn't try to debug them all at once. He focused on one per week, marking a black dot in his notebook every time he committed a fault against that virtue.

Franklin was essentially creating a primitive issue tracker and generating log files. He understood that you cannot optimize a metric you do not track. When he saw a cluster of black dots under "Silence," he had data rather than mere guilt. He could look at the timeline. Ah, the dots cluster on Tuesday evenings. What happens on Tuesday evenings? I go to the Junto club and drink too much Madeira.

Now we have a reproduction path.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Attend social gathering.
2. Consume > 2 glasses of wine.
3. Ego defense mechanisms loosen.
4. Result: User speaks over others and violates the Silence constraint.

Once you have the reproduction steps, you can implement a patch. Franklin's patch might be "Drink water on Tuesdays." Without the log, he is a man feeling vague shame about being loud. With the log, he is an engineer solving an optimization problem.

We can apply this to modern neuroses.

Take: "scrolling Twitter for four hours when I should be working."

Don't flag it as User is lazy. That's a lazy ticket. Open a detailed issue.

Issue #402: Excessive context switching causes productivity crash

• Severity: Critical
• Environment: Home Office, 2:00 PM, Low Blood Sugar
• Trigger: Hit a difficult paragraph in the report.
• Expected Behavior: User pushes through difficulty.
• Actual Behavior: User opens new tab, types 'r', autopopulate takes over.

Now we can see the logic error. It's a try/catch block failure. The brain encounters a DifficultyException and looks for a handler. The default handler for "unpleasant sensation" is "seek dopamine." The quickest route to dopamine is X. The code is working exactly as written; it's simply a bad script for your current production environment.

III.

G.K. Chesterton imagined a fence erected across a road. The modern reformer goes up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." The more intelligent reformer does well to say, "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

You can call this "Legacy Code Fear." You see a weird function called do_the_thing_with_the_variable() that seems to do nothing but slow down the system. You delete it. Immediately, the payment processing server in Ohio catches fire.

Our habits are Chesterton Fences.

We generally view anxiety as a bug because it feels terrible and ruins our sleep. We want to issue a git revert and go back to a version of ourselves that was (somehow) more chill.

But if we look at the commit history of the human species, we see that anxiety was a high-priority feature request. For 99.9% of human history, the environment was loaded with predators, rival tribes, and scarcity. The user who sat around being "chill" was removed from the gene pool by a leopard. The user who heard a twig snap and immediately flooded their system with cortisol lived to reproduce.

Anxiety is a proximity alarm with the sensitivity knob ripped off.

When we try to debug our behaviors, we have to stop and ask: "What does this code do?"

Take the ticket: Issue #55: User eats entire pint of ice cream at 11 PM.

The surface analysis says this is a lack of willpower. But run a Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Why is the user eating?

• Is it hunger? No.
• Is it taste? Partially.
• Is it sedation? Yes.

The user is stressed, cortisol levels are high, and high-fat, high-sugar foods trigger a parasympathetic response. They physically calm you down. The ice cream eating is a load-bearing subroutine for emotional regulation.

If you delete the ice cream subroutine without replacing it with another mechanism for down-regulating stress (meditation, exercise, screaming into a pillow), the system will crash. You won't become thin; you'll become unhinged. Or you'll find a different, potentially worse patch. Alcohol and / or meth come to mind.

We deserve the respect we accord to a complex, critical system running in production. You don't go into the server room and start yanking cables because the fans are loud. You investigate and understand the dependencies.

IV.

The hardest part of this philosophy is the backlog.

Once you start tracking your internal issues, really tracking them in a notebook or a literal Trello board, you'll realize something horrifying. The backlog is infinite.

You have tickets for your physical health, tickets for your career, tickets for that weird thing you do where you interrupt people, tickets for your unresolved trauma regarding your third-grade teacher, and tickets for the fact that you simply cannot remember to floss.

It's technical debt all the way down: the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.

We are all drowning in technical debt. Maybe you spent your twenties "moving fast and breaking things" (ignoring your dental health and relationships). Now you're thirty-five, and the interest payments are due.

The novice developer looks at the mountain of technical debt and despairs. They declare "Bankruptcy" and try to rewrite the whole codebase from scratch. This is not dissimilar to the "New Year's Resolution" or the "Midlife Crisis." I will quit my job, move to a farm, and become a totally different person.

