Essay: Emotional Tech Debt: Why You Cannot Always Just Get Over It

But first, a Haiku:

Her Reality
Is functional yet broken
Ship it anyway

There is a particular kind of advice that people give when they do not understand why someone is struggling.

Just get over it.

Move on.

Stop dwelling on the past.

You cannot let this keep you from living your life.

And to be fair, I understand the sentiment.

Sometimes people genuinely believe they are encouraging resilience. They see someone they love struggling, and they want that person to get back to living.

But having spent roughly fourteen years working in information technology—and finding myself often required to put my secondary degree in psychology to use—I have come to recognize a fundamental problem with this approach.

Sometimes what looks like a failure to move forward is actually the consequence of trying to move forward without addressing what broke.

In software development, we have a concept called technical debt.

Technical debt refers to the future costs associated with decisions made during the development or maintenance of a system. These decisions often involve accepting a less-than-ideal solution to meet an immediate business need, delivery deadline, or sprint commitment.

Sometimes the compromise is intentional. Sometimes it is a shortcut. Sometimes it is simply the result of not having sufficient time, resources, or information to implement a more sustainable solution.

The system might continue functioning.

The application might still run.

The users might not even notice anything is wrong.

But underneath the surface, unresolved issues can accumulate—or I like to say, “it’s held together with duct tape and prayer.”

And eventually, something has to give.

I think human beings can accumulate something similar.

Emotional tech debt.

1) When Functioning Becomes the Priority

I grew up around people who believed in perseverance.

You handle your responsibilities. You get up. You go to work. You do the things. You take care of what needs taking care.

And there is tremendous value in that.

But I also think we sometimes confuse the ability to continue functioning with the ability to function well.

I remember being let go from a job once.

And here is the particularly unfortunate part.

It was the only day I had ever decided to bring donuts for the entire office.

On a whim and a coupon, I stopped by Krispy Kreme on my way to work. I thought it would be nice to bring everybody a little something.

Apparently, somebody else had a very different idea about how my day should go.

Those MFers fired me.

With donuts.

I do not know if there is an appropriate etiquette for terminating an employee who has just brought breakfast for the office, but I feel reasonably confident that whatever happened that day was not it.

Anyway.

I called my mom on my way home from the office, still shocked by what had happened.

She told me I had the afternoon to cry about it.

And to be fair, I understood where she was coming from. I was a grown woman with a mortgage and responsibilities. I had recently purchased a house, and my partner at the time had stepped away from employment to return to school.

The drumbeat of life still beat.

So I took it on the chin.

By the following morning, I was submitting resumes. By Friday, I was already communicating with a recruiter.

Ultimately, I was unemployed for approximately a month.

From a certain perspective, that was a success story.

I experienced a setback, recovered quickly enough to pursue another opportunity, and eventually returned to work.

But here is what that story does not capture.

I never really gave myself the opportunity to process the shock of being fired.

I had been accustomed to being a strong employee. I took pride in my work. And suddenly, I found myself unemployed without having anticipated that possibility.

At the time, I took it incredibly personally.

It was only much later that I learned the company had been reducing staff in preparation for being acquired by another company.

That information changed how I understood what happened, but it did not retroactively erase the anxiety I had already developed.

In subsequent positions as a consultant, I began experiencing a nagging concern whenever I found myself on the bench.

For those unfamiliar with consulting, being on the bench means that you are employed by a consulting firm but are not currently assigned to an active client engagement.

It is a normal part of the consulting business.

But for me, it became associated with the possibility of being unexpectedly let go.

I would wonder whether this was the day someone would decide I was no longer needed.

And that insecurity took time to overcome.

The experience had also temporarily ruined Krispy Kreme for me.

Well, the original glazed donuts, anyway.

Boston cream was apparently innocent until proven guilty.

But beneath the humor was something I had not fully understood at the time.

Losing my job had created a very real fear about my financial security. I had a mortgage, a household to maintain, and a partner who was also unemployed.

My body responded to that uncertainty as a threat.

When animals escape danger, we sometimes observe them trembling or shaking afterward. Humans also experience physiological responses to stress, including changes in muscle tension, heart rate, and alertness.

I sometimes wonder whether we underestimate how much time and space we need to recover from experiences that leave us feeling threatened, even when the threat is not immediately physical.

I had not given myself much opportunity to pause.

I had simply resumed functioning.

And while continuing to look for employment was necessary, the act of submitting resumes did not resolve the emotional consequences of losing my job.

The system was operational.

But the vulnerability remained.

And over time, that vulnerability affected how confidently I could operate within it.

That is what I mean by emotional tech debt.

2) When the Emotional Debt Comes Due

Years later, I found myself navigating the end of a long-term partnership.

But this time, I could not simply take the experience on the chin and keep moving.

I had spent years overfunctioning in the relationship, giving more than I realized I could sustainably offer, and assuming that eventually things would work themselves out.

When I finally recognized that they were not going to work out in the way I had hoped, and that I needed to make a different choice, something unexpected happened.

It was not just the grief of that relationship.

It was the accumulated weight of other relationships, other experiences, and other moments when I had shown up for people without recognizing how little reciprocity I was receiving.

I began to recognize a pattern.

And with that recognition came what I can only describe as an enormous wave of emotional tech debt.

I became profoundly depressed.

There were days when finding the motivation to get out of bed and manage basic responsibilities felt nearly impossible.

And when I tried to explain what was happening to my Dad, we struggled to understand one another.

My Dad comes from a generation that often emphasizes perseverance through adversity.

You take it on the chin.

You keep moving.

You do what needs to be done.

And I understood that philosophy because I had lived by it for much of my life.

But what I was trying to explain was that I had already spent years doing exactly that.

I had pushed through.

I had kept moving.

