The Global IT Shutdown Ate My Homework

Is there any sensible way to cope when the whole world's going bonkers? Here's mine.

If you are one of a handful of paid subscribers who were excitedly waiting for your +DepthCharge installment to arrive this past Sunday, you may (or may not) have noticed that it did not land in your inbox as planned.

There’s a reason for that, and I shall seize upon it as a teachable moment.

I assume by now you’ve heard about what happened on Friday: Huge swaths of the so-called civilized world came to a screeching halt as the result of a massive IT disruption that crashed tech-dependent systems everywhere.

In the days that followed, we saw headlines like this …

This headline from an NBC Business News story pretty much says it all.

Before you move on, take close note of that little quote in the subhead: We’re clearly operating faster than the systems we’ve built can handle.

Um, yeah.

Frankly, most of us are operating faster than any of our systems can handle — not just the ones we’ve built, but also our own biological systems and the tightly linked natural systems on which our very lives and planet depend.

While my own personal tech operations were not directly affected by the global IT mayhem, my life certainly was. And as that mess trickled down and rippled outward, I’m guessing your life was affected, too.

One place that got messy on Friday (and stayed that way) was the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport, where many thousands of people wound up stranded —some for multiple days.

With flights, baggage handling, and information systems all thrown into chaos, some understandably cranky passengers got vociferous enough in their complaints that the cops got called in to help maintain order.

And so it happened that on Saturday morning, as I was working on my +DepthCharge post for Sunday, I got a call from a couple of older friends who found themselves in the midst of all that airport madness.

With one of them reliant on a cane and electronic scooter to get around, and the other tasked with trying to locate their missing luggage while managing endless lines and gate changes, both were getting nervous about how long this might go on. And how much worse things might get.

All the area hotels were full. The rental car lots were emptied. There was no telling if or when alternate flights might become available.

So when they called to ask if I might able to come rescue them, I was happy to say yes.

And just like that, my whole week was shot.

Hosting unexpected guests didn’t just mean warp-speed house cleaning, bed making, grocery shopping, and meal arranging. It meant nonstop friendly chatting, orienting new people to my quirky house, and thinking about things (like area-rug trip dangers) that I normally don’t think about at all.

It also meant my normally quiet, calm, predictable reality was suddenly turned into something else entirely.

With both my schedule and mental focus totally fractured, it didn’t take long before a bunch of my spinning plates started crashing to the ground.

I had a lot of spinning plates in the air this weekend, and a bunch of ‘em came crashing down.

I forgot one Zoom class entirely, and messed up the time of another. I set my cell phone down in the laundry room with a dead battery and couldn’t locate it for hours. I left my reading glasses within easy reach of my dog’s jaws.

My glasses got chewed. My hours got gobbled. My nerves got fried. I made zero headway on my writing.

Late that night, after I’d cleaned up dinner and gotten my guests situated for bed, I briefly considered staying up until the wee hours in order to get my +DepthCharge post out on Sunday, as originally planned.

But that default, business-as-usual approach would have meant more rushing, more pushing, more cortisol pumping through my system.

It would have meant me missing out on desperately needed sleep and mental recovery time.

It would have meant me donning some dumb, everything’s-just-fine facade at the cost of my own wellbeing.

And that, I knew from experience, would be playing right into the hands Unhealthy Default Reality (UDR).

One thing I’m serious about (mostly) is walking my own Healthy Deviant talk. So when I can avoid submitting to the demands of the UDR, I do.

Sometimes that means making tough choices. In this case, though, it wasn’t all that hard. With emergencies erupting around the world in that moment, I figured that (at least for my readers) a severe content shortage was not one of them.

So instead of pushing myself further than felt right, I decided to listen to my body-mind, get some sleep, and push my +DepthCharge delivery off to this coming Sunday.

And in the meantime, I’m delivering this extra special Healthy Deviant Digest to all my subscribers today. Yay!

By doing so, I hope to demonstrate for you the power of what I call Preemptive Repair.

Preemptive Repair (getting ahead of the damage done to us as the result of living in an unhealthy society) is an essential, modern-day survival skill I would love to see you practice for yourself.

Why? Because the vagaries of the Unhealthy Default Reality negatively affect us all. And they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future — which is not particularly foreseeable at this time.

Technology run amok, resource scarcity and overload, daisy-chained, “just in time” systems all breaking down at once, reactive hordes responding with fear, anger, or “irrational exuberance” — this is just par for the course in the UDR.

When the systems we’ve been conditioned to rely on do not work as promised or expected, we cope as best we can. Too often, that means extracting the means to cope from the increasingly threadbare fabric of our own lives.

We pull extended work shifts, we provide uncompensated care, we shell out extra cash, we pick up the slack however we can. And in the process, our dwindling supplies of energy, time, attention, and vitality all get further drained. Our risk of significant breakdown climbs.

Most of us are already running on such thin margins that even small emergencies can prove catastrophic.

This is particularly true when multiple, cascading crises converge, leaving a bunch of us scrambling and suffering all at once, with little remaining community “rescue” capacity to go around.

And as things get more complex, more efficiency-driven, and more tech-dependent, our iffy guardrails and safety margins will be less and less adequate to the task.

Remember the IT expert’s warning: “We’re clearly operating faster than the systems we’ve built can handle.”

With all this in mind, rather than pushing my own mental and physical systems to the breaking point this weekend, I decided to embrace what I saw as a better plan: I focused my attention and energy on maintaining my own wellbeing so that I could better attend to the wellbeing of the human beings needing my here-and-now help. Right up until 6:20 this morning, when I dropped them back at the airport. (They got home without further trouble — hurrah!)

In case of future weirdness, I encourage you to consider adopting this health-first approach in whatever ways you can.

The UDR will never stop trying to gobble up your margins (and in the process, perhaps, your homework), but please, don’t let it consume you.

Next week, I’ll be publishing my previously planned Healthy Deviant Digest post.
In the meantime, I’m sharing a little lead-in to that — a video from my Healthy Deviant U experience titled “Our Long, Slow, 10,000-Year Emergency.” 👇👇👇

From Lesson 5 of Healthy Deviant U, a brief history of humanity delivered in nine minutes flat.

I’m hoping this video will serve as a handy bridge between my post of last week (“Do Look Now: There’s a Hunter-Gatherer Inside You”) and the “Ape in the Arcade” material we’ll be going deeper with next week, all of which I hope will help you find your own better way through the UDR madness.

At the very least, I hope you will take a moment to reflect on how the UDR’s accelerating speed, complexity, and unpredictability are currently affecting YOU.

• Where are you panic-pivoting and pulling from your personal reserves in order to accommodate the demands of some industrially-driven system or institution?

• Where are you running on fumes or supplying uncompensated labor in an attempt to bolster or underwrite inherently unsustainable situations?

• As you do all of this accommodating, what is happening to your own physical and mental health? How are you coping, and at what expense? At whose profit?

• In what ways might you minimize the damage to your own systems by renegotiating your agreements during times of UDR-drive emergencies, rather than assuming/accepting that “the show must on” — even when the stage is rather obviously on fire?

Ooh, that reminds me: I just got a lovely note from a student saying they found the “Coping” episode of The Living Experiment podcast very well suited to this time. If it sounds appealing to you, feel free to give it a listen.

Here’s to embracing Preemptive Repair — and deviating from the norms that are causing too many of us to suffer.

P.S. Thanks for bearing with me during this wildly challenging week. If you know anybody who is stressed out or who might enjoy this brand of thoughtful, semi-disruptive health counsel, please pass this post along to them and suggest they subscribe, too!