Software Drives People Insane

10 Sep, 2026 I have a little pet theory that software drives people insane. Not in the "wash your hands every thirty minutes like Howard Hughes" kind of way, but more so in how the conditions surrounding software seem remarkably effective at making otherwise normal people lose their sense of proportion. I've watched this happen enough times from enough angles that I don't think it's entirely a personality problem. Software combines speed, money, complexity, abstraction, and almost unlimited freedom to change your mind. On their own, those things are perfectly manageable, but put them together and you start to get some really bizarre side-effects. Most software, when you strip away the branding and architecture diagrams, is remarkably boring. A form here, an API endpoint there, sprinkle in some permissions, calculations, workflows, and a database somewhere. Maybe a queue if you need to scale something (or you're feeling adventurous). But, harsh as it may be: most software is still just a glorified spreadsheet. And yet somehow the process of producing this stuff can turn perfectly ordinary adults into b-tier Bond villains. The project is never moving fast enough, the plan has to be ever-flexible to sudden change, and every new feature is the one that's going to be the one (but certainly not that one that was supposed to be the one during the previous sprint). There is always some new concern about whether it will work, whether it will scale, whether we're moving fast enough, or whether we should be doing something else entirely. The weird thing about software is that many of these ideas are technically possible. That's part of the problem: there's very little natural friction between an idea and its implementation. If you're building a house and somebody decides halfway through framing that the kitchen should be on the opposite side of the building, everyone immediately understands that decision has a cost. Boards have been cut, plumbing has been run, and people have to tear already-fixed things apart. The cost is physical enough that nobody can pretend it doesn't exist. With software, that cost hides inside people's heads and inside systems that are, typically, already difficult to reason about. Moving the kitchen in software might look like a "simple fix." The work is still costly, but the actual expense accumulates quietly. Somewhere between context switching, regression risk, and architectural erosion we find lost momentum, forgotten assumptions, and endless meetings to "get aligned."