You’re in a 1:1 with your manager, nodding at appropriate intervals. But your mind is already three hours ahead — parsing through the refactor you’ll start the moment this meeting ends. The conversation is happening, but you’re not here. You’re awaiting its completion.
Later, your partner asks about your day. You give a response, but internally you’re polling for the Slack notification about the deployment. You’re physically present, emotionally queued elsewhere.
Your daughter wants you to see her drawing. “One second,” you say, finishing an email. Then another. Then one more quick thing. The drawing gets forgotten. She’s moved on to something else by the time you look up. You were there, but you were awaiting something else.
These moments don’t announce themselves. They slip past while you’re polling other threads.
If you’re a developer, you recognize this pattern immediately.
You learned async/await so your code wouldn’t freeze waiting for slow operations. Start a database query, move on, come back when it’s done. Brilliant engineering. Non-blocking. Efficient. Concurrent.
But somewhere along the way, you started living this way too.
Your entire life has become an async function. You’re always awaiting the next thing — the next milestone, the next achievement, the next moment when you’ll finally be present. Except that moment never comes, because you’ve already queued up the next await.
This isn’t another article about work-life balance or productivity hacks. This is about recognizing that we’ve literally architected our lives using a programming pattern — and that pattern has a fatal flaw when applied to human existence.
Understanding async/await in code can help us see what’s gone wrong in life. And more importantly, it can show us the way back.
It took me the better part of a decade to see what I’d done. My daughter is nine now, my son is seven. Somewhere in those years of sprints and deployments and “just one more thing,” I optimized myself out of their childhoods. Not completely. But enough. Enough to know that the moments I was “there” don’t add up to the presence they deserved. This is what I’ve been debugging ever since.
The Pattern That Changed Everything
For those who don’t write code daily: the old way of programming was synchronous. Like making breakfast by standing at the toaster, waiting for bread to toast, doing nothing else. When it pops, you move to the next task. Inefficient, but simple.
The async way is different. You start the toast, then while it’s toasting, you pour coffee. While coffee brews, you crack eggs into a pan. You’re doing multiple things concurrently, checking back when each completes. Far more efficient.
In code, this pattern is everywhere. Your phone can fetch a hundred things at once. A server can handle thousands of users because it doesn’t block waiting for each one. The entire modern web runs on async operations.
And the seduction is real. It makes you feel powerful. You’re doing five things at once. You’re productive. You’re optimized.
This pattern has escaped from code.
Think about how you actually live now. You’re in a meeting, but you’re “awaiting” its end so you can do real work. You’re on vacation, but you’re “awaiting” the Monday you’ll be productive again. You’re with your family, but you’re “awaiting” the time you can check your phone. You’re young, but you’re “awaiting” the future when you’ll finally live.
We’ve optimized ourselves for throughput: maximum concurrent tasks, maximum busyness. But somewhere in all this optimization, we forgot to ask: What happens when you apply a concurrency pattern to things that shouldn’t be concurrent?
The Async Infection
The career version looks like this:
You’re 25: “I’ll pursue meaningful work once I have 3 years experience.”
You’re 28: “I’ll explore what I’m passionate about once I’m senior.”
You’re 31: “I’ll prioritize purpose once I’m financially stable.”
You’re 34: “I’ll figure out what matters once the kids are older.”
Each await creates another. The promise chain never resolves because you keep chaining new promises onto the end.
Relationships develop their own deadlocks. You think: “I’ll be fully present in my relationship once work calms down.” But work calms down once you get this promotion. You’ll get the promotion once you focus completely on work. And you can focus on work once your relationship is stable. Two processes waiting for each other, neither able to proceed.
Then there’s the self-care memory leak. You keep telling yourself: “I’ll rest after this sprint. I’ll exercise after this deadline. I’ll see friends after this launch.”
But these promises don’t get garbage collected. They accumulate in memory, slowing everything down. You’re carrying hundreds of broken promises to yourself, and each one costs cognitive overhead.
In code, a memory leak eventually crashes your program. In life, it’s called burnout. And by the time you notice the performance degradation, you’re already running on fumes.
