Much of what we call stress is misdiagnosed. It is rarely the result of too much responsibility or even genuine complexity. More often, it emerges from an excess of points of engagement — too many small demands competing for attention without any meaningful hierarchy. Modern life is saturated with hooks: notifications, artificial urgencies, loosely scoped problems, systems that reward responsiveness over coherence. Each hook is minor in isolation, but collectively they fragment attention so thoroughly that depth becomes inaccessible. The exhaustion that follows is not caused by difficulty, but by shallowness repeated at scale.

There’s a strange alchemy to stress.

Give me one small problem and I’ll worry it to death. I’ll pace around it, circle it, polish it until it gleams with imagined consequence. My mind, when underfed, becomes obsessive. When there’s only one mouse in the room, it gets all my attention.

But introduce a bigger problem and the first one disappears.

It began by accident. I was walking to a Portland Timbers match, looking for something light to pass the time at halftime. Fifteen minutes to read, that was the goal. I slipped into Powell’s on the way, scanning spines the way you might scan a grocery shelf when you’re hungry but not sure what for. I walked out with Walking in the Woods, the English version of a Japanese text about Shinrin-yoku — forest bathing.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something curious: though I self-identify as a pathological productivity obsessive, my best decisions never seem to come from a spreadsheet. They emerge from somewhere else—a way of seeing, building, and evaluating that I rarely take the time to articulate.

So today, I’m writing down what I’ve never said aloud: the implicit code I live by.