Resilience and Simplicity: The Overlapping Philosophies of SRE and Stoicism

5 min readJan 30, 2023

Some time ago, as I was reading a book on Stoicism, I couldn’t help noticing some strong similarities between the two philosophies — Stoicism and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

Both philosophies strongly emphasize resilience, simplicity, proactive thinking, and personal responsibility.

Curiously, I could not find any other blog post linking the two philosophies, so here’s my compilation of the similarities I see:

Dealing with incidents

Let’s compare side by side two quotes.

First, let’s see a quote from the chapter Being On-Call from the 1st SRE Book:

To make sure that the engineers are in the appropriate frame of mind to leverage the latter mindset, it’s important to reduce the stress related to being on-call. The importance and the impact of the services and the consequences of potential outages can create significant pressure on the on-call engineers, damaging the well-being of individual team members and possibly prompting SREs to make incorrect choices that can endanger the availability of the service. Stress hormones like cortisol and corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) are known to cause behavioral consequences — including fear — that can impair cognitive functions and cause suboptimal decision making [[Chr09]](https://sre.google/sre-book/bibliography#Chr09).

Now, let’s look into a quote from The Stoic Challenge (by William B. Irvine). This chapter addresses how to deal with setbacks, which can be correlated to the incidents in SRE:

But when a water pipe bursts, the ruptured pipe is only one of the problems that confront you. Besides the problem of not having water where you do want it, you have the much bigger problem of having water where you don’t want it. The unwanted water might flood several rooms, and if the broke pipe is on an upper story, it might cause the lower-story ceiling to collapse. The flooding problem is much more serious than that of the break in the pipe itself. Consequently, when a water pipe bursts, your first response should not be to try to mend the pipe or to go out and buy drinking water so you can make your morning coffee. It should be to turn off the water supply, to prevent your dwelling from getting flooded.
In a parallel manner, when you experience a setback, you are faced with not one challenge but two, and the second — preventing a flood of negative emotions- is usually more critical than the first.

To my eyes, both paragraphs are saying the exact same thing. When you experience a setback or if you are handling an incident, preventing the flood of negative emotions (such as fear or anger) is the first thing to do.

Why? Simple: Fear and anger may cloud your judgment and cause you to make incorrect/suboptimal decisions that will ultimately make matters worse.

It amazes me how the first stoics, two millennia ago, figure out so much about human behavior. Many of those concepts were eventually backed up by modern psychology studies (see refs in The Stoic Challenge book), along with research on how certain stress hormones (cortisol) may impair our critical thinking.

Embracing simplicity

Simplicity is another common topic between the two philosophies and the reason is clear: simple solutions prevent complex problems.

Is important not to confuse being simple with being simplistic. Simplistic means that the solution was simplified to a point it no longer meets the requirements. Being simple means we are meeting the requirements with elegance and avoiding extra complexity.

Quoting from SRE, on the Simplicity chapter:

This chapter has repeated one theme over and over: software simplicity is a prerequisite to reliability. We are not being lazy when we consider how we might simplify each step of a given task. Instead, we are clarifying what it is we actually want to accomplish and how we might most easily do so. Every time we say “no” to a feature, we are not restricting innovation; we are keeping the environment uncluttered of distractions so that focus remains squarely on innovation, and real engineering can proceed.

Furthermore:

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.

Simplicity is also very common in the Stoic manuscripts. The goal in the Stoic philosophy is to attain tranquility, and keeping things simple will increase your chances of achieving that goal. One thing that caught my attention in my stoic readings is that if you lose the ability to enjoy simple things, your happiness is doomed. Wanting more things is part of human nature (due to the hedonic adaptation) and we should try as much as possible to enjoy simplicity.

Failure is inevitable

In the introduction of the SRE book, you can find that famous cliche phrase:

Hope is not a strategy.

Embracing risk lives at the core of the SRE philosophy. That is, accepting the fact that failure is inevitable and we should prepare processes to deal with failures when they happen.

Stoicism, similarly, teaches us to focus on the things we have control over and understand that bad things will eventually happen. See this quote from Seneca:

“Remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission — indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever — nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.” — Seneca

In summary — both philosophies are similar in the sense that hope is not a strategy. Both also understand that failure is natural and the more prepared we are to deal with them, the better off we will be.

Conclusion

If you happen to have made it this far, here’s something you should know. I’m an imposter. I don’t have any formal study in philosophy, I’m only an enthusiast on the subject and yet here I am writing about philosophy.

If you do happen to be knowledgeable in philosophy, please drop a comment. I’d love to get insights on this article from people who studied all of this in-depth 😄

Nonetheless, this is a thought I’ve been meaning to share for a while now. I believe that knowledge is interconnected and we can draw valuable lessons from several disciplines. For the record, SRE has a chapter saying “Lessons learned from other industries", which does not mention stoicism directly, but mentions several other concepts from other industries applied in SRE.

References

Chapters in the SRE book:

Stoicism books I’ve read: