Greg Troszak - Posts

Introducing pain

2026-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

I've been circling a decision. The plan, if it's a plan, is to take an option away from myself. Make staying put cost something. Introduce enough pain that I can't keep doing what I'm doing.

I don't know if that's a good idea.

It's made me think about The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

Show up.

Do the work.

Try to overcome the Resistance.

A professional doesn't need a crisis. He just goes to work.

He'd call this Resistance, and he's probably right.

But he assumes the work is already in front of you.

I still can't tell if taking the option away is the Resistance, or me trying to be a professional.

Eventually

2026-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

A friend of mine passed away earlier this week. It was sudden, but not necessarily unexpected. He'd been diagnosed with cancer several months ago. It seemed like it would be manageable, until it wasn't.
I've found that death is always a shock. It just hits differently depending on the circumstances.
For me, it always makes me reflect on time. We know it's a finite resource, but we can't quite comprehend how finite it is with an unspecified end.
Our mind is wonderful at coming up with stories for what might happen in the future. As each second goes by, it gradually adapts the narrative arc so we can have any number of cohesive lives.
We need this. It's a useful survival mechanism. The problem is that many of those stories are complete bullshit.
And that's fine, until we forget that. When they cause us to delay a decision because we aren't sure what will happen. When they cause us to not actually live.
Most of my stories have the same word in them.
Eventually.
I'll figure it out eventually. It'll come to me eventually. I'll know when I know.
Eventually is the part that's bullshit. It's a word that assumes an unspecified end.
The cost isn't the waiting. It's what eventually does to me while I wait. It's always running in the background, and everything else gets less of me.
I don't think death takes eventually away from us. I think it just reminds us we never had it.
So I'm going to start removing that word from my stories.

This is happiness

2026-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.
— Niall Williams, This is Happiness </blockquote>
I love this quote because it embodies my definition of happiness so well.
Happiness is almost always available. Sometimes it's loud, sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes it's easy to tap into, other times you need to slow down and focus. But it's usually there.
Many people mistake happiness for a feeling, something that comes and goes on a whim. I think you can feel bad, but still be happy.
Happiness is realized gratitude. That framing is empowering.

Having no problems is a problem

2026-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

For a while now, work hasn't felt meaningful. I used to love software engineering, but a lot has changed in the last few years, and somewhere in there the joy went out of it. Maybe I've changed too. Either way, I've caught myself mourning my chosen profession, trying to work out whether it's still salvageable.
When people are not satisfied with their work, they usually want something concrete. More money. Maybe a promotion. But that's not what I'm after right now. Neither would fix it. What I'm after is harder to name. I want work that's engaging and interesting. I want it to mean something.
"Meaning" is a slippery word. Everyone wants it, but I'm not sure any two people share the same definition. I think you have to define it for yourself.
For me, meaning is something you make rather than find, and you make most of it by solving problems and helping people.
In talking with someone about this conundrum, they asked me a pointed question.
"What problems do you have?"
It's a good question. If that's where meaning comes from, then naming mine should point me toward what I've been missing.
I couldn't come up with a single one. At least not one that felt worth saying out loud.
I thought I'd feel proud of that.
I felt ashamed.
For a long time I've believed most of our problems are of our own making. We solve one, and the solution creates two more, until we've lost sight of the one we started with. Complex fixes that breed new problems, making everything worse. Take human connection, and the "solution" of social media.
So I made it a rule. Minimize the problems I take on. Ask whether a problem is worth solving, and if it isn't, find a way around it.
And I was good at it. Maybe too good.
Because I only ever trained one half of that skill. I got very good at eliminating problems. I never got good at telling which ones were worth giving a fuck about.
Here's how you actually end up with no problems. You close yourself off. You deal only with what you absolutely have to. If someone asks for help, I'll help. But I don't go looking for people to help. That would just be adding problems that aren't mine.
And that's the part I'm most ashamed of. Because if meaning comes from solving problems and helping people, then closing myself off to both means I spent years optimizing away the exact thing I was looking for.
It worked, too. The optimizing bought me time and resources. The freedom most people say they want. And I don't know what to do with it. I engineered my way into a kind of privilege and now I'm squandering it.
The strange part is that none of this leaves a mark. Avoidance doesn't leave a trace. You can't point to the friendships you didn't make, or the problems you never took on. So it's not that I had no problems. I'd lost the ability to see them — this one included. Which is probably why it took someone else's question to show me.
That's not the person I want to be.
My problem is not having a problem. And it's a pretty big fucking problem.
I don't think the old idea was wrong. Most self-made problems really can be let go. I'd just aimed it inward, at my own life, until I'd cleared it of nearly everything. Aimed outward, it isn't withdrawal at all. Helping someone see that a problem isn't one they need to carry is one of the better things you can do for a person. Same idea. Opposite direction. Completely different result.
I don't have it all worked out. But the shift is clear enough: to stop eliminating, and start looking.
So if you've got a problem you think I might be able to help with, let me know.

