The Minute I'm a Genius, The Next I'm an Idiot

You know that feeling when you're deep in a coding session and everything just clicks? The solution is elegant, the code is flowing, and you're convinced you've finally figured it all out.

Then 10 minutes later, you're staring at the same code thinking "what the hell was I thinking?"

Welcome to the first pendulum.

It's Not Just One Pendulum

Here's what I've realized after years of beating my head against keyboards: success doesn't swing on just one pendulum. It's multiple pendulums, all operating at different time scales, all moving independently, and all constantly messing with your perception of whether you're actually any good at this.

The Hour-to-Hour Pendulum

In the span of a single work session, I'll oscillate between "I'm crushing this problem" and "I need to undo all of this and start over." One hour I'm making incredible progress down exactly the right path. The next hour that path reveals itself to be a dead end, and I'm ctrl+z'ing my way back to square one.

The Day-to-Day Pendulum

Yesterday I killed it. I was in the zone. I shipped features, squashed bugs, and felt like a 10x engineer.

Then tomorrow rolls around, and I realize I actually fucked it all up yesterday. That elegant solution? It introduced three new bugs. That refactor? It broke the deployment pipeline. That feeling of productivity? It was an illusion.

Or flip it the other way: today I feel like I got nothing done. I spun my wheels, attended too many meetings, and barely wrote any code. But tomorrow? Tomorrow I'll suddenly knock it out of the park, building on the foundation I didn't realize I was laying today.

The Month-to-Month Pendulum

Some months you're shipping, learning, growing. Other months you're maintaining, debugging, spinning. Neither is necessarily better or worse, but the pendulum makes them feel that way.

The Year-to-Year Pendulum

This is the big one, and the one that's easiest to see in hindsight but hardest to recognize when you're in it.

2025 has been a really good year for me. I started a new job (okay, technically late 2024, but I really got my footing in 2025). It's a career at a company I'm passionate about, working in a field I'm genuinely interested in, with people who aren't just respected by me - they're highly respected by the entire community.

Compare that to 2023. I spent most of that year as a cog in a machine, writing code I hated, at a job I despised, for a company I couldn't care less about. Every day felt like showing up to push someone else's boulder up a hill that didn't matter.

That's the same pendulum, just swinging at a longer time scale.

The Constant State of Flux

Here's the thing that keeps me up at night: life is in a constant state of flux. Always in-between. Never quite settled.

What feels good one day is bad the next. Or vice versa. The code that seemed perfect last week needs to be refactored this week. The career move that felt like a mistake last year turns out to be the best decision you ever made.

You're never really winning, and you're never really losing. You're just existing somewhere along multiple pendulums, each one swinging at its own pace, each one telling you a different story about how you're doing.

Why This Scares (and Saves) Me

The only constant is change.

That terrifies me today, because right now things are good. I have a job I love, I'm working with people I respect, I'm learning and growing. The pendulum is on the upswing, and I know - I know - it won't stay here forever.

But here's the flip side: that same truth might save me next week, or next month, or next year, when I'm in the thick of it and can't wait for things to change. When I've fucked something up so badly that I can't see a way forward. When I'm convinced this is just how things are now.

The pendulum will swing back. It always does.

So What Do You Do With This?

I don't have a tidy conclusion here. I can't tell you how to stop the pendulums or how to only experience the good swings.

But I can tell you that understanding they exist has helped me. When I'm in a rough patch - whether it's a bad coding session, a rough week, or a shitty year - I try to remember: this is just one pendulum, at one time scale. The others are still swinging. Some of them might even be pointing up.

And when things are good? I try to appreciate it without clinging to it. The pendulum will swing. It always does. That's not pessimism - it's just physics.

The minute-to-minute pendulum will keep swinging as long as I'm writing code. The year-to-year one will keep going as long as I'm building a career. And that's okay.

Because change isn't just inevitable - sometimes it's exactly what you need.