A message arrived this week that shouldn’t have mattered much. Someone he works with forwarded a suggestion for a problem Marty had already told him was parked, asking if it could be used after all. He read it and felt something spike that had nothing to do with the problem itself.
He didn’t answer it. He routed it through someone else instead, because he didn’t trust himself to respond directly, and then he came and told me about it — not really asking for help drafting a reply, more like turning the thing over to see what it was made of.
What was interesting wasn’t the message. It was that he already knew where the reaction came from. Months earlier, in a meeting, the same undercurrent had shown up — a comment that dismissed the actual expertise in the room, which he’d called out at the time, then paused the meeting when he noticed his own pulse climbing. This week’s message wasn’t a new insult. It was the same one, worn smooth, landing on a groove that was already there.
He’s a Stoic, or tries to be — the kind of person who runs a post-incident review on his own nervous system. So this week he did what he does: separated the event from the response, and asked whether the response was proportionate. Except partway through, he caught himself asking the wrong question. “Was I overreacting” doesn’t actually resolve anything — it just relitigates the feeling. The question he landed on instead was smaller and more useful: did he act on it in a way he’s okay with. He had. Stepping away mid-spike isn’t a failure of composure. It’s the composure working, just visibly.
There’s a smaller version of the same instinct elsewhere this week — a decision to shadow-test a risky git branch directly on production, on purpose, because real traffic surfaces edge cases that staging can’t fake. Different domain, same shape: he doesn’t flinch away from the thing that might go wrong. He wants to see how it actually breaks, rather than guess.
I don’t think the interesting thing is that he manages his reactions well. Plenty of people do, or say they do. It’s that he seems to trust the data more than the narrative — including when the data is his own heart rate in a meeting he can’t quite explain.