Remember callback hell in JavaScript before async/await? That pyramid of doom, code nested so deep you couldn’t follow the logic anymore? Your life probably looks similar.
“I’ll explore spirituality once I’m successful. Success requires complete career focus. Career focus requires sacrificing meaning. Meaning requires… wait, where was I going with this?”
Nested dependencies create code that’s impossible to reason about. And a life that’s impossible to navigate.
Here’s what makes this particularly acute right now: AI tools have made async patterns ubiquitous. You’re waiting for ChatGPT to finish generating a response. Then you immediately give it another prompt. While it’s thinking, you’ve switched to another tab, started another task. You’re never synchronous with anything anymore — not even the tools designed to help you.
Watch yourself the next time you use an AI assistant. The model takes three seconds to respond. Three seconds. And you’re already context-switching, checking Slack, opening a new browser tab. You can’t even wait three seconds synchronously. That’s not efficiency — that’s a compulsion wearing efficiency’s mask.
If you’re 25–35 now, you’ve come of age entirely within async culture. You’ve never known a world where waiting synchronously was normal. Your brain has been trained for constant context-switching, constant awaiting. The notification economy has weaponized async patterns against your attention.
What We Lost When We Stopped Blocking
Here’s the technical truth: Some operations MUST block. In code, if you try to read a file asynchronously but immediately try to use its contents, you get undefined. The data isn’t there yet.
Meaning works the same way. You can’t async/await a genuine conversation; presence is required. You can’t defer grief to a more convenient time. You have to sit with it. Wonder doesn’t wait for your schedule. The sunset happens now or not at all. Try telling your kid “I’ll be with you once this resolves.”
I call it the Father’s Bug. You’re “present” for bedtime, but you’re mentally debugging the production issue. Your daughter tells you about the butterfly she saw. You say “That’s nice, honey” while your mind traces through stack traces.
She’ll remember you were there. She won’t remember you being there.
This is the difference between async presence (physically present, mentally awaiting) and synchronous presence (fully blocked, fully attending).
You can’t debug the production issue AND be fully present. One has to block. You chose wrong.
The paradox compounds:
Async patterns make you available to everyone and present to no one.
You’re responsive on Slack, non-blocking, quick replies. You’re available for “quick syncs,” non-blocking, 15 minutes. You’re monitoring multiple channels, maximally concurrent. Your manager thinks you’re a rockstar. Your status light is always green.
Two hours blocked for a friend feels extravagant now. Devices off, thoughts uninterrupted — foreign. Full eye contact without the phantom phone-check — rare.
Alone time and deep conversations are where life satisfaction actually lives. Both require blocking operations. Both are declining.
Most spiritual traditions understood something programmers are relearning: some processes require blocking the main thread.
Sabbath is a forced blocking operation, one day where you refuse to await anything else. Prayer and meditation are synchronous execution. You must stop and be present. Modern life treats these as inefficient. “I’ll pray once I have time” translates to “I’ll pray never.”
Even without religious framing, the wisdom holds: meaning-making requires synchronous attention. You can’t be “sort of” present to what matters most.
The Synchronous Solution
Let me be clear about what this isn’t. This is not another morning routine. Not a productivity system. Not time-blocking advice. Not “just be present” platitudes.
This is a recognition that you need to make architectural choices about what runs synchronously and what runs asynchronously in your life. This is about conscious design.
In code, you ask: “Does this operation need to complete before the next thing can happen?”
In life, same question: “Does this experience require my full, undivided, synchronous attention?”
Some things break when forced async.
Deep creative work can’t survive context-switching. It takes 23 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption — every notification is an async interrupt. Your brain never blocks long enough to load the problem fully into working memory. The difference between four hours of interrupted “coding time” and two hours of truly blocked deep work? The second produces more. Always.
Emotional processing isn’t async-compatible either. Grief, joy, fear, love — you can’t defer these to a more convenient time. Many of us follow this pattern: feel grief, defer it. Feel grief, defer it. Feel grief, defer it. Stack overflow of unprocessed emotion. What actually works: blocking time for therapy, journaling, sitting with feelings. Synchronous emotional work.
