When It Falls Over

At the tail end of 2025, major cloud providers experienced outages that affected millions of users. "Blame the intern", "a person pushed the wrong code to production," or my personal favorite, it's a DNS mistake (the thing that turns names into addresses). Sometimes it's as ridiculous as someone forgetting to renew a security certificate.

Yes, really.

I'm not picking on AWS here, but look at the October Amazon outage: it lasted almost 15 hours and affected over 1000 companies across 4 million users.

Predictably, it was a DNS error at the core.

According to research, an estimated 94% of enterprise services worldwide rely on at least one primary cloud provider. The three largest providers control more than 60% of the global cloud market.

To name a few, similar patterns of failure also hit Ingram Micro (July), Microsoft (Oct), Cloudflare (November), and Google (June) in 2025.

They fail because too much depends on one thing. There's one quiet dependency carrying too much weight.

Now here's the question that I wanted this preamble to get to: Have you ever asked that question about your own life?

Building Fragile Lives

Dependencies aren't created deliberately. They happen. There's a paradox with people who become "the reliable one," indispensable, with everything routed through you. These don't feel like a problem until things come crashing down on top of you.

Life happens.

I sometimes joke that if X person was hit by a bus (apparently the new politically correct version is if X person won the lottery), what would we do?

It's the same pattern, but it's human single points of failure.

Some common traps:

• Identity Compression - Psychologists describe identity coherence as a narrative we maintain about who we are. Your meaning and worth are tied to a single role or outcome. But when something fundamentally shifts, everything falls apart.
• Unpracticed Recovery — When things don't go as planned, many of us don't know how to step back and recover. Rest is reactive, not rehearsed. Few people have a real contingency plan for disruption, especially when it's life-altering. I learned this the hard way after unexpected heart issues in 2019. (Apparently, there's also something known as the 'what-the-hell' effect)
• Cumulative Risk - the 'increased risk of negative outcomes when they are simultaneously exposed to multiple risk factors.'

The real issue isn't the failure itself.

The surprise is.

Invert

Stoics have a practice known as premeditatio malorum, which is the premeditation of the troubles that might lie ahead.

In other words, by imagining the worst-case scenario, you regain some control by removing the surprise.

It's not a pessimistic stance, but rather a reminder to focus on practice and preparedness.

The same idea shows up in Charlie Munger's 'The Power of Not Making Stupid Decisions':

'It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.'

How do you do this? When you stop expecting smoothness, disruption stops feeling catastrophic.

It becomes information.

It's a recognition that shit happens.

German mathematician Carl Jacobi believed that inversion exercises could be used to help you figure out what you need to do to not only get to an outcome, but also help you become aware of things you will need to get you to where you want to go. Pitfalls to avoid, skills you need to master, and issues you will encounter along the journey.

Define the outcomes you don't want and plan the path to avoid hitting them.

It's worth taking some time to explore these questions:

• What if the thing you rely on went away?
• What if you weren't needed anymore?
• What if you didn't get that dream job?
• What if your role changed?
• What if your energy dipped?

Hugh MacLeod wrote in Thank You, Shitshow:

There's a word for this and it's not being 'resilient' in the face of failure, it's antifragility. Where you get stronger because of it. The great thing is once you learn this (and we mean really internalize it and accept it), something shifts. You start getting very grateful for all your failures, large or small.

Resilience isn't built by avoiding failure.

It's built by refusing to rely on one thing that can fail.

A Life That Can Bend

Failure is going to happen.

Collapse, however, is optional.

I'm sorry to break it to you. Things will go sideways. What matters is whether your life can absorb them without collapsing. How you handle these things isn't about grit or toughness, but rather, how many things your identity, purpose, and recovery depend on.

In a 2009 study on brain patterns and different failure stimuli:

There was greater learning in the brain from failure than from success. Simply put, what these findings suggest is that curiosity sets up an anticipation of a reward (for the correct answer). Once we receive the reward (the correct answer), the brain acts to consolidate our memory so that we learn the correct answer. And this learning is stronger if we had initially failed than if we had succeeded.

Rehearsed disruption hurts less. When you expect change, it becomes information, not a catastrophe.

Build the ability to adapt, reroute, and keep going when things shift. You need to have more than one way to stay intact. Let meaning come from not a single place, but many. Practice making shifts before you're forced to.

A life that can bend doesn't need to break.