Why have a website no one reads

2026-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

I assume pretty much no one except me will look at my website. So why even have it?
Sure, it's handy to have my own digital space to reference things. But the real reason is that the possibility someone could read it makes me write better. It doesn't matter that no one does. Only that someone could.
The structure necessary to explain an idea to someone else forces you to clarify it for yourself. You have to organize the thought. Question it. Make it more defensible. Mostly, if I'm honest, I'm trying to avoid looking sloppy rather than trying to produce something brilliant, but that defensive pressure is the whole point.
I journal too, with pen and paper, mostly to get ideas out and force myself to slow down. That's a different job. The ideas I keep coming back to in my journal are the ones that need additional pressure. Otherwise I'll just keep writing about them in a shallow way and burning mental cycles. Those are the ones that earn a spot on the site. This post is one of them.
So if you're not me and you're reading this, and you're thinking about starting a website, just go ahead and do it. Use the prospect of someone seeing what you write to make yourself better.

Cognitive friction is a signal worth paying attention to

2026-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Maybe I'm wrong, but at least on the internet, it feels like we're trying to minimize cognitive friction at all costs.
I suspect that's because most major platforms incentivize attention and engagement at the expense of trust and quality.
I think that's very misguided.
Cognitive friction, the kind that comes from actually doing the work of thinking, is one of the most useful signals I know that I'm doing something worthwhile. Yes, it doesn't usually feel great in the moment, but it's a pretty good proxy for growth and learning.
Not all friction is like that. Friction from tedium, where you're doing something rote or mechanical, isn't very helpful. But friction from cognitive labor is worth paying attention to.
The labor is the thing that gets distributed in a social interaction. The friction is what you feel when you're doing your share. Skip the labor and you skip the signal, but the labor doesn't disappear. It just gets pushed downstream.
This skewed distribution can quickly erode trust.
An example.
Imagine someone is trying to submit a patch to an open source project.
In world one, they use their AI agent to do the work, it generates slop they don't personally review, and they submit the patch.
In world two, they do the work themselves and submit the patch.
In world one, the contributor felt no friction because they didn't do any labor. All of it lands on the maintainer, and it's not the good kind. It's pure tedium. Assuming they give a shit about quality, as soon as they realize it's slop, they reject the patch and the interaction is over. Trust with the contributor is gone. No one learned anything.
In world two, the cognitive friction is more evenly distributed. The person had to put time and energy into understanding the codebase. They felt the friction. Even if they made a mistake, their initial investment will make the maintainer more likely to give feedback. The contributor learns something. The maintainer gains another person who understands their project. Trust is built.
This isn't an anti-AI post. I think there's a version of world one — where the contributor takes some time to understand the codebase and review their agent's work — that gets pretty close to world two. You can still feel cognitive friction and use AI. I just think it's very tempting not to.
That's a slippery slope. You're cheating yourself out of an opportunity to learn, and you run the risk of eroding trust.

