There’s a point in learning to care for plants where things start going wrong, and you don’t know why. The leaves yellow. The stems sag. The roots turn to mush. And you end up hunched over a pot of dirt, not quite sure whether the thing needs more water, less light, or just a better gardener.
That moment feels a lot like debugging.
The symptoms are never the full story. Plants don’t throw errors. They just decline quietly, piece by piece, until one day they don’t bounce back. People can do the same thing.
Root Rot and Burnout
Root rot is what happens when there’s too much of a good thing, usually water. The roots, overwhelmed and oxygen-starved, begin to break down. From the outside, it can look like thirst. So the natural instinct is to water more. That makes it worse.
Burnout works similarly. Overcommitted, overconnected, overstimulated—your mental “roots” stop functioning. You get slow, tired, forgetful. You try to push through with more of the same: more time, more effort, more caffeine. And it digs the hole deeper.
Diagnosis is hard, because the cause hides behind the symptom. You need to step back. Check the container. Let things dry out. Reassess the balance.
Light Starvation and Cognitive Overload
When a plant doesn’t get enough light, it over-stretches, weak stems grasping for something just out of reach. It grows fast but badly. The structure fails because the inputs aren’t right.
Cognitive overload can look the same. You’re exposed to too much of the wrong input: constant context-switching, noisy environments, fragmented attention. You learn a little bit about a lot of things, but nothing takes root. The thinking gets thin.
Plants need light that matches their biology. People need space to focus, time to go deep, and some quiet now and then. That’s not a luxury. That’s basic care.
Overoptimisation and Fragility
A plant grown in perfect, sterile conditions might look impressive, but it’s fragile. One missed watering or a slight temperature drop and it collapses. There’s no resilience built in.
People can do this too. Overengineer every routine, optimise every second of the day, track sleep, diet, focus, productivity—until one variable shifts and the whole system stutters.
It’s not that systems are bad. It’s that resilience isn’t always efficient. Sometimes it looks like mess, or boredom, or time spent doing nothing useful. But those things are compost. They feed the rest of the work.
Debugging the Living
With code, there’s usually a log or a stack trace. A way to replay what went wrong. Plants don’t give you that. Neither do people. You learn by watching closely. By noticing small changes before they become big problems.
Debugging living systems means accepting uncertainty. It means responding to conditions, not just intentions.
Sometimes the most useful thing isn’t a fix—it’s simply knowing what not to do again.
“Failure Modes in Plants and People” — Because sometimes, the best way to keep something alive is to stop trying to control it entirely.