Living Inside the Loop

Living Inside a while Loop

While building a TUI program in Python, a thought suddenly crossed my mind.
Programs, in the end, all run inside a loop.

while True:
Inside that single line, we take input, make decisions, produce output, and return to the beginning.
Until it ends. Or more often, until it’s designed not to.

I first learned while loops in a C programming class.
Back then, it felt obvious.
“Oh, it’s just a loop.”
Nothing more, nothing less.

But stepping away from frameworks—
no Spring Boot, no event loop abstractions,
no libraries doing the heavy lifting—
and running a TUI by hand, something became clear.

Ah…
Everything happens right here.

Frameworks Are Kind, but They Hide the Truth

With Spring Boot, we write controllers,
add annotations,
and trust that requests will be handled somehow.

That’s not wrong.
But what actually happens underneath slowly fades from view.

At some point, we get used to
“how to make it work” instead of “why it works.”

A manual-driven developer.
Harsh words, maybe.
But also a product of an efficient era.

Yet when you write the loop yourself,
the truth frameworks hide reveals itself.

In the end, servers too,
programs too,
are just repeating the same work over and over.

Isn’t Life Also One Big Loop?

Wake up.
Go to work.
Do the job.
Eat.
Come home.
Sleep.

Back to the start.

There is input.
There is logic.
There is output.
And then we return to the beginning of the loop.

When we’re young, we don’t notice we’re inside it.
We just think, “That’s life.”

But in midlife, a thought appears.

“Wait… am I still inside the same while loop?”

We believe we’re living freely,
but haven’t we just been patching local logic inside a prewritten structure?

Years Spent on Local Optimizations

A bug appears, so we fix it.
Performance drops, so we tune it.
Salary feels low, so we consider a job change.

All of these are improvements inside the loop.

But
we rarely think about changing the loop itself.

Because the loop is
too familiar,
too normal,
and has been running for too long.

Programs are like that.
Life is too.

Comfort in Primitive Code

When you build a simple TUI in Python and
handle everything yourself inside a while, it’s strangely fun.

It’s not fancy.
It’s not efficient.
But it’s honest.

“So this is everything.”
“I can finally see what I’m actually doing.”

Maybe life has a moment like that too.
When you strip away complex frameworks,
and put down flashy abstractions,

and quietly look at
which loop you’re really living in.

Why This Thought Feels Comforting

Living like a program
isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Programs create meaning even through repetition.
A small input
can lead to a completely different output.

Knowing you’re inside a loop is different from spinning without awareness.

Now I know.
We were inside a while loop.

And the moment you realize that,
choices finally appear.

• Keep running the loop
• Change the condition
• Or place a break

That choice
is finally ours.