There’s an old Zen story about a farmer. Feel free to skip ahead if you’ve already heard this one.
One day, his horse ran away. His neighbors, ever the experts in unsolicited commentary, gathered around and declared, “Such terrible luck!” As if someone appointed them to the village omens committee.
“Maybe,” the farmer shrugged.
The horse returned the next day, followed along by several wild horses. The neighbors cheered as if they had just won the lottery by proxy, “Such great fortune!”
Non-plussed, the farmer said, “Maybe.”
Later, the farmer’s son tried breaking one of the wild horses. This did NOT go well—the horse would have none of it and threw the farmer’s son, who broke his leg as the inevitable result. Ever the Greek chorus of doom, the neighbors shook their heads and gasped, “Bummer, dude!”
The farmer abided and replied, “Maybe.”
Soon after, the army came to draft young men for some war or other. But they passed over the farmer’s now gimpy son. Fully invested in this rural rollercoaster drama, neighbors enthusiastically exclaimed, “How lucky you are!”
Still, the farmer said, “Maybe.”
The Tech Industry: A Never-Ending Cycle of “Maybe”
To most of us working in IT or technology, this story feels oddly familiar—with constant and exponential change, technology is essentially a Zen parable on steroids. Rather than a pastoral ambiance of horses and wars, though, we’ve got data breaches and AI revolutions. And cyber-espionage.
Take my own journey with photo editing software. One day, I realized I’d lost my Photoshop Elements DVD—and with it, my precious license. Disaster! Adobe’s response? “Sorry about your bad luck. Care to sign up for our new subscription model at three times what you were paying before?”
So I grudgingly switched to GIMP, thinking I was downgrading my life. But that “setback” eventually led me to discover the Affinity Pro Suite—which not only costs a fraction of Adobe’s increasingly extortionate pricing but also doesn’t hold my creative work hostage behind a monthly subscription paywall.
Was losing my Adobe license bad luck? As the farmer in the story might say, “Maybe.”
This kind of technological “maybe” happens all the time:
- A server crashes spectacularly during peak hours? Disaster! Until you realize it exposed vulnerabilities you didn’t know existed—and now your system is stronger than ever.
- A major software update breaks half your integrations? Catastrophe! But then you discover a new tool that works better anyway.
- AI is taking over jobs? Terrifying! Until you realize it’s also creating roles like “Prompt Engineer,” which sounds like something out of “Johnny Mnemonic.” Hmmm, maybe that’s not such a good thing….
In technology, what looks like bad luck today might just be tomorrow’s breakthrough—or at least tomorrow’s mildly amusing anecdote. Or it could be the first step down the road to a dystopic hellscape. Yellow Brick Road? Maybe.
Cybersecurity: Crisis or Cosmic Joke?
Cybersecurity is a field where chaos reigns supreme and yesterday’s best practices are today’s punchlines:
- One day, passwords are king. The next? Passkeys and biometrics are staging a coup.
- Your firewall is state-of-the-art this year; next year, it might as well be the screen door to Kramer’s apartment.
It’s easy to feel you’re playing an endless game of Whack-a-Mole with hackers who are always one step ahead (and possibly laughing maniacally). But maybe that’s the point: every breach forces innovation. Every failure is a nudge toward resilience. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves while updating our systems at 3 AM, drinking stale coffee that tastes suspiciously of despair.
How to Retain Your Sanity in the Unpredictably Insane World of Tech
So how do we navigate this ever-shifting landscape without losing our minds—or at least without losing more than we already have?
Channel Your Inner Farmer
When faced with yet another IT crisis (or triumph), take a deep breath and say: “Maybe.” Is this API change a disaster or an opportunity? After all, some engineer somewhere thought it would be a good idea…. Is this outage the end of days or just an inconvenient Thursday? While I never could get the hang of Thursdays, I learned a long time ago that Friday is NOT the day to push ANYTHING to production.
Control What You Can; Laugh at What You Can’t
Some things are within your power: backups, updates, training your team not to click on emails promising riches and free cruises from Nigerian princes. Other things—like quantum computing breakthroughs or the whims of algorithm updates—are not. Accept this with grace (or at least with some Tim Hortons…).
Remember: Change Is the Only Constant
In IT, there’s no such thing as “done.” The moment you think you’ve mastered something, it changes—like trying to hug a cloud or explain blockchain to your grandparents. Embrace the absurdity. Stay curious. And when things go sideways (as they inevitably will), just ask yourself: “Maybe this isn’t so bad?”
Conclusion: The Cosmic Joke That Is Tech
Life and, by extension, technology, are absurd. In light of this abhorrent state of affairs then, humor is the best response. So when your IT systems inevitably throw you for a loop again—and they will—laugh and remember: good luck or bad luck doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you adapt.
And if all else fails? Blame it on wild horses.