This almost never works. Joel Spolsky, the founder of Stack Overflow, wrote a famous essay on why you should never rewrite code from scratch. He noted that old code is messy but battle-tested, containing thousands of bug fixes for edge cases you haven't even thought of yet. If you try to rewrite your personality from scratch, you'll re-introduce bugs you solved when you were six years old.

The alternative is "Refactoring."

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code without changing its external behavior. You clean it up, simplify the loops, rename the variables for clarity, and do it piece by piece, commit by commit.

You don't fix your entire life in a weekend. You pick one ticket.

Sprint 1:

• Goal: Fix the sleep schedule dependency.
• Task: Install blackout curtains.
• Task: Leave phone in the kitchen at night.

You run that sprint for two weeks and verify the build. Did it work? If yes, merge it to the main branch. If no, revert and try a different patch.

This sounds tedious because it's tedious. Life is, broadly, tedious. It lacks the cinematic grandeur of a montage. We want the montage where the protagonist runs up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and suddenly is a champion. But montages are lies. The reality is the commit log.

• Commit 8f4a2: Failed to wake up early.
• Commit 8f4a3: Failed to wake up early.
• Commit 8f4a4: Woke up early, felt tired.
• Commit 8f4a5: Woke up early, felt okay.

The process is incremental and boring, and it's the only way anything ever gets fixed.

V.

The danger in doing this is that we begin to view ourselves entirely as machines to be optimized, becoming obsessed with the metrics and confusing the map for the territory. I've watched this in the "Quantified Self" movement, where a good many people have excellent data on their REM cycles and are fucking miserable.

Some tickets should be marked WONTFIX.

WONTFIX is a status used when a bug is acknowledged, but the team decides the cost of fixing it outweighs the benefit, or that it isn't really a bug at all.

Maybe you are introverted and find parties draining. You could open a ticket: Issue #900: User energy drains rapidly in large groups. You could spend years trying to patch this, forcing yourself to take improv classes, drinking copious amounts of caffeine, and trying to rewrite your source code to emulate an extrovert.

Or you could mark it WONTFIX.

Resolution: Working as Intended. User is designed for small group interactions and deep work. Will not patch.

This is documentation and self-knowledge, not resignation. Once you mark it WONTFIX, you stop wasting CPU cycles feeling guilty about it. You stop trying to run party_animal.exe on hardware that was optimized for library_research.exe.

We have to account for "Heisenbugs" - a bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it.

Mental states are often Heisenbugs. Have you ever tried to relentlessly analyze why you aren't happy? The act of analysis itself creates a new form of unhappiness. You become self-conscious, hyper-aware, and rigid. You are observing the system so closely that you choke the throughput.

Sometimes, the correct debugging step is to close the laptop and go outside. Sometimes, the system self-corrects when it isn't under the microscope. We have background processes (garbage collection, sleep, dreams) that clean up the memory leaks if we just get out of the way.

VI.

We are running on an architecture we do not (and cannot) entirely understand, executing code we did not write, processing input that is often malicious or corrupted. It is a miracle we function at all.

The goal of the debugging mindset is not to achieve a "Zero Bug Bounce." You'll never be free of issues. As you fix one layer of problems (survival), you reveal a new layer (existential dread). As you fix your poverty, you discover the ennui of abundance.

The goal is to move from "Catastrophic Failure" to "Known Issues."

There is a profound difference between a system that crashes randomly and a system that has a documented quirk.

Scenario A: You snap at your co-worker and don't know why. You feel like a monster.

Scenario B: You feel the anger rising. You recognize the signature. Ah, this is the Low Blood Sugar bug combined with the Insecurity trigger. You tell your co-worker, "I am currently experiencing a runtime error. I need to restart my system with food. Please pause input."

You are still angry. The bug is still there. But you are no longer the bug. You are the developer observing the bug.

This creates a gap, a tiny buffer overflow of space between the stimulus and the response. In that gap, as Viktor Frankl said, lies our freedom.

Next Steps:

Where do you start?

You start by creating the repository. Buy a notebook. Open a text file. Start a Trello board.

Don't judge the bugs. Log them.

• Ticket #1: I feel a tightness in my chest when I open my email.
• Ticket #2: I am jealous of my friend's success.
• Ticket #3: I keep forgetting to call my mother.

Get them out of the dark, wet hard drive of your subconscious and onto the screen. Look at them. They are spaghetti code, not demons. And code can be refactored.

Have A Capture System

Pick one tool and stick with it. The best system is the one you'll actually use.

