The Exhaustion of Permanent Disruption

I've been using the same notes app for about three weeks now.

This is, by contemporary standards, a committed relationship.

Before that, I was on another platform for two months, which felt like a marriage. The one before that lasted six weeks before the company announced they were "sunsetting" it to focus on AI features nobody wanted. I have a graveyard of abandoned productivity apps on my phone, each one intended to be the last system I'd ever need, each one now displaying a polite error message about API deprecation // service termination.

We talk about technological progress as if it's a universal good - a rising tide lifting all boats, etc - but we don’t mention the specific texture of living through it. Existing in a state of permanent disruption is deeply exhausting. We're constantly being forced to relearn interfaces, adjust to features we didn't ask for, and abandon tools we'd finally mastered because the company decided to pivot on its pivot on its pivot.

Innovation fatigue is not a personal failing or a lack of vision; it's a rational response to an irrational situation. We’re tired, because being tired is the appropriate reaction to chaos.

The psychological toll is hard to articulate without sounding like you're complaining // whining about nothing. After all, these are just apps, just interfaces, just little conveniences. But the cumulative effect of never being able to settle, never being able to build genuine mastery, never being able to trust that the systems you rely on will still function the same way tomorrow is real. It’s a low-grade anxiety that pervades everything. You become reluctant to invest too much effort (or any at all) into learning any particular tool because you know it might be obsolete or transformed beyond recognition in six months. You develop a protective distance from your own workflow, treating every process as temporary, every optimization as provisional.

The tech industry has built its entire economic model around this churn. VC money flows toward disruption, toward companies that promise to make existing solutions obsolete, toward founders who talk about "reimagining" things that already work. There's money in chaos, in forcing everyone to constantly switch platforms, to abandon their learned competencies, to buy new solutions to problems that were already solved.

The ecosystem selects for instability.

And we’ve internalized the narrative that this is good for us. We're supposed to be excited about change, supposed to embrace disruption, supposed to view any attachment to stability as a character flaw, supposed to install, signup, import, integrate and go all-in. The person who says "I liked the old version better" is treated like a Luddite who doesn't understand progress, someone standing in the way of the future. But attachment to stability isn't the same as opposition to improvement. Sometimes the old version was genuinely better. Sometimes a tool that's been refined over years of use is superior to a flashy redesign optimized for new user acquisition rather than existing user productivity.

The most productive people I know have a defensive near-conservatism about their tools. They find something that works and they stick with it as long as possible. They resist updates, they use old versions, they build elaborate workarounds to preserve their existing workflows. They understand that mastery takes time - and that constantly relearning everything is incompatible with actually doing anything well. They've realized that in a world that demands constant adaptation, the rational move is to create islands of constancy wherever possible.

I’ll accept: change is inevitable, technology marches forward, you can't stop progress. But I take issue with the framing that assumes all change is progress, that every redesign is an improvement, that disruption is inherently valuable. The reality is more complicated. Sometimes things change because they're actually getting better. Sometimes things change because a company needs to justify its existence to investors. Sometimes things change because the incentive structures in tech favor novelty over refinement.

There's a difference between meaningful progress and change for its own sake; between updates that respond to user needs and updates that respond to business imperatives. The current system rarely distinguishes between the two. It treats all change as equally valuable, all disruption as equally necessary, all exhaustion as a failure of individual adaptation rather than a predictable consequence of systemic instability.

What would it look like if we valued stability as much as we valued innovation? If we treated mastery as a feature not than a bug? If we gave space // oxygen to the entirely reasonable proposition that constantly being disrupted has a cost, that the costs fall unevenly, and that exhaustion is a signal worth listening to rather than something to be overcome with better personal productivity systems?

There is value in artisanship. In becoming so tied to the tools and the skill of your craft that you elevate your work to an art form.

But innovation fatigue places that value at an existential risk of total extinction.