When I was young, I decided I wanted to be an inventor.
I remember telling my parents this with complete confidence, like it was as normal a job as dentist or firefighter. To their credit, they didn't rush to explain that "inventor" wasn't actually a job. You eventually have to pick a field. So in my head, inventor stuck.
In middle school I learned the uncomfortable truth: if you want to invent things, you have to choose a medium. You don't invent in the abstract. You invent in electronics, chemistry, biology, or software. Looking around, it seemed obvious that most new inventions were coming from computers, so I pointed myself there.
In high school I learned about computers. In college I studied computer science. After college I worked as a software engineer. The goal never really changed. Programming was just the price of admission. I didn't love it, but it let me build things.
What I didn't realize at the time was that I wasn't just learning how to build software. I was learning how to think.
Software engineering trains you to think in terms of probability and risk. You learn to overestimate timelines, assume friction, and plan for failure. In code, this is a virtue. You're rewarded for finding edge cases and anticipating what might go wrong.
Slowly, that mindset became automatic.
I started applying it outside of programming. I evaluated life the way I evaluated systems—through statistics and probabilities—looking for failure modes and shutting ideas down early. Every decision became a calculation. Ideas felt pointless because most startups fail. Dating felt pointless because most first dates go nowhere. Careers felt fragile because entire fields seemed uncertain. I thought I was being realistic. I was actually shrinking my world.
Over the last three years, the nature of programming itself has shifted, and the problem intensified. Advances in AI changed where the friction lives. Programming stopped being the bottleneck. Writing code mattered less than deciding what to build. Less time went into syntax and more into ideas. The center of gravity moved back toward invention itself.
That should have been exciting. Instead, it exposed the habit I'd built.
When execution is hard, pessimism hides. When execution gets easier, judgment becomes the constraint. And my judgment had been trained to look for what could break. I analyzed ideas harder, dismissed them faster, and optimized for not being wrong instead of for being curious. Without noticing, that became my default.
At the same time, I was obsessively tracking AI progress. I read papers, followed releases, and watched new products appear every week. Instead of motivating me, it paralyzed me. The ground felt unstable. It was hard to justify committing to anything when whatever I built might be obsolete before I finished. That uncertainty spread outward. I questioned my career, my goals, and my relationships. Long-term planning felt pointless. Even wanting things started to feel foolish.
By last winter, it had taken over. I was deeply depressed—not dramatically, but persistently. I woke up tired, stayed tired, and carried a low-level dread through the day. Things that used to excite me felt flat. I wasn't sad so much as empty, anxious, and stuck.
Over time, pessimism turned into helplessness, and helplessness into anger. I got angry at politics, the economy, and mostly at myself. I felt trapped in a hole I couldn't climb out of and had lost control over my own life.
So I left.
I quit my job, moved out of my place in San Francisco, said goodbye to friends and family, and left with a backpack. No itinerary. No deadline. Just a need to reset.
I went to Buenos Aires and enrolled in a Spanish school. I met other solo travelers with loose plans and flexible lives, and we became close quickly. They came from all over, and getting to know them exposed me to very different ways of thinking about work, risk, and what actually matters. Many had grown up with far more uncertainty than I had, yet seemed more comfortable moving forward without guarantees.
After a few weeks we went our separate ways. I headed south to Patagonia and climbed in El Chaltén, then on to Bolivia, where I unexpectedly placed third in the national climbing competition. With people I met there, I spent weeks climbing in the Central Andes before passing through Colombia and Brazil.
Instead of going home, I eventually flew to Italy. A friend I'd met in Buenos Aires drove down from Manchester to pick me up. Over the next three months we drove 11,000 miles through eighteen countries, staying with friends we'd met along the way.
When I returned to the US in October, something had changed.
I wasn't cured or fearless, but my relationship with uncertainty was different. Traveling pulled me out of my head. Plans fell apart constantly, and I learned that this didn't automatically mean things went badly. The people I met weren't optimizing their lives or following perfect trajectories. They were figuring things out as they went, and they seemed more alive because of it.
Over time, I started trusting that good things could happen without being carefully engineered. And often, they did. Staying open mattered more than having a perfect plan. Seeing that pattern repeat taught me something I couldn't think my way into: optimism isn't naive. It's practical.
If you want to build things and live well, you have to protect optimism deliberately, even when pessimism feels smarter. Pessimism can sound analytical and grounded, but carried too far it shuts things down. It kills projects before they start and drains energy from relationships. Optimism does the opposite. It creates motion and keeps you engaged long enough for good outcomes to appear.
More recently, a phrase started circulating on tech Twitter: never doom. By the time I saw it, I'd already been circling this idea for months, trying to understand what had shifted in me and why optimism had started to feel different. Seeing it stated so plainly finally pushed me to write this down.
You can always find reasons to believe things are falling apart, but you can also choose to believe there's still room to build something better. That choice matters, especially now.
2026 will change work and life in real ways. You can meet that change with fear, or you can meet it with momentum. Never doom isn't denial—it's how you stay in the game while everything changes.