A framework for processing my dissatisfaction using AI

2026-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Like many people, I'm feeling some trepidation about AI, both at the macro and micro scales. I'm not even going to address the macro scale here - that's its own circus. But at the microscale, I use it pretty much every day. Most times it helps me get things done faster, which is a good thing. But I also usually feel very unsatisfied, even if I accomplished what I set out to achieve. I haven't quite been able to pinpoint why I feel that way.
Bob Nystrom recently wrote a post</a> that's helped me make some sense out of that. He argues that in order for AI to be useful, it has to provide some value. But what does it mean for something to be valuable?
He claims that things are valuable because they either provide utility or meaning.
A thing has utility if it helps us accomplish something.
A thing has meaning if you have some emotional connection to it.
That emotional connection can come from any number of sources - maybe the thing helps you do something deeply important, or someone you care about gave it to you, or made it for you. If you distill those examples, meaning is derived from a human being spending time on something. And time is our most precious resource.
As far as I can tell, AI is heavily skewed towards utility. Yes, we need utilitarian things, but the things that I value the most are all imbued with meaning. I'm not going to say that AI will never be able to create something meaningful. I just think human beings will always be better at it - I feel no emotional connection to AI.
When I think back on times when I've felt the most satisfied using AI, it's been to accomplish very utilitarian tasks. I'm a software engineer, so on the surface you'd think most of my tasks skew utilitarian. And they probably do. But I also enjoy practicing my craft.1</a> And part of practicing a craft is putting yourself into it.
AI makes it so easy to circumvent that. It makes it easy to trade-off meaning for utility. While the end-user of something I create may not care, I do. Maybe more than I realized.
Perhaps the craft is shifting - I should derive more satisfaction from writing a good set of prompts, wielding the tool effectively? But for now, I still find the process of thinking through abstractions, writing the code, honing it, much more satisfying.
I don't think AI is going away. I'm going to keep using it. But it would be nice to have a better, more thoughtful, relationship with it. At least now I have a framework to help guide me through that.
^{1
I realize some people scoff
at the idea of software engineering being a craft.
I think anything someone deliberately practices
and pursues thoughtfully is a craft,
even if the output skews utilitarian.
</div>}

Everything you make is awful

2025-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

...or at least that's what you'll think most of the time. And that's okay.
If you finish it, that's a success.
If someone else sees it, that's amazing.
If someone else depends on it, that's astounding.
The upside of making something great is simply so much higher than the downside of making something bad.
So get comfortable making things you think are awful.

Beliefs, actions, and emotions

2025-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

Beliefs are theories. Actions are experiments. Emotions are feedback.
Not my words, but seems like a good heuristic to remember. As far as I'm concerned, the more quickly you can change your mind, the better.

Weeknote 2025.36

2025-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

A pizza night</h2>
I make a bunch of pizza dough. I bring my Ooni to a friend's house. Everyone hangs out and eats pizza. It's pretty great. And this time I had help making the dough and forming it, so it was way easier.
A cold</h2>
School started the week prior, and my daughter got a little cold. It didn't seem to phase her. She bounced back in like a day. I'm assuming I got it from her. It knocked me out for 1.5 days, and I'm still coughing up a lung. I'd consider myself a very healthy person, and I rarely get sick. But when I do, it really throws me off.
Functional Core, Imperative Shell</h2>
I decided to revisit a couple of my favorite talks by Gary Bernhardt.

