During the past week at work, Dane Jensen gave a talk on Resilience and Pressure. I had briefly looked into his work beforehand, but I did not know exactly what to expect from the session. It ended up being one of the more insightful talks I have attended recently because it made resilience feel practical instead of abstract.
Rather than treating this as a summary of the talk, I wanted to use this reflection to internalize the ideas that stuck with me. Dane gave a helpful structure for thinking about resilience, pressure, and control, and I wanted to write through how that framework applies to my relationship with technology.
Resilience and Pressure
Just so we’re all on the same page, these are the definitions of both Resilience and Pressure that we’re going to work with.
Resilience: Response from a setback and performing on demand
A few questions to keep in the back of our heads are:
- How do we re-centre ourselves as we get shoved off balance?
- How can we not “choke” in meaningful moments?
Pressure: Being in an energized state
Pressure is a double edged sword meaning it can either excite/motivate us or make us more anxious/overwhelmed.
Pressure can be corrosive if it feels like it’s happening to us. But if we feel like we can leverage and act upon pressure, it can become useful energy.
Chronically Online
One area where I feel this pressure most clearly is being online. There are always new posts, podcasts, essays, videos, frameworks, opinions, and conversations that sway my attention.
There are two main factors that make this pressure anxious and overwhelming for me.
Reacting
Time and attention are limited, but the amount of content available to me is infinite. I know that I cannot tackle everything at once, yet most major platforms are designed to make it hard to stop. They keep recommending new things that are optimized to capture my attention. I am no longer choosing what to think about. I am responding to whatever the feed places in front of me.
I used to wake up and immediately check Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, then sit in bed while an hour disappeared. I would see a lot, but internalize very little. Most of the time, I was just scratching the itch for something interesting. If something seemed valuable but required more effort, I would save it for later. However, since these platforms all have infinite scroll interfaces, it’s hard to remember to resurface saved posts and I’d just fall back into the same loops all over again.
Tunnel Vision
Sometimes when watching or reading something, a concept comes up that I recognize but cannot explain clearly. I get an odd feeling of “discomfort” so I try to patch this with a metaphorical bandaid. Instinctively, I usually consume more by opening another video, skimming an article, just looking for the one sentence that makes everything click.
This pressure eventually turns into tunnel vision. I’ve found that if I want to internalize an idea properly, I need space to think and write it down. But when I feel discomfort with not knowing something on the spot, my attention narrows around the gap in my understanding, and I start collecting fragments instead of building a foundation.
Control Domains
One really useful part of this talk was outlining the main components in which we can start to build more self control in moments of pressure. Here is an overview on the main 4 domains to focus on.
Eliminating Stressors
I noticed that anxious feelings would surface when I used specific apps on my phone: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube (any infinite scroll based UI). Recently, on my phone, I’ve deleted all of these apps from my phone and the only way I can access them is on my laptop. I’ve since reorganized my phone to centre around 4 areas:
- quick utilities (password manager, music, obsidian, presto)
- health (apple health, bevel)
- personal finance (banking, insurance, investments)
- communication (text, call, email)
Another pattern I noticed is whenever I come back home late, my wind down routine is very different than if I’ve been able to settle down at home myself. I feel rushed, and more inclined to reach to passively using my phone at night to wind down instead of taking time away screens before sleeping. Additionally, when I wake up more tired and drained, I’m more than likely to scroll for an hour before getting up and starting my day.
Physical Resilience
The choices within this domain involves doing 3 things consistently: sleeping, eating, and movement.
Since my year-in-review-2025 my fitness routine has gone through some iteration. My weekly routine is the following now:
- 2x full body strength at the gym in the morning
- 2x runs (on the days I work from home)
- 1x spin class/outdoor cycle if the weather permits
- 1x swim
Additionally, I’m doing my best with eating a whole food diet (with occasional cheat meals obviously haha) and prioritizing consistent sleep/wake times and tracking everything through my Apple Watch. While I know that most fitness trackers aren’t the most accurate, wearing one for me acts as an accountability partner and helps me to stay aware with my progress in terms of wanting to build an active lifestyle.
Relationships
One analogy I really liked is that fostering relationships with people who love you unconditionally is your own personal safety net.
One thing I’ve always struggled with is knowing when to reach out and just talk about how I feel whenever I get overwhelmed. I tend to not share and stay in my own shadow. This often makes the pressure feel bigger.
I want to keep building activities that naturally pull me into relationship with other people: visiting my parents, going to the office, doing spin classes, training for a triathlon with friends, and having regular catch ups.
Inner Skills
Lastly, looking inwards and being aware of allows us to choose how we respond.
The way how I look about my relationship with technology is that it is very useful. What I can control are the apps that I choose to interact with, and the topics that I want to explore more in depth. Using devices isn’t something I need to avoid and cut out of my life, but I want to face the challenge of learning to use my devices more intentionally.
North Star
One last point that was brought up in this talk was about how our everyday actions bring meaning and purpose into our lives. While I can’t verbally describe what this exactly is for me right now, I do know that I care about learning, building useful things at work, being healthy, deepening relationships, and being more intentional with how I use technology in my personal life.
One question I want to keep asking is whether I am actually noticing the positive moments I am building toward. It is easy to keep optimizing for the future and miss the moments of meaning that are already happening: a good workout, a meal cooked at home, a conversation with a friend, a useful idea finally clicking, or a quiet evening where I feel settled. If resilience is partly about returning to centre, then maybe part of the work is learning to notice when I am already there.
Interesting Ideas
- our no phone roadtrip: This video was so wholesome and it did inspire me to want to try something like this in the future. I can’t imagine using a map and asking other people how to navigate, but it would be such a fun experience.
- Thoughts on slowing the fuck down: Mario (the fella who wrote this blog) released a coding harness called
Piwhich I’ve been using at work recently (instead of Claude Code). I do like the message within this post to slow down, and learn to be intentional with AI usage. Our own experience and taste is what makes us unique and most of the work nowadays is to try to guide agents into the right direction — a quite hard skill to develop! - Interaction Models: A Scalable Approach to Human-AI Collaboration: Thinking Machines was started by Mira Murati (former OpenAI CTO) and it seems this is the main research direction that they are going down. Interaction Models are quite interesting because it does solve a problem as current LLMs are “turn based” and it’s hard to make them respond in “real time”. The demos within this blog were quite impressive and I’m excited to see how they’ll commercialize this research.