@kristiedegaris Oddly enough, this is a thing that (some) people in the technology area actually get right. *You don't do ground-up rewrites*. It's incredibly hard to do a good job of starting again from scratch, but if you can plot a course of steady change from where you are to where you want to be, that's almost always the better solution.

@kristiedegaris Thanks for the essay. I'm very much appreciating that sentiment at the moment, having considerably over-extended myself last year.

Puts me in mind of another piece I was reading yesterday by Tim Harford. He's coming at the topic from a slightly different angle (and I guess a much more comfortable starting point), but also has a theme of maintenance over improvement. Maybe interesting to compare:
https://timharford.com/2026/01/why-self-improvement-starts-with-maintenance/

Best wishes with managing your health and keeping the plates spinning.

P.s. nice pic of Dunkeld - it's a good few years since I was last there, but it used to be a favourite stopping point on the way up north. Seem to remember that you could spot dippers hunting near the bridge on occasion

@kristiedegaris

“When we organise our culture around renewal, we devalue the quieter labour of holding things together, of getting through.” Yes!

The more the culture valorizes moving fast and breaking things, and the more things break and break, the more I appreciate the essential, unglamorous but dignified work of simply holding it together, carrying on.

@kristiedegaris Thank you so much for this, truly deeply viscerally.

You touched on a lot of what I’d been feeling the last few years but broke then open and blossomed then and gave them better words & handles for reckoning beyond the seeds I had only just begun to understand. I can’t wait to see what grows slowly and on their own timeline now.

I also shared in my LC support group.

@kristiedegaris oh excellent. Thank you for your wise observations here.

@kristiedegaris 100% agree. My toast with friends on the 31st was to continue what I started in 2025 and before.