My Latest Existential Crisis (and how JavaScript made it worse)
Picture this: It's 3 AM. The only lights are the glow of my monitor and the cold, indifferent moon. I'm staring at a Promise chain that looks more tangled than my last relationship...
Digital Psychology
My Latest Existential Crisis (and how JavaScript made it worse)
By MoAfrika Skotch Ntilane — 10 June 2025
Picture this: It's 3 AM. The only lights are the glow of my monitor and the cold, indifferent moon. I'm staring at a Promise chain that looks more tangled than my last relationship, and a thought hits me with the force of a syntax error on line 1: What if life is just an asynchronous operation with no .catch() block?
You send out a request, for love, for success, for a decent internet connection, and you get a promise of a response. You wait. You attach a .then() block, full of optimistic plans for what you'll do when the data arrives. But there's no guarantee. The server (the universe) might time out. The request might get lost in the void. You might be left waiting forever, your callback function never to be executed.
And don't even get me started on 'undefined'. That's not just a value, it's a philosophical state. It's the perfect description for that feeling of not knowing your purpose, your value, your place in the great DOM of life. We're all just variables, declared but not yet assigned, trying to find meaning in a world of nulls and NaNs.
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