A weekend was almost leaving when it left me a note. It read: “You thought you were thinking hard, but you were only stuck at a crossroad.”
I could have slid that note into a desk drawer and gone to sleep. Crossroads are easier to ignore at night. But I have learned that the notes a quiet weekend slips under your door are usually the ones worth reading twice, so I sat with it. Three questions had been circling my head all weekend, like crows over a field, and I decided to let each one land.
The first question: why am I so busy?
The answer arrived almost too quickly, which is how you know an answer has been waiting a while.
I am a busy bee. I go flower to flower collecting nectar, carrying it home to make honey, storing the honey for some imagined rainy day. Learn a new technology. Build something with the technology I just learned. Then write about it, so that other people know that I know. Nectar, hive, honey, repeat.
It is a satisfying story to tell yourself. The trouble is how it ends. The bee’s fate is rarely the rainy day it was saving for. The bee is abandoned from the hive to go build a new one, or it is smoked out and burned alive so someone else can take the honey. And here is the part the bee never gets to understand: it believes the honey is its life insurance. The honey is actually the reason it is hunted. The very thing it worked itself to death to store is the thing that gets it killed.
I think a lot of us in software are storing honey right now and calling it safety.
I suspect we will keep hearing, through the coming months, of difficult things happening to IT professionals; of people quietly coming apart. Everyone is stressed. And much of that stress wears the costume of virtue: we call it upskilling. But stress-learning does not build a safety net. It digs a whirlpool. You learn faster not because you are curious but because you are afraid, and fear is a terrible teacher; it takes everything in and retains nothing, and it pulls you down even as you tell yourself you are swimming.
Here is where the bee and the engineer part ways, and it matters.
The bee has no other move. It cannot decide that the meaning of its life lies somewhere other than honey. It can only build the hive higher, in a more unreachable place, and sharpen its sting. But a software professional in 2026 can do the one thing the bee cannot: stop and ask whether the honey was ever the point.
So I will say the unfashionable thing plainly. If you came into software for the genuine love of building, keep learning and keep building; you are exactly where you belong, and the noise should not move you. But if you are here only because it paid well, or because it was the one door that happened to be open, then it is worth looking for another door, even one that pays less. Get a life first. Then live it. The honey was never the insurance. The life is.
The second question: what kind of world is taking shape for my kids?
This one I cannot answer quickly, because it is not about me, and the people it concerns most are not yet old enough to vote on it.
Let me try the thing through a picture, because pictures hold what arguments drop.
For two decades, the Indian software services industry behaved like a supermarket selling eggs by the crate. The clients were consumers who loved the experience of buying in bulk: a whole crate, into the freezer, far more than this week needed, because they had the disposable money and storage felt like wisdom. There was always more demand than there was immediate appetite, because everybody was stockpiling. And so, to meet that swollen demand, we built poultry farms; we built a great many of them. Our engineering colleges are those poultry farms. The services companies are the supermarkets. The clients of the world, flush with cash and a taste for convenience, are the consumers buying crates they did not strictly need.
Now watch what happens when the consumer changes his mind.
When AI lets a client buy only the eggs they need for the day, the crate stops making sense. The supermarket’s bulk orders shrink. The poultry farms, built for a stockpiling world, suddenly produce more than anyone will buy. So they reduce intake. Then some of them close. It will not happen in a single quarter; the cycle may take seven or eight years to run its full length. But I think the cycle has already started, and the first turn of a slow wheel is the hardest one to see.
I am not saying this to frighten the parents reading; I am saying it because I am one of them. If our children are choosing the IT or software-engineering route by default, the way we once did, because it is the visible road and everyone is on it, then this is the moment to think it through honestly. Not to forbid the road. Only to make sure it is chosen, not merely defaulted into. The world that paid for crates is not the world they will graduate into.
The third question: what actually gave me peace, and how little time I gave it
I had been treating my own anxiety as a problem to be solved by more thinking. More analysis of the market, more scenario-planning for my children, more nectar. By Sunday I had thought myself into a smaller and smaller room.
And then I noticed something almost embarrassing in its simplicity. The whole weekend, only one kind of activity actually loosened the knot, and it had nothing to do with strategy.
I had started a new book, Devadasi, by Bijoyini Das. I will write about the book properly another time; it deserves its own essay. But what struck me this weekend was not its argument or its information. It was the literature itself, the way a sentence could build a vivid image in my mind and, in doing so, absorb the shock of an anxious day. The prose did for me what no spreadsheet of the future could: it held me in a present that was complete on its own terms.
The other thing was a film, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar. If you do not know it, it is the story of a middle-class Calcutta household where, out of financial necessity, the wife steps out to work, and the small domestic universe rearranges itself around that quiet revolution. It is sixty years old and it is about exactly the anxiety I was feeling: money, dignity, work, the fear of a changing world, the question of who we become when the old arrangements stop holding. Ray does not solve any of it. He simply looks at it with such tenderness that the looking itself becomes a kind of answer.
Sitting with the book and the film, I understood the thing my busy mind had been too busy to see. The only refuge human beings have ever truly found from anxiety, the one that has held since before the first hive and the first egg crate, is art. Not because art fixes anything. The market will do what it will do; the colleges will thin out; my children will inherit a harder, stranger world than I did. Art changes none of that. What it changes is the person sitting inside the worry. It gives you back to yourself.
What the weekend was really asking
So I picked the note back up before sleep, and I think I finally read it right.
I had spent the weekend believing I was thinking hard about the future, mine and my kids’. But the crossroad was never between two careers, or two strategies, or two forecasts. The crossroad was between a life spent storing honey I will never eat, and a life that keeps a little room for the things that have absorbed human shock since the beginning: a good book, a great film, a sentence that builds a world.
The bee cannot choose. We can.
Here is the question I am leaving the desk drawer open for this week, and I would genuinely like to know how you answer it: when you feel the future closing in, do you respond by working harder, by collecting more nectar, or do you respond by making more room for the one thing that actually steadies you? And if you already know which one works, why do you give it so little of your time?