Why I Started Chasing the Bear

Multiple people have asked me lately how work has been going. It’s become a somewhat anxiety-inducing question.

The analogy that keeps coming to mind, over and over again, is being chased by a bear.

The classic version of the story goes like this: two hikers encounter a bear. One starts lacing up their running shoes. The other says, “you can’t outrun a bear.” The first replies, “I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.”

It’s a good analogy for a lot of things. But it’s a difficult one to sit with when the person running next to you is a coworker or a friend — someone you genuinely want to see succeed. Gone are the days of hoarding knowledge to preserve your position. That playbook doesn’t work anymore, and honestly, it never should have.

The bear is real

The landscape of software engineering is shifting faster than I’ve ever seen. It requires a continuous investment just to stay current. And the bear isn’t slowing down — if anything, as we approach what could very well be a kind of singularity, it’s getting bigger.

That’s the anxiety underneath the question. It’s not about any single technology or any single job. It’s the pace itself. The feeling that no matter how much you learn, the gap between where you are and where you need to be is always moving.

The reaction is the part I can control

I can’t control what tomorrow looks like. I can’t control the bear.

What I can control is my reaction to it.

For a long time, my reaction was to run. To stay heads-down, accumulate notes, move fast, and hope that was enough. And somewhere along the way I realized: that’s still running. You’re still behind the bear. The anxiety doesn’t go away just because you’re moving.

So I changed directions.

I stopped trying to outrun the field and started trying to understand it — in public, out loud, in writing. The act of explaining something forces a different kind of thinking than consuming it does. You find the gaps. You check the assumptions. You build something that lasts longer than a highlights folder.

Welcome to chasingthebear.net

This blog is that change of direction made concrete.

It’s a place for notes on AI, software engineering, and what it looks like to build things when the tools are moving this fast. Not polished retrospectives — notes from the trail, written while I’m still on it.

I stopped running from the bear. I started chasing it.

Welcome.