Stoicism and the critical path
Re-reading Marcus Aurelius during a wave of tech restructures prompted a different read of the Stoic ideas. Diligence is not enough. What matters is where you direct it.
16 Mar 2026
I just finished re-reading Meditations. First time through, years ago, I read it mostly as a guide to equanimity: accept what you can’t control, focus on what you can, don’t let externals knock you sideways. Still good advice.
Re-reading it now, with the past two years of tech restructures in my head, I found a different thread worth pulling on.
The diligence trap
A lot of very good engineers lost their jobs in recent rounds of cuts. Not because they were careless or checked out. They were diligent. Showed up, shipped their work, maintained their systems. The cuts weren’t performance reviews. They were a different question: which parts of this business are actually load-bearing?
That framing changes things.
The critical path
In project management, the critical path is the sequence of work that determines when the project finishes. Everything off it has float. Everything off it can slip without affecting the outcome.
Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, describes how the structure of a system determines its behaviour. Feedback loops, stocks and flows: the system’s function emerges from its structure, not from the intentions of the people inside it. Organisations are systems. The critical path is the high-leverage region: where loads are real, feedback is direct, and things fail if no one tends to them. Work adjacent to it is valuable until conditions change.
The people who got cut were often doing real, useful work. But some of that work existed because things were going well, not because the system needed it. When conditions changed, the float became visible.
Worth noting: the critical path is not always vertical. Some engineers extend their reach by contributing to cross-cutting work. Guilds, for instance, are not teams. They are groups drawn from across teams around a shared practice or domain. Contributing there means your work touches more of the system at once.
What the Stoics would say
The Stoics were always trying to cut through to the nature of things. Not what something looks like, what it actually is. What does it do? What does it depend on? What does it enable?
This is exactly what systems thinking asks. The structure of a system, not its surface, determines what actually happens. A Stoic reading of an organisation would go straight past titles and org charts to ask: what are the actual load-bearing structures here?
Applied to a role: what does this work actually do for the system? A senior title attached to work that floats is not virtue. It’s decoration.
Marcus wouldn’t recommend chasing job security. That would be putting too much weight on an external. What he does recommend, over and over, is something like: understand what you’re for, and do it well. Be useful in the way you’re capable of being useful.
Epictetus wrote about autarkeia, the capacity to function from your own resources. This shows up in engineering too. The ability to take something hard and drive it through independently is itself a signal: it tells the system something real about your capability, separate from your effort or your intentions.
The reframe
Which raises a question worth sitting with: if you are good at your craft, but you consistently work on things that float, are you actually putting your craft to use? Or are you choosing the work that is familiar, adjacent, low-friction?
Diligence on the wrong problem is not just inefficient. It might be a way of avoiding the harder, more exposed work of going where things actually matter.
Building your reputation around the critical path is not a political strategy. It is closer to the Stoic idea of applying reason where it counts. The problems that are genuinely hard, consequential, and unsolved. The systems that break when someone stops caring for them. The places where shallow thinking causes compounding damage.
Work there. Not because it protects you. It might not; companies are messy and restructures are blunt instruments. But because work at the intersection of hard and important is the most honest use of your craft.
Pure diligence applied to the wrong thing is well-executed irrelevance. Not a character flaw. Just a mismatch between effort and consequence.
The restructures will keep coming. The critical path shifts. But the habit of asking “is this load-bearing?” and directing your energy accordingly seems more durable than hoping your output is visible enough when the spreadsheet gets made.
Normal human signing off.