It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again.
Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on the API stuff, today I’m continuing with the API stuff, no blockers.” Fantastic. Groundbreaking information. Absolutely could not have been a single line of text.
Let me save you the suspense. If your job can be done from a laptop and an internet connection, there is no good reason you should be commuting into an office during a fuel shock like this.
We already ran the biggest accidental experiment in remote work anyone could have asked for. It worked. The world did not end. Companies did not collapse. Projects still shipped, meetings still happened, and the entire knowledge economy did not spontaneously burst into flames because people were working from spare bedrooms instead of beige carpet boxes in the CBD.
We used to build things. Software that did something. Products that solved problems. Tools that people used.
Now we build apps to talk about building things. Project management tools for managing projects that produce nothing. Communication platforms for communicating about communication. Productivity apps that consume more time than they save.
The industry has become meta. We are so busy building tools for building that we forgot to build anything.
Look at a modern developer’s setup. They have tools for task management. Tools for note-taking. Tools for documentation. Tools for communication. Tools for code review. Tools for deployment. Tools for monitoring. Tools for managing the other tools. Each tool promises productivity. Together they consume productivity. The time spent configuring, maintaining, and switching between tools is time not spent on actual work. The tools became the work.
You spent years building expertise. Learning the domain. Mastering the tools. Understanding the nuances that only come with experience. This expertise is your value. It is why people pay you. It is why you have a career.
It has an expiration date. And that date is approaching faster than you think.
This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition. The half-life of expertise is shortening. The skills that were valuable for decades are now valuable for years. The knowledge that used to compound is now depreciating. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.
The RBA just raised the cash rate to 4.1%. That is two hikes in two months. The big four banks are tipping a third in May to 4.35%, which would be three consecutive rate rises for the first time since March 2023, back when they were trying to wrangle post-COVID inflation. Two rate hikes in the first quarter of 2026 has added $225 a month to the average home loan, or $2,700 a year. That nearly wipes out the three rate cuts we got in 2025.
You can earn more money. You can rebuild your health. You can make new friends to replace the ones you lost. Most resources that feel scarce can be regenerated if you invest the effort.
Attention cannot. You have a finite amount of attention in your lifetime. When you spend it, it is gone. There is no getting it back. There is no earning more. You get what you get and then you die.
The startup mythology has a convenient excuse built in. Most startups fail because the market is tough, the competition is fierce, the timing was wrong. External factors. Bad luck. Forces beyond anyone’s control.
This is cope. Most startups fail because the founders are bad at business. The market was fine. The idea was fine. The execution was bad because the people doing the execution did not know what they were doing.
There was a moment, somewhere around 2012, when the internet was as good as it was ever going to get. We did not know it at the time. We thought it would keep getting better. Instead it got worse, and we have been coasting on momentum ever since.
This is not just nostalgia. The structural incentives that made the early internet good have reversed. What we have now is optimised for different things, and those things are mostly bad for the people using it.
The return-to-office push has been justified with a lot of words. Collaboration. Culture. Serendipitous encounters. Innovation. Mentorship. Water cooler conversations. The magic that supposedly happens when bodies occupy the same physical space.
It is all bullshit.
The office exists because managers do not trust you to work without being watched. That is it. That is the reason. Everything else is a story they tell to make the distrust sound reasonable.
The guitar world has spent the last few years treating capture tech like a holy war. One camp wants modelling. One camp wants captures. One camp wants to shout AI a few more times and hope that somehow counts as innovation. It is all getting a bit silly.
That is why Helix Stadium has my attention right now. Not because Proxy is already out in the wild and flattening everything in its path. It is not. As of March 7, 2026, the latest public Helix Stadium firmware notes Line 6 has posted are still 1.2.1, and Proxy is still preview territory. The Stadium Floor itself only started shipping in mid-February, so plenty of people are still in the honeymoon phase with the hardware before any of the capture stuff even enters the picture. But the strategy around Proxy looks smarter than the usual race to see who can scream capture the loudest.