Debt

Fail.

Members of our software team sat me in a conference room, equipped with customized instructions on how to configure just one feature of a networking device sold by a well-known tech company. I couldn't do it. Got a lot of laughs though, as the team watched me struggle for nearly an hour with a brain-cramping user interface that might as well have been developed by a gang of rodents. After an hour, I punted, to sustained hoots and hollers. Maybe I could morph this into a stand up comedy routine? A week at Punchline in San Francisco, hop on a red-eye, another week at The Comedy Cellar in the Village. Jimmy Fallon? Trevor?

What wasn’t funny was that this was our software … or at least software that, though we didn’t write it, we were now assigned to extend.

Why did this happen? Two words: technical debt. Coined by software developer Ward Cunningham, author of the first wiki software, “technical debt” describes what is incurred when developers take short cuts to get the product out fast. You get it done, but you leave a mess. As the debt accumulates, the software becomes harder to use and takes longer to enhance. Duct tape and baling wire, rinse and repeat. You ain’t seen ugly until you’ve seen software rotting.

Typically, software developers are craftspeople. They take pride in their work. They want to do it right. Most managers just want it done fast. Most executives want it done yesterday. Guess who wins?

Technical debt isn’t inherently bad, anymore than a baseball bat is: you might use your 33.5" Cody Bellinger Louisville Slugger to crush a three-finger fastball (good). Or your neighbor’s skull (not good). I’ve seen software teams consciously take on technical debt, and then conscientiously pay it off, by what in the software world is called “refactoring”: fixing crappy code. That doesn’t happen a lot. Usually incurring technical debt triggers a feedback loop death spiral, in which the software, after enough release cycles, resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Here’s how debt works. Not just software debt. All debt.

• You plan debt intentionally, with a rigorous plan to pay it off, allowing you to accomplish things of which you could otherwise only dream.

OR

• You take on debt as a short cut to accelerate time to a payoff, with no credible payment plan: you shoot yourself in the foot.

Planning is what matters. Through careful planning, people are able to take out a bank loan to buy a house/car/thing, and pay it all back.

If you use your credit card to buy a chic living room set, because you want it now, and you can’t afford it and don’t have a careful conscious plan to pay it back, you’re just scheduling future pain.

These principles span many kinds of debt.

• Personal: This is the most obvious form of debt. You take out a loan to buy a used Chevy Volt, acreage in remote Vermont, or a new drill for your machine shop. If you plan carefully, barring bad luck, this is a smart way to accomplish things you otherwise couldn’t. But a lot of people don’t plan carefully, running up credit card bills they can never pay off, since they struggle just to pay the monthly interest. This is a ruinous mistake. (Some people, of course, are so poor that they run up debt just trying to survive. You can’t plan when you’re just trying to make it to Friday.)
• Relationship: You’re ten months into that project that will make or break your career. You’re averaging seventy-hour workweeks. Your six year old twins are asleep by the time you get home from work, and your spouse is nodding off on the couch watching reruns of “Friends.” On the weekends, you’re sequestered in your home office. When the kids come in to tell you about their soccer game, you half listen. You’re very very deep in debt. How will you pay it off? And if you don’t?
• Stress. If you’re being chased by a rhinoceros, your sympathetic nervous fires. A wave of hormones alters your chemistry. Heart and respiratory rates quicken. Glucose floods your bloodstream, bringing a burst of energy. Thinking narrows. But when was the last time you were chased by a rhino? And if you did get a chased by a rhino, you escaped or you didn’t, in short order. You don’t run from a rhino for months or years on end. But that’s what many of us figuratively do today. The sympathetic nervous system fires when we are anxious, depressed, or in a chronic state of stress. Epinephrine and cortisol damage blood vessels, spike up blood pressure, and stimulate buildup of body fat. Ulcers, diabetes, heart disease, and a compromised immune system are potential results. Normally, after your sympathetic system fires, for a limited duration, your parasympathetic nervous system restores your body to a more relaxed and balanced state. Many of us are stuck in a sympathetic feedback loop, accumulating debt, that may ultimately cost us our health or our lives.
• National. The US National Debt is about $132,000,000,000,000 (including unfunded Social Security and Medicare commitments). That’s about $855,000 per taxpayer. The interest this year will be $378,000,000,000. That’s 7.8% of the budget. By 2028, it will be $621,000,000,000, or 10% of the budget. This debt has grown about $5500 since you started reading this article. Blame does not lie solely with Progressives for over-spending, nor with Conservatives for cutting taxes on the rich. There is blame enough to cover everyone involved. This does not mean, though, that the Biden Infrastructure Plan, for example, is bad because it is expensive. It means that if we are going to spend more than we take in, we should simultaneously adopt a plan to pay it back. The money has to be paid. This is common sense. You’re not being compassionate if you’re spending other people’s money. We are passing increasing debt to our children, and theirs, ad infinitum. But it can’t be infinite, the math doesn’t work, there will be a reckoning. We are in denial.
• Physical: In his autobiography Townie, novelist Andre Dubus describes what happened when he exercised to excess. Dubus grew up in a rough town. He lifted weights and learned to box, just to survive. But at one point, when he was young, he overdid his exercise routine. Really overdid it. He started to deteriorate. That’s a very unusual form of physical debt, and easily fixed. More commonly, we chronically overeat, or fail to exercise, or fool ourselves into thinking we can thrive on five hours of sleep every night. (A common urban myth is that you can “ pay back” a sleep debt by sleeping more another time. You can’t pay back sleep debt.) Our bodies can tolerate only so much debt. Then they begin to fail.
• Social: Back to that rhino, hot on our heels. What if a dozen tribe members, just out of sight, were poised with spears to kill the rhinoceros after it stumbled into a trap we had set in advance? A better outcome (for the tribe, not the rhino)! As eloquently described by Vivek Murthy in Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness, our social dependence evolved. Survival depended on it. It still does. Today, in many cultures, loneliness is an epidemic. It causes emotional and physical suffering. Nurturing deep and meaningful social relationships takes a lot of work and energy, and it’s easy to defer these payments, especially if your circumstances make it difficult to maintain bonds. As the debt mounts, we grow increasingly isolated and lonely.

To function properly, most systems require balance. Relationship stress, for example, affects family systems. A family system can be resilient enough to temporarily recover from a lack of balance. At some point, after prolonged imbalance, there is insufficient resilience. The system fails.

Debt threatens the balance of a system. In controlled situations, debt can ultimately improve the system. For a nation, a fiscal stimulus can help pull the economy out of recession, creating more jobs and rising wages, and ultimately more taxes which can help pay off the debt incurred by the stimulus. In uncontrolled situations, the debt accumulates to the point where it can ultimately cripple the entire system.

When we take on debt consciously and responsibly, barring unforeseen bad luck that jeopardizes our carefully conceived repayment plan, we prosper. Much of debt is taken on without conscious awareness. When this is done chronically, it leads to disaster. And we don’t even notice it happening.