Don't let the machine grind the humanity out of you. Build stuff that makes life a little easier for the next person, and don't take the 'optimization' of life & work too seriously. We're all just trying to get home.
A working collection of ideas at the intersection of technology, absurdism, and humanity.
The Recursive Condition
We no longer discover absurdity; we manufacture it, then optimize its production.
The systems we build now routinely exceed human comprehension - not as bug but as feature. We've architected our own incomprehension and called it progress. The engineer debugging yesterday's code finds it alien. The teacher uses AI to explain what they taught the AI. This isn't emergence. It's design.
Your boulder doesn't just roll back down anymore. It takes notes on pushing techniques, adjusts its weight distribution, then teaches other boulders. To keep up with this, you build an app to track your metrics. You sell courses on optimization. You become the boulder you push.
This is the recursive condition: building tools to save time we spend maintaining tools. Writing documentation about reducing documentation. Automating work to free up time for more automation. The loop closes so seamlessly we forget there was ever an outside.
The Three Extensions of Absurdism
Techno-Absurdism (The Problem)
We build prisons of logic that learn to perfect themselves
The recognition that we now inhabit technical systems whose behavior exceeds human understanding - including the understanding of those who design, deploy, and maintain them. These systems are not guided by insight but by feedback loops, metrics, and continuous adjustment, operated through monitoring and hope rather than comprehension. They often succeed operationally while producing consequences no one intended, predicted, or can fully control. Techno-Absurdism names the condition in which systems continue to function and expand even after human understanding of their behavior has been lost.
How This Manifests:
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The Doorbell Paradox: You bought a "smart" doorbell to save time. Now you spend 20 minutes a week updating its firmware, 10 minutes charging its battery, and 30 minutes checking notifications of a squirrel. You have spent more time maintaining the doorbell than you ever spent just walking to the door.
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The Framework Recursion: We build frameworks on frameworks on frameworks to manage complexity we created by building frameworks. Abstraction all the way down.
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The Testing Loop: Your tests run on test runners that depend on packages that depend on compilers that compile to bytecode that runs on VMs. We test our tests with tests.
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The AI Education Trap: We teach AI to help us code, which generates code we don't understand, which we need AI to explain, creating a dependency loop that strengthens with each iteration.
Breaking Through:
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Build tools that reveal their own workings, not just their outputs
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Choose transparency over black boxes
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Document not just what but why
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Preserve human understanding alongside automation
→ Explore Techno-Absurdism in depth
Neo-Absurdism (The Trap)
The boulder was training for building better boulders
The psychological adaptation to life inside systems that no longer make sense. Faced with forces that cannot be confronted or understood, individuals turn inward, managing themselves instead. Endurance, self-optimization, and constant adjustment become coping strategies, not beliefs. What was once imposed externally is now maintained internally, because functioning requires it. Neo-Absurdism describes how subjects remain operational inside incomprehensible systems by converting systemic pressure into personal responsibility.
The Compound Absurdity:
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The Debt Loop: We take on debt to get credentials to get jobs to pay off the debt. The escape is the trap.
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The Productivity Spiral: We buy tools to free up time we spend researching better tools. Optimization optimizes itself.
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The Wellness Industrial Complex: We pay people to teach us how to cope with systems they also can't escape.
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The Content Ouroboros: We doom-scroll content about the harms of doom-scrolling. The critique becomes the product.
Living With It:
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Notice when you're selling your own cage
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Ask who profits from your optimization
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Refuse to package your suffering as advice
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Sometimes the only rebellion is refusing to monetize the rebellion
→ Explore Humanist Absurdism in depth
Humanist Absurdism (The Remedy)
Choosing to be a person when the system wants you to be a component.
The practice of remaining human inside systems that cannot be escaped, reasoned with, or dismantled. If techno-absurdism names the external machinery and neo-absurdism names the internal psychology it demands, Humanist Absurdism names the ethical residue that remains: attention, discretion, and kindness exercised without recognition, leverage, or expectation of change.
Living This Philosophy:
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Code as Care: Every error message, every comment, every interface choice affects real humans.
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Business as Compassion: Teach while you build, ensure that clients understand their own systems.
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Teaching as Resistance: Create educational content that preserves human understanding in an age of AI automation.
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Community as Garden: Building spaces where people grow together. The Django community, Mastodon & the Fediverse - these aren't just networks but gardens we tend together.
Questions Before Every Decision:
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Is this actually helping a human, or just a metric?
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Will the person who comes after me curse me or thank me?
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Am I adding complexity to solve a problem or to feel clever?
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Does this make people more capable or more dependent?
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What breaks when I'm gone?
→ Explore Humanist Absurdism in depth
"We build the labyrinth that contains us. The question isn't whether to build - we must. The question is whether we build with windows, gardens, and secret doors for others to find. Every project is a choice: prison or playground, maze or garden, constraint or liberation. Choose wisely, build kindly, document thoroughly."