Functional Core, Imperative Shell</a></li>
Boundaries</a></li> </ul>
I feel like I pickup something new, or am reminded of a good habit I've strayed away from, every time I rewatch them. On this instance, I came to the conclusion that I'm not pushing the idea of values as boundaries far enough.
Scott Wlaschin's talk on moving IO to the edges</a> captures what I'm referring to very well. It also makes a pretty convincing case that interfaces often aren't worth it. If you push IO (i.e. side-effects) to the edges of your application, and use values as the boundary between your core and shell, it's often easier to just compose a new shell rather than define an interface so you can easily swap them at start up.
I concluded this rabbit hole by watching Rich Hickey's talk Simple Made Easy</a>. While tangentially related to FC/IS, it makes the case that "simple" and "easy" are very different things.
Simple means "not intertwined".
Easy means "at hand".
In order to create simple software, you should strive to use simple constructs (think functions and immutable data vs. classes and methods) and keep things conceptually simple by thinking of the specific problems you're trying to solve. This will often result in more things (functions, variables, data types), which may not be "easier" to manage, but makes your solutions more maintainable.
I'll likely want to revisit this one.

A post

2025-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

This is a post.
It's not about anything in particular - maybe that's the point. No one is inspired all of the time, or a constant source of profound thoughts that must be shared. That's the performative aspect of the web I don't particularly like. The internet makes it very easy - and tempting - to infinitely polish your content.
There's a time and place for that, but it's not here.
I've been thinking a lot about why I want this website. Digital ownership? Self-reflection? Curation? I don't think I have an answer yet - maybe I never will. I'm becoming okay with that. What I do know is that I want it. So I'm going to start, and see where it takes me.
I'm committing to writing at least one post per week for the rest of the year, no matter how shitty it is. It'll show that I'm human.
And one thing I can certainly get behind is doing my part to re-humanize the internet.
Nov 21, 2025</time>
I've failed miserably at this, however I don't feel any differently. Creating posts was too onerous, and I had little reason to engage with my site. I've made some tweaks to address both of these issues. Now I can write everything in Markdown. And I'm restructuring the site to make it more useful to me, so I have a reason to engage with it more.

Semantic line breaks

2025-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

The idea is to add a line break after each substantial thought when writing in a markup language that joins consecutive lines with a space. This makes it easier to author, edit, and read in source, without changing the rendered output.
The paragraph above looks like this in source:
The idea is to add a line break after each substantial thought when writing in a markup language that joins consecutive lines with a space. This makes it easier to author, edit, and read in source, without changing the rendered output. </code></pre> Dec 17, 2025</time> I've been writing this way for several months now. I do find text easier to edit. I also think it encourages succinct writing. If a sentence is difficult to break up, it probably has a bunch of unnecessary qualifiers, or isn't cohesive. It's probably not the best for more literary prose, but for technical writing, I think it encourages some good habits. I'm gonna stick with it.Sources</h2> Semantic Line Breaks</a></li> Semantic Linefeeds</a></li> </ul>
Human curation 2025-02-17T00:00:00+00:00 Curation performed by a human is tremendously valuable, especially post 2000. This isn't a new idea, but an often overlooked one. Curation takes time, energy, and consistency, which is probably why it's been automated in so many aspects of our lives. But that just makes skilled human curation so much more valuable, and all the AI hype will only amplify this.

Greg Troszak - Posts

Introducing pain

Eventually

This is happiness

Having no problems is a problem

Why have a website no one reads

Cognitive friction is a signal worth paying attention to

A framework for processing my dissatisfaction using AI

Everything you make is awful

Beliefs, actions, and emotions

Weeknote 2025.36

A pizza night</h2> I make a bunch of pizza dough. I bring my Ooni to a friend's house. Everyone hangs out and eats pizza. It's pretty great. And this time I had help making the dough and forming it, so it was way easier.</p>

Functional Core, Imperative Shell</h2> I decided to revisit a couple of my favorite talks by Gary Bernhardt.</p>

A post

Semantic line breaks

Sources</h2> Semantic Line Breaks</a></li> Semantic Linefeeds</a></li> </ul>

Human curation

A pizza night</h2>
I make a bunch of pizza dough. I bring my Ooni to a friend's house. Everyone hangs out and eats pizza. It's pretty great. And this time I had help making the dough and forming it, so it was way easier.</p>

Sources</h2>

Semantic Line Breaks</a></li>
Semantic Linefeeds</a></li> </ul>