Every summer I do something that, on paper, makes no sense. I leave a farm that has hot water, rain shower, a real bed, and three horses who expect breakfast, and I go sleep in a field, on purpose, in a tent. Where the water comes out of a communal tap forty meters away and the coffee involves a small gas burner and a great deal of patience.
By day two my back has opinions. By day three I have stopped noticing the birds and started noticing that I would trade a horse for a shower with actual pressure.
And then I come home. I turn on the kitchen tap, and the water is the best thing I have ever tasted. The bed feels like it was built by angels. The shower is a religious experience. Nothing about the house changed. I changed. For about a week, I can actually feel the luxuries I live inside of every single day and never register.
That week never lasts. Give it a two days and the tap water is just water again.
The comfort you stopped tasting
The thing about comfort: you cannot perceive it while you are standing in it. Comfort is the background. It is the thing your attention slides off. The whole point of a good abstraction is that you stop thinking about what it abstracts, and the whole cost of a good abstraction is that you stop thinking about what it abstracts.
Our systems are built entirely out of comfort now. Layers of it, stacked so high that most of us have never touched the ground floor.
You deploy a container without knowing what the kernel is doing. You call an API without knowing whether there is a datacenter or a intern on the other end. You spin up a managed database and never once think about the replication, the backups, the thousand small mercies you are renting by the hour. You write three lines of framework and a small army of maintainers you will never meet keeps them working while you sleep.
None of that is bad. I want to be very clear, because this is the point where these arguments usually swerve into “real engineers compile their own kernel” and that is not where I am going. Abstraction is the single greatest force multiplier our industry has. The tap is a miracle. I am not proposing we all go back to hauling buckets.
I am proposing that you cannot judge the value of a tap until you have carried the bucket.
Luxury Amnesia
Let me name it, because I like naming things and it makes them easier to argue about.
Luxury Amnesia: the value of a convenience becomes invisible in exact proportion to how well it works.
The better the abstraction, the less you think about it, the less you can price it. A platform that fails occasionally keeps reminding you what it does for you. A platform that never fails disappears completely, and one day someone in a budget meeting asks “what are we actually paying for here” and nobody in the room can answer. Not because the value is not there. Because the value became furniture.
This is where it stops being a camping story and starts being a governance problem. You cannot control a cost you can no longer see. You cannot defend a line item you have forgotten the reason for. And you absolutely cannot decide whether to remove something when you have no felt memory of life without it. The convenience has become an invisible dependency, and invisible dependencies are the ones that take the whole system down at two in the morning while everyone stands around asking what that service even did.
Going camping, on purpose
Turn off the framework and write the thing by hand for an afternoon. Not to ship it that way. To feel what the framework was carrying. Provision a box the manual way once, so that when the platform team quotes you a number you have some bodily sense of what you are buying. Take the auto-scaler out of a staging environment and watch what happens, so the magic becomes mechanism again. Do the deploy without the pipeline, one time, and count the steps the pipeline was doing silently on your behalf.
It is uncomfortable. That is the entire point. The discomfort is the information. When you come back to the convenience, two things have happened. You appreciate it, genuinely, the way I appreciate that kitchen tap for a week. And, more usefully, you can finally judge it. You now know what it costs to go without, so you can weigh whether it is worth what it costs to keep.
Some of the time, the answer surprises you. Some of that comfort you were renting turns out to be furniture you could sell. And some of it turns out to be the load-bearing wall you very nearly knocked through because you had forgotten it was holding the roof up.
The tap is still a miracle
The trap is not that we have too much comfort. The trap is that we have stopped being able to feel it, and a value you cannot feel is a value you cannot govern.
I am not romanticising camping. My back is not romanticising the vouwwagen. Camping is not better than a house, and bare metal is not better than a managed platform, and doing it the hard way is not a personality. The bucket is not the goal, the bucket is the thing that lets you taste the tap. Also, the moment I am fidgeting with campingaz to get a decent cup of coffee, all the work has melted way. For me a great way to recharge!
Now if you’ll excuse me, the horses want breakfast and the tap water still tastes incredible.
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