I had continued showing up.

And now, when I finally stopped long enough to recognize what those experiences had cost me, I was not suddenly filled with motivation to begin again.

I was exhausted.

It felt as though my body had accumulated years of emotional inertia, and I could no longer sustain the effort required to keep everything moving.

My Dad, wanted to understand why I could not simply get back to living my life.

I was trying to explain that I needed to understand what had happened to the life I had been living before I could confidently determine what came next.

Eventually, with the help of an AI assistant, we found a way to communicate across that difference.

The technology did not resolve my depression.

It did not undo the experiences I had been processing.

And it certainly did not make the difficult decisions for me.

But it helped explain my experience in language my Dad could understand, while also helping me recognize the perspective from which he was approaching the conversation.

And something changed.

He understood.

Our relationship has been better since.

Sometimes emotional recovery does not begin with someone giving you the right advice. Sometimes it begins with someone finally understanding why the advice they have been giving has not worked.

3) You Cannot Troubleshoot What You Refuse to Examine

Imagine calling an IT department because your computer keeps crashing.

The technician responds:

“Well, have you tried just getting over it?”

You explain that the computer will not start.

They tell you to stop dwelling on the last crash.

You explain that the problem keeps recurring.

They tell you that other computers have experienced worse problems and continued functioning.

At some point, you would reasonably conclude that this person has no business working in technical support.

Yet we sometimes approach human emotional experiences with precisely this logic.

We treat the visible symptoms as the problem rather than asking what might be causing them.

And then we become frustrated when those symptoms persist.

But in technology, troubleshooting requires understanding the conditions that produced the failure.

You examine the logs.

You identify patterns.

You investigate dependencies.

You look for the root cause.

Not because you enjoy staring at error messages.

Because you want the system to function properly again.

I think emotional processing deserves similar consideration.

Understanding why something hurt is not necessarily an exercise in self-pity.

Sometimes it is how we identify what needs to change.

4) Not Every Problem Requires Immediate Repair

Now, this is where I would caution against taking the analogy too literally.

Human beings are not machines, and emotional experiences are not defects that need to be eliminated.

Grief is not a software bug.

Sadness is not evidence of malfunction.

And sometimes there is nothing to fix, or even declare a feature.

Sometimes an experience simply is.

Something painful has happened, and the appropriate response may be to acknowledge that it was painful.

Not everything requires troubleshooting, optimization, or immediate resolution.

But even in those circumstances, refusing to acknowledge the experience does not necessarily make it disappear.

There is also no universal timetable for emotional recovery.

Some people benefit from staying active while processing difficult experiences. Others need more time, support, or treatment before they can resume certain responsibilities.

Neither approach is inherently evidence of superior character.

And while technical debt can sometimes be addressed through a scheduled maintenance window, emotional recovery does not always proceed according to a predictable project plan.

Believe me, if I could have created a Jira ticket titled Resolve Relationship-Related Depression, assigned it a reasonable number of story points, and closed it by Friday, I might have tried.

Unfortunately, the human nervous system has never shown much interest in sprint deadlines.

5) The Hidden Cost of Deferred Maintenance

What concerns me about emotional tech debt is not simply that unresolved experiences can continue affecting us.

It is that we can become so accustomed to functioning around them that we forget how much effort we are expending.

We develop workarounds.

We avoid certain conversations.

We anticipate conflict.

We suppress reactions.

We organize our lives around things we have not fully understood.

And sometimes, the cost of that accumulated stress becomes physical.

Chronic stress does not exist exclusively in our thoughts. Our bodies participate in the experience through physiological responses involving the nervous system, stress hormones, immune activity, and other biological processes.

When those responses remain activated or become repeatedly triggered over time, they can contribute to a range of health concerns, including sleep disturbances, muscle tension, digestive problems, and changes in mood.

Emotional well-being and physical well-being are not entirely separate systems.

In my own experience, I eventually realized that understanding what had happened to me intellectually was not sufficient to restore my sense of equilibrium.

I could explain my experiences.

I could identify the patterns.

I could understand why I had responded the way I did.

But that understanding did not automatically make my body feel safe or rested.

I began incorporating somatic practices, breathwork, meditation, yoga, and energy practices such as Reiki into my personal recovery, alongside therapy and medication.

These approaches helped me address different aspects of my well-being, offering opportunities to process my experiences, reconnect with my body, and cultivate a greater sense of balance.

Emotional tech debt is not always something you can rationalize your way through.

And sometimes those adaptations are necessary. They may even help us survive difficult circumstances.

But a workaround that was useful during a crisis may not be the best long-term solution.

Eventually, we deserve the opportunity to examine whether the systems we have built around our pain are still serving us.

And that examination is not necessarily about assigning blame.

It is about understanding what we are carrying.

6) Resilience Should Include Recovery

I do not believe resilience means never experiencing disruption.

I do not believe strength requires pretending that something did not hurt.

And I certainly do not believe that the ability to suppress an emotional response indefinitely is the highest expression of maturity.

To me, resilience includes the capacity to recover.

Sometimes that recovery requires action.

Sometimes it requires rest.

Sometimes it requires difficult conversations, professional support, or changing circumstances that continue causing harm.

And sometimes it requires acknowledging that what worked for another person may not work for you.

My parents’ approach to hardship helped them navigate their lives.

But that did not mean I could process the end of my partnership in exactly the same way.

I was not refusing to move forward.

I was trying to understand what moving forward actually required of me.

And I think that is a distinction worth making.

Because sometimes the most productive thing a person can do is not to push harder.

Sometimes it is to address the debt.

Not so they can spend the rest of their lives examining what went wrong.

But so they can finally enjoy more of what comes next.

And perhaps also be able to enjoy a glazed donut again. 🍩