Until it BSODed while opening my photo editor earlier today¹, my home PC had over two months of uptime — pretty alright for a Windows 10² box! This is not atypical for me: while browsers are pretty good at keeping my tabs indefinitely these days, my text editors persist unsaved changes automatically, and seemingly every other application autosaves every keystroke³, I generally prefer to just put my computer to sleep at the end of the day and have it resume to the exact place I had left off.
Saving (or losing) work isn't even the main issue here; it's primarily persistence of mental state — like a CPU lifting a frame off the stack to reveal a previous one, resuming the computer also allows me to resume the frame of mind I was in when I last used it, catapulting me into the flow of wherever I was up to before.

This is great for times when you want that kind of preservation... but it also means carrying around a bunch of baggage. Like a computer, the longer you run, the more stuff gets loaded into memory, and just... sticks around. Whether because you neglected to 'free' (forget) it, there's some dangling reference keeping it in memory, or you're caching the information 'just in case' you need it, things accumulate over time — and, to be clear, this is not just 'things you recall', but also 'things that occupy mental load⁴'.

And when things accumulate for too long, you can slowly boil the frog⁵ without noticing (N.B. you are the frog).

But there is no need to boil the frog. We have the ability to exit the pot⁶ as we reach our voluntary thermal maximum (or in this case, situational stress maximum). We have the ability, but not always the awareness to notice that we need to, or the fortitude (or perhaps even the bravery) to make the necessary changes.

When you're in the midst of the pot, it's easy to forget what it's like outside — that you might be one sproing away from cool refreshing air. Hope can be created.
While it is the product of our environment and mindset, these are both var, not const. Changing your environment may not be a reversible decision, but it is often ultimately a required step to resolve downstream issues. And oh boy, once you do make that leap, the winds of change can be as reinvigorating as a bucket of ice water to the face.

"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."
- Albus Dumbledore (Steve Kloves)

Once your eyes are lifted to see the light appearing at the end of the tunnel, anything feels possible. Perhaps the tunnel is $WORKPLACE, a community turned rancid, or a third place that you now feel dragged down rather than uplifted by — regardless, change is, by definition, required to repair a broken status quo.

These situations can feel soul-crushing, but the relief upon finding an 'escape' is immediate and palpable. Often executing the escape isn't even the relieving step — it's just the discovery and knowledge that you have a way out, if you need it, the blossom of hope in an otherwise shaded vista.

You don't need to retire and take up bonsai farming to be happy — maybe you just need to change some set pieces on the great stage of life. Remove the boiling pot, pop a few stack frames, open the curtains, and prioritise the things that bring you purpose.

Footnotes#