Aesthetics of Single Threading
21 Feb, 2026
Code is on the right monitor, and Slack is on the left. A YouTube playlist flows through my noise-canceling earphones. My fingers hit Alt+Tab before I even make a conscious decision, moving back and forth between the browser and the terminal.
We call this multitasking. we mistake it for a skill representing the capable modern person handling multiple things simultaneously. However, from an engineering perspective, this is a clear error. The human brain is not a state-of-the-art multi-core processor. It is closer to an old single-core chip from the 90s. The tasks we believe we are doing at the same time are actually just switching so fast that the transitions are invisible to the eye.
Stopping one task to move to another in an operating system is called context switching. The problem is that this switch is never free. If a CPU wants to stop task A to work on task B, it must save the state of A and load the new state of B. This inevitably generates overhead. When a brain deeply immersed in coding checks a single messenger notification and tries to return to the code, it wastes a massive amount of energy just trying to restore the context.
You have likely felt exhausted on your way home from work despite feeling like you accomplished nothing. That is not because the total volume of work was high. It is because your CPU usage hit 100% all day just from changing contexts. In computer science, we call this thrashing. It describes a phenomenon where a process cannot do actual work and pours all its resources into swapping pages until it eventually freezes. While burnout often looks like an emotional issue, it is often closer to systemic heat caused by excessive context switching.
Developers prefer asynchronous methods for efficiency. We make a data request and process other tasks without waiting for the response. Our lives have come to resemble this asynchronous processing. We watch the news while eating, text while walking, and calculate our next schedule while having a conversation. We consider waiting a waste and pack every gap tight.
Paradoxically, the most beautiful moments in life come from complete blocking.
You do not move to the next line until the function returns a value, waiting with the process completely stopped. This is not inefficiency. It is a state of immersion where a single object monopolizes every resource of the system called “me.” On weekend mornings, I become a single thread for a moment in front of my espresso machine.
I tamp the finely ground beans horizontally and lock the portafilter tightly into the group head. As the machine hums and reaches its peak pressure, I watch the high-density liquid struggle through the resistance of the coffee grounds and drop heavily. During those thirty seconds while the timer counts up and the golden crema fills the cup, every bit of computing power in my brain is allocated to the single process of extraction. There is no room for smartphones, worries, or yesterday’s unfinished work to intrude.
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