• For the analog aficionado: A pocket notebook works. The Bullet Journal method, stripped of its Instagram aesthetics, is essentially a paper-based issue tracker. Carry it everywhere. When you notice a bug, log it immediately. Date, context, trigger, behavior. Don't wait until you get home because you'll forget the details and file another useless "felt bad" ticket.
• For the digital minimalist: A plain text file in your notes app. Create a running document called BUGS.md or ISSUES.txt. Append to it throughout the day. The friction is low, the search is easy, and it syncs across devices.
• For the visual thinker: Trello gives you a Kanban board for your psyche. Create columns for BACKLOG, IN PROGRESS, BLOCKED, and RESOLVED. Each card is a bug. You can add checklists for reproduction steps, labels for severity (is this a minor annoyance or a system-critical failure?), and due dates for your sprint goals.
• For the engineer brain: Linear or GitHub Issues. If you already live in these tools for work, there's no reason your personal development can't share the workflow. Create a private repository. Use proper issue templates. Tag things by area (health, relationships, work, habits). The structure will feel familiar, and familiarity reduces friction.
• For the resistant: A weekly voice memo. Every Sunday, spend five minutes talking into your phone about what crashed that week. Transcribe it later or don't. The act of verbal processing is itself a form of logging.

Use The Review Ritual

Capture without review = hoarding. You need a recurring appointment with your backlog.

• Weekly: Fifteen minutes, same time each week. Look at what you logged. Do you see patterns? Are the same bugs appearing repeatedly? Can you cluster them into categories? Pick one bug to focus on for the coming week. Write down a hypothesis for a patch. Be specific: "I will leave my phone in the kitchen after 9 PM" is a patch. "I will be less distracted" is not.
• Monthly: Thirty minutes at the end of each month. Review your weekly notes. What patches did you try? What worked? What failed? Update the ticket status. Celebrate the ones you can mark RESOLVED. Be honest about the ones that should be marked WONTFIX. Look at the overall trajectory, not the individual data points.
• Quarterly: One hour. Zoom out. Are you working on the right bugs? Sometimes we spend months optimizing a subsystem that doesn't matter while a critical process bleeds memory in the background. Ask yourself: if I could only fix one thing about how I operate, what would have the highest impact? Reprioritize the backlog accordingly.

Adopt The Sprint Structure

Don't try to fix everything. Run two-week sprints focused on a single bug or a small cluster of related bugs.

• Week one: Observation and patch design. Gather more data on the bug. When exactly does it trigger? What are the environmental conditions? Write down your patch hypothesis. Implement it starting on day three or four.
• Week two: Patch testing. Run the new behavior. Log the results daily, even if the log entry is just "patch held" or "patch failed, reverted to old behavior at 3 PM." At the end of week two, evaluate. Did the patch work? If yes, merge it: keep doing the new thing until it becomes automatic. If no, don't despair. You've eliminated one approach. Design a new patch for the next sprint.

Embrace Maintenance Mode

Eventually, you'll have addressed the critical bugs. The system will be more stable. You'll enter maintenance mode.

This doesn't mean you stop logging; it means the cadence changes. You shift from active debugging to passive monitoring. Keep the capture system running, but reduce the review frequency. Watch for regressions. Old bugs will resurface, especially during periods of stress. When they do, you'll have the documentation to recognize them quickly and reapply the patches that worked before.

Remember:

The moth didn't intend to crash the Mark II. It was just doing what moths do, seeking warmth and light, following the only program evolution gave it. Your anxiety is doing the same thing. Your procrastination, your tendency to eat ice cream at 11 PM when the world feels like too much - these subroutines were written by a younger version of you, or by millions of years of survival pressure, and they were trying to help. They still are. They're just running on outdated assumptions in an environment that has changed.

When you treat yourself as a system to be understood rather than a sinner to be punished, the shame compiles differently. You stop asking "what the everliving fuck is wrong with me" and start asking "what is this code trying to do." The answer is almost always the same: it's trying to protect you. It's trying to keep you safe, warm, fed, loved, and alive. It's just doing it badly, with legacy methods, in a world the original developers never anticipated.

Log the bugs. Run the sprints. Mark the tickets that will never be fixed. And when the system crashes anyway, because it will, remember that you are both the code and the coder. You are the moth and the engineer who found it. You are the fail-point and the one who gets to document it, learn from it, and push a new commit in the morning.

That's a damned good thing, if you ask me.

Not that you did...