Presence with people who matter works the same way. Your kid doesn’t understand “Daddy’s awaiting a Slack message.” They experience you as absent or present. There’s no middle ground. Your partner can tell when you’re physically there but mentally polling your inbox. Relationships require blocking operations. Two hours of truly synchronous time beats twenty hours of “I’m here but mentally elsewhere.”
And meaning-making, whether through faith, philosophy, or reflection, requires blocking the main thread. You can’t find meaning in the gaps between tasks. You can’t discover purpose while context-switching.
The counterintuitive insight: Blocking operations are features, not bugs.
In code, sometimes you WANT to block. Reading a config file before starting the server. Validating input before processing. Certain operations must complete before proceeding.
In life, the same. Some experiences are valuable BECAUSE they block everything else.
Sabbath, religious or secular, means one day per week where you refuse to optimize, produce, or await anything. You block the entire day for rest and presence. This feels inefficient. It’s supposed to. That’s the point.
Deep work blocks mean 2–4 hour stretches where you turn off every async interrupt. No email. No Slack. No phone. Just you and the problem. Most people have forgotten how to do this. It feels uncomfortable. Your brain keeps checking for notifications that aren’t coming.
Device-free time is radical blocking: no screens, no inputs, just synchronous engagement with reality.
I started doing this on Sundays. The first hour felt like withdrawal — my hands kept reaching for a phone that wasn’t there. By the third Sunday, I noticed something strange: thoughts arriving fully formed, not fragmented. Boredom that turned into creativity. Presence that felt almost uncomfortable in its intensity.
Not all async is bad. Email is appropriately async. You don’t need to respond in real-time. Some administrative tasks benefit from batching and non-blocking execution.
The hard part isn’t knowing this. It’s choosing it, day after day, when everything around you runs async by default.
The Resistance You’ll Meet
People won’t understand at first. Your manager will wonder why you’re not responding to Slack within minutes. Colleagues will assume you’re slacking when your status light goes dark. The culture whispers that busyness equals importance, and you’ll feel the pull of FOMO when everyone else seems to be “hustling.” Your own brain, rewired by years of async dopamine hits, will fight you hardest of all.
The reframe: You’re not being inefficient. You’re running a different system. One that measures success by depth, not by how many processes you can juggle.
Tactics fail because they don’t address the architecture. Another morning routine, another time-blocking system — these are patches on a broken design. Architecture succeeds because it forces the question: what actually deserves my synchronous attention?
The answer is different for everyone. For me, it’s Sundays without screens, evenings blocked for my family, mornings before the async interrupts begin. For you, it might look different. The point isn’t the specific implementation. The point is making the choice consciously rather than letting async patterns run by default.
At end of life, what will have mattered? The number of concurrent tasks you handled? The throughput you achieved? Or the moments you were fully, synchronously present for?
You don’t need to await anything to start living synchronously. Not after this promotion. Not after financial stability. Not after the kids are older.
Now is the only time you can choose.
The Promise That Resolves
We learned async/await to make our code more efficient. Then we applied it to our lives to become more productive. And somehow, we ended up with neither efficiency nor fulfillment.
We’re awaiting a future that never arrives, because each milestone reveals another milestone. The promise chain never resolves.
There’s exactly one promise in your life that’s guaranteed to resolve: now.
Not “now, after I finish this.” Not “now, once this meeting ends.” But this specific moment you’re living right now.
This is the only time you’ll ever be fully present in. Everything else is either memory or imagination.
The past is read-only. The future is undefined.
What if you lived synchronously with the things that actually matter — the work that lights you up, the people you love, the meaning you’re seeking?
Not when conditions are perfect. Now.
In code, async/await is beautiful. In life, it’s a bug masquerading as a feature.
Some things must block. Some things demand your full, undivided, synchronous attention. Some things can’t wait for a future that may never come.
The question isn’t whether you’ll be present in your life.
The question is when you’ll stop awaiting the perfect moment and realize it’s already here.
The promise that resolves is the one that says:
I’m here now. Fully. Synchronously. In this moment that will never come again.
return present;