Dear Team,
I'm writing this because over the past few weeks, various situations have overlapped, leaving me repeatedly feeling helpless and making me realize and reflect on whether I've been the most cynical person on the team.
Exhausting discussions with multiple stakeholders, frustrating decision-making processes, a world changing by the day while I remain prepared to move forward yet stuck in place, unable to progress. I imagine most of you have repeatedly experienced similar situations at work, moving beyond anger to resignation.
Added to this are the inherent difficulties of our work. Creating "tools for humans" in workflows where human involvement is approaching zero. I've called this work a polyfill for some future that will come, believing that nonetheless, rapidly providing the tools and interfaces needed right now between humans and AI is the answer for agile solution teams like ours. That belief itself remains unshaken. I also have no disagreement that the products we create have exciting goals and vision. It's why I'm still here.
Yet the reality of AI rapidly replacing human roles one by one brings a different kind of weight. Questions like "What's the point of building this anyway, when competing products will flood the market in a few months?" and "Is it meaningful to spend this much to build something faster and better than others?" swirl in my head. My response to "We need to solve problems the market doesn't address" with "There are no problems the market doesn't address" was probably of the same vein. (To be precise, I meant it's hard to justify building ourselves versus buying based on product differentiation alone, but I reflect that cynicism was underlying those words.)
Mixed with resentment, helplessness, fear, and other emotions, I've discovered myself taking a cynical stance over just a few months, half-giving up on persuading others.
The Problem with Cynicism
The biggest problem with cynicism is that it feels like insight. Because cynicism takes a stance of looking down at situations from a distance, it appears astute both to oneself and others. But structurally, cynicism isn't insight—it's a defense mechanism. It's a strategy to avoid disappointment by lowering expectations in advance, and to avoid responsibility for failure by withdrawing effort beforehand. Insight creates the next action, but cynicism stops the next action. Isn't this the clearest criterion that separates the two?
The second problem is that cynicism lowers the team's baseline. One person's cynicism changes the air in the meeting room, and that changed air raises others' threshold for speaking up. In a meeting where "it won't work anyway" has been said once, proposing new attempts requires more courage than before. Cynicism becomes not a personal attitude but a team environment variable.
Third, cynicism is self-fulfilling. A cynical person predicts failure, reduces their total effort according to that prediction, and consequently creates failure. Then they use that failure as evidence for their insight. Once this loop starts, it's hard to break.
Self-fulfilling cynicism is particularly fatal in our work. Creating new tools in areas without established answers requires conviction as raw material. Without the belief that "this will be meaningful," there's no reason to spend time on details, and products without details become indistinguishable from what others have made. In the AI era, the premise that "someone will make this in a few days anyway" might be true. However, the moment we leap from this premise to the conclusion that "therefore we don't need to make it," that spot gets taken by someone else who didn't accept the same premise. Cynicism may start from accurate observation, but when used as a basis for action, it always produces wrong conclusions.
We Should
First, let's distinguish between criticism and cynicism. Criticism is an act of engaging with the target, but cynicism is an act of withdrawing from the target. If decision-making processes are frustrating, discussing how to change them is criticism, but saying "it won't change anyway" is cynicism. The two may look similar but have opposite effects on the team. I hope we can each check which side we're on. I'll start with myself.
Next, I hope we place the starting point of change not in external factors but in ourselves. For instance, while we might sometimes feel "I wish the team moved more agilely," staying only with those thoughts and complaints could also be another form of cynicism called detachment. Team atmosphere ultimately changes only when someone acts first, and there's no reason we ourselves can't be the people who create that change.
Finally, I propose one question to ask ourselves when cynicism arises: "If I truly believed this work was meaningful, what would I do right now?" If the answer to this question differs from what we're currently doing, that difference is the space cynicism has occupied. As an aside, I've recently been taking apart existing products and tinkering with various things with the mindset of "even if the world ends tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree." Interestingly, I was able to discover new opportunities and hope within that work.
We came this far because we believed what we're creating is meaningful. I know there are sufficient reasons for that belief to waver. But wavering and letting go are different things. Wavering can be steadied again, and that work can only be done by each of us, one person at a time.
Now, as AI fundamentally rewrites various workflows and paradigms, cynicism and helplessness might be natural reactions. It's a world where yesterday's answers become today's mistakes, and no one can guarantee what the landscape will look like in a few months. Nevertheless, isn't the experience of creating something during such times and the confusion we're experiencing now not a cost but an asset that only those who pass through this period can possess? What's built when the ground is shaking remains even after the ground solidifies. And the person who built it becomes someone who can move first when the next ground starts shaking. This is why I'm still immersed in this work.
"We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope (Romans 5:3-4)." I believe choosing hope over cynicism is the most accurate way to cross this period.
Team, let's drop the cynicism. I'll start by dropping mine.