Mental Health Debt

This is not a post about AI, computer science, or building companies. It is a post about the parts of my life that never make the feed.

Open Instagram and everyone is living their best life. Perfect kids, perfect vacation, perfect body, perfect marriage. Most of it is bullshit — not because people are lying, but because they are editing. A feed is a highlight reel. A life is the raw footage.

I remind my girls of this constantly: life is a series of interconnected problems to solve. You solve one and it hands you the next. The highs are real, the lows are real, and the lows are not a bug. Life’s imperfections are what make it perfect.

Being human is being flawed. I wish more of us were honest about that.

What the feed is doing to our kids

Start with the generation growing up inside the machine.

My girls describe parties — actual parties, kids physically in the same room — where nobody talks to each other. They sit separately and doom scroll. And when they do want to post something, they rehearse the video over and over and over, because it has to be perfect before it can be shared. What kind of childhood existence is this? They are performing childhood instead of living it.

None of that is an accident. The pull-to-refresh, the infinite feed, the like counter — these are variable reward machines, the same mechanic that makes a slot machine work. You pull the lever and maybe there is something good. Each maybe delivers a small hit of dopamine, and the unpredictability is the feature: your brain keeps pulling precisely because it cannot know when the next hit lands. Some of the smartest engineers of my generation spend their days tuning that loop. Our kids’ developing brains are the workload.

The adults are not exempt. Sarah and I went to the US Open this year and found ourselves surrounded by influencers. Some of the best athletes on earth were competing forty feet away, and they were not watching the tennis. They were taking pictures of themselves and editing their own photos, courtside, for hours. What a waste. The seat was not the point. The evidence of the seat was the point.

That is the water we are all swimming in: everyone performing a perfect life, no one living in the one they have. Somebody has to go first and tell the truth. Let me.

Under the hood

I am grateful for everything life has handed me — a wife who has put up with me for decades, two daughters I would not trade for anything, a career I could not have drawn up at 22. All of that is true.

It is also true that if you could see what stirs in my head on an average Tuesday, you would not describe it as steady. A short list:

• Imposter syndrome. With everything I have built and every title I have held, some part of me is still waiting to be found out.
• Co-dependence. Patterns I did not have a name for until recently, and that have put real stress on my marriage.
• Periods of retreat. Stretches where I do not want to talk to anyone. Not angry. Just gone.
• Body image. I feel fat and ugly more days than not. I have for most of my life.
• A stroke in my 40s. A life-threatening event that I survived and, if I am honest, am still trying to make sense of.

That list was harder to write than anything I have published on this site in twenty years. Which is exactly the point.

Everyone has a plan

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” — Mike Tyson

The stroke was my punch. Yours might be a diagnosis, a layoff, a divorce — or nothing dramatic at all. The crossroads I am describing does not require a hospital. It shows up on its own somewhere in your 40s or 50s, and it does not look like the movies.

A midlife crisis is not about buying a sports car so everything feels better. It is the moment you — or the people around you — pull your head up and ask, out loud, what the fuck is this all about?

• The kids grow up. Their games and recitals no longer fill the calendar or the silence.
• Work starts to mean less than it used to.
• You look across the table at your spouse and wonder what the next 30-plus years look like.
• You value stuff less and less.
• You struggle to find meaning, joy, and purpose.

For some people, the struggle is simply too much. And almost nobody talks about any of this in real life. We are not honest enough about our flaws. We are not honest enough about our hardships. We are not honest enough about our mental health.

Mental health debt

Every engineer knows technical debt. You take a shortcut to ship. It works. You take another. Years later the system still runs, but every change costs more than it should, and nobody remembers why the thing is wired the way it is. You either pay the debt down deliberately or it collects at the worst possible moment.

Minds work the same way. Every hard thing you route around instead of through — the childhood you did not examine, the marriage pattern you did not name, the event you survived and then went right back to work — is a line of debt. It compounds. We all carry mental health debt. The only question is whether you pay it down on your terms or on its.

I recently started therapy. It has been an amazing gift — not because I am broken, but because I am carrying debt, and for the first time I am reading the code with someone who knows how to read it. I would recommend it to anyone. I have needed it more than I knew, and I have benefited from it more than I expected.

What has helped

Mental health is a lifelong journey and I am in the early innings. These are the things that have helped me find my way so far:

• Therapy. See above. Go.
• Vulnerability. Say the hard thing out loud — even to one person. That is how you stop carrying it alone. This post is me doing that.
• Smiles and laughter. Not as a mask. As medicine. My family would tell you I am an amateur humorist, and they are being generous — but laughing with the people you love is a real reset.
• Time with select friends. You know who they are. They give you energy instead of taking it. The conversation is fluid, two-way, and honest. Avoid the “friends” who spend 99% of the conversation talking about themselves. Invest in the people who matter.

That is the whole list. It is not a framework. It is what has kept me upright.

Your turn

I named this site Memory Leak because things pile up in the background until the system slows down and nobody can say why. I have been leaking for years. I am finally running the profiler.

So here is the question I keep coming back to:

What are you carrying that no one knows about?

Not what you post. Not what you tell people at work. The real thing — the one you route around every day.

Find one person and tell them. If that person is a therapist, even better. The mess is not the problem. Carrying it alone is.