Sorry for not posting last week. It will soon become apparent why.

Steve Yegge’s post about managing Vibe Coding usage dropped two Wednesdays ago in the morning. That was after I pulled a 14-hour day on Monday to finish up some work for the sprint, and ended up finishing 40% more story points than I was subscribed to do.

I viscerally felt what he said about Vibe Coding being a vampire for your energy. It enables you to work harder for longer, and rewards you for doing so. A recipe for potential burnout.

Vibe Coding made it possible to over-perform on this past sprint, with a lot of the work coming in on the last day. It was a long day, but felt very doable the entire time.

Then I was wiped out on Tuesday. Engineering tends to be like that. We hurry up as deadlines approach. Two weeks to accomplish a sprint's worth of work feels like a long time until you're a couple of days before the end of the sprint and realize you still have a bunch of work left to do. Someday I'll learn.

Something else happened to me later on Wednesday that wasn't totally unexpected, but still completely changed my worldview.

“MIIIIKE”, my wife Lark, called for me. I ran downstairs, thinking she was in her office. Turns out, she was upstairs on the third floor in our bedroom. I turned on a dime and ran back up.

She met me on the 2nd floor stairs and said two words that made me understand this human project more deeply than ever:

“I’m pregnant”

We hugged. We cried. We were nervous, scared, and excited. We wanted this baby. I had a meeting to jump on with my co-worker basically immediately after, and I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t.

That's because we have this taboo in society around telling people about your pregnancy before the end of the first trimester. It makes sense because it is somewhere between a dice roll (1/6 ~ 16%) and a coin flip (1/2 ~ 50%) whether you get past the first trimester or not [1].

That's how common it is to hear, “I’m not pregnant anymore” from your wife on a Friday morning.

We hugged. We cried. We were nervous, scared, and devastated. We knew this was a real possibility, were afraid of it, and it still came true.

100 years ago, we may not have even known that she was pregnant this early on. Lark had what is called a “chemical pregnancy”. A pregnancy that only shows up positive on an at-home pregnancy test, and then when retested later, goes negative.

For less than 48 hours, we thought we were going to be parents. We went from “not expecting” to “expecting”, to “not expecting” again. I can see how this thrashing of expectations applied to a society may cause confusion and potential unnecessary emotional turmoil. It can create some awkward social conversations where the person asking about your pregnancy may suddenly feel like an asshole because they reminded you of a miscarriage.

It's a dice roll applied to ~5 million pregnancies per year in the US. It is tragic, but I feel like we should also normalize talking about it because it is actually happening all the time to people that we know. This is another case of emotional stuntedness that we have as a society. Maybe this was a necessary coping mechanism back when child mortality rates were much higher, but we've outgrown that.

We don't feel free to express ourselves at the risk of bumming some other people out for a couple minutes. We put others' thoughts and feelings above our own, even when the truth is that the others don't really think about us all that much. It's a personal tragedy, but I think we would have better support for it if we were open and let others support us [2].

Maybe it's just me, but I would rather actually know how my friends and family are doing versus just the surface level “oh, I'm doing well”. I'd rather know what they're going through and have the ability to sympathize with them and let them know that they're not alone in their personal struggles. If they didn't seek help for a certain thing yet, maybe I could connect them with someone who has been through a similar experience.

Let's call this “Full Contact Life”. Maybe it's just the level of intimacy I'm used to in my friendships due to my time in a full contact sport like Jiu-Jitsu. People who sweat into each other's eyeballs tend to also be open books with each other.

There's strength in vulnerability. It feels counter-intuitive. If you expose your most vulnerable, weakest parts to everyone, then nobody can hurt you.

I would rather fully live life through experiencing the ups and downs than making it smaller, less expressive, but more convenient for others. I want to live it in full, vivid Technicolor.

It only really hit me how flowers represent the fragility, temporality, and beauty of life when my wife and I got married in France in 2023. First world problems, I know.

We paid a bunch of money to have someone put a lot of effort into building this beautiful flower arrangement for us to enjoy for a few hours on one day. These flowers were planted, watered, grown, picked, arranged, and brought to our venue, and then I assume they weren't reused for anything else after our ceremony and dinner.

All of that money for what? As a math-minded engineer, of course you could say that money would have grown more in the S&P 500 than being spent on something as frivolous as flowers.

All of that effort for what? An experience we will never forget.

All of these experiences in life, pain and beauty, for what? We're all going to die anyway.

I think we're meant to be present now and get whatever enjoyment we can out of this ride. It won’t be pure joy because life isn’t perfect. There needs to be some contrast of Bad Times to make us value The Good Times. We really see how valuable, fragile, and fleeting the gift of this life is through experiencing The Bad Times.

We will be parents and experience more Good Times in the future, but unfortunately, not at this current moment.

[1] It gets worse as you get older, we’re 34, but that's the choice we made to ensure that we were in a good financial position and lived fulfilling pre-parenthood lives.

[2] Just like how I'm very open and vocal about mental health. I did two years of various talk therapy modalities to try to avoid taking medication for health anxiety because of the stigma, but 1 year on SSRIs ultimately gave me my life back.

The stigma around medication is terrible, particularly in the fitness / Jiu-Jitsu community, where mental health is just “grind harder, bro. You only need to sauna, cold plunge, run, train Jiu-Jitsu, lift weights, get sun, and avoid carbs to be mentally healthy, bro.” I thought I was going to die every week, which was crippling for me.