I flipped my desk last week. Literally. Sent the monitor flying, stomped on my laptop in a blind rage.

Or at least, I did in my head. Then I heard my name, tuned back into the daily call, and carried on fixing a broken build, rotating secrets, and untangling merge conflicts I didn’t cause. Just to clear the way for the work that actually mattered.

And that’s the point: everything is too hard. Not meaningful-hard. Not worth-it-hard. Just absurdly, unnecessarily, needlessly hard.

We’ve normalised friction. We’ve glamorised struggle. We celebrate Git mastery as a badge of honour, telling ourselves the problem is our competence, not the fact that we’ve standardised a tool where one wrong move can undo a whole week’s work. We twist our models to fit relational schemas and write SQL incantations that make us feel superior, even when they’re clearly not the right tools for the job.

We tell ourselves this is maturity, when really it’s resignation. We build ever higher barriers around “the right way”, then congratulate ourselves for surviving them, instead of making it harder to do things wrong.

This talk doesn’t offer a framework, or a fix, or five steps to simplification. It offers recognition. It’s a rallying cry for everyone who’s ever stared at some pointless obstacle and thought: Why am I even doing this?

Because you’re not the problem.
Everything is too hard.
And maybe the first step to fixing that is finally talking about it.