Welcome to the Co3deX
Hello and welcome to the CO3DEX, a blog of my Journeys in Real-time 3D Graphics and Technical Art. My name is Jonny Galloway. I am a polymath technical art leader who bridges art, tools, engine, and product. I work as a Principal Technical Artist and tools/engine specialist with 30+ years in AAA game development, working across content, design, production, and technology.
The String Theory of Disappointment
How to avoid trapping yourself in the negative spaces and despair
There’s a version of string theory that says reality is made of tiny vibrating strings. Not solid things, not even particles… vibrations. You never see the string itself; you see the effects.
Disappointment works the same way. One string snaps, and suddenly the whole instrument of your life feels out of tune. You don’t just lose a note. You start to hear every sound as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with you, with other people, with the future.
This is my string theory of disappointment. It’s about what happens when one broken project, one toxic job, one betrayal gets amplified until it drowns out everything else… how we get trapped in the negative spaces, and how we learn to step out of them before they become despair.
When the Studio Goes Dark
When Bluepoint was shuttered and our project was canceled, it wasn’t just a line in a press release to me. It was a life I’d been living in advance, a future I could already see in detail.
On paper, it was “business.” In my body, it was grief.
The day you get that news, it’s one string that snaps. But if you’ve built your identity around the work, that string is tied into everything: your sense of competence, your belonging, your story about what the next five years look like. The vibration travels.
That was my first big lesson in how disappointment echoes. What I didn’t expect was to watch a different version of the same physics play out, in parallel, in the person I love.
The Practice Manager
You probably know someone like her. Maybe you are her.
She isn’t the owner of the business. Her name is not on the door. But in reality, she is one of the people holding the place together. She is the subject-matter expert in how the work actually gets done. Systems, people, the plumbing of the practice that no one notices until it breaks.
Above her, there is an owner who lives in a world of constantly shifting priorities and half-formed plans. Everything is urgent, nothing is sequenced, context changes every hour. He wants everything done now, with expectations that don’t match the calendar, the headcount, or basic physics.
He doesn’t really listen when she lays out what the practice needs. He nods, gets distracted, chases the next crisis. His spouse steps in from the side. Smart, credentialed, but out of depth in this specific business and not a good people manager. Instead of empowering the expert, she soaks up her time with anxious “let me help” conversations that require more explanation than if the expert just did the work.
When numbers don’t look right, they go into quiet panic. They start going behind her back, questioning every staff member: What do you do all day? Why do you do it that way? Why isn’t this fixed yet?
They target the obvious pressure points: the billing person whose parent just died, the staff who have already been working a plan that everyone knows will take a month or more to show up in the metrics. Empathy is an afterthought at best. At worst it’s replaced with “this really isn’t a good time for the practice.”
From the outside it’s obvious: reactive, anxious, badly led. From the inside, if you’re the one holding it together, it feels like a referendum on your worth.
How She Carries It
The pattern I see, in her, in me, in everyone who cares too much… is this:
When leadership is chaotic and systems are broken, the person who cares the most tries to become the system.
She personalizes everything. If they’re going behind her back, it must mean she isn’t trusted. If they question the plan, it must mean she is incompetent. If the numbers lag (exactly as predicted), it must mean she is an impostor who has somehow fooled everyone.
So she runs around putting out fires. Every day becomes an endless string of emergencies. She can’t get to the long-term, high-leverage work that would actually change things, because she is trapped in triage.
The impact on her is brutal:
- She’s stressed and wired all the time.
- Sleep is a replay of the day, not rest from it.
- Evenings turn into long debriefs about everything that went wrong, because there is so much that went wrong.
- Weekends become pre-work, mentally living in Monday before Sunday is even over.
- A drink on Sunday night becomes less about pleasure and more about anesthesia.
This is what it looks like when disappointment becomes a whole climate instead of a passing weather pattern.
How It Lands in Us
Here’s the part the self-help books usually skip: disappointment doesn’t just live inside one person. It distorts the space between people.
When someone you love is living in constant negative space, the whole house starts to vibrate with it. She becomes a live wire. Anything I say can be misread as attack, judgment, or proof that I’m not on her side. My attempts to offer perspective or help can land as criticism or minimization.
From her perspective, the world is a rigged game:
- The people above her don’t listen.
- The people around her might be failing her.
- The next disappointment is not a question, it’s a certainty waiting just out of frame.
In that state, she notices every flaw, every missed beat, every small disappointment… in herself, in me, in everyone… and names it. She expects mind-reading and feels abandoned when it doesn’t happen. I get frustrated, defensive, exhausted.
So now it isn’t just “her job” or “my job” that’s vibrating with disappointment. It’s the relationship itself being tuned to that same harsh frequency.
When One String Rewrites the Song
This is what I mean by “string theory” in this context:
- There is the event itself (studio closed, practice in chaos).
- There is the meaning we attach to it (“I failed,” “I am not safe,” “I am invisible,” “I am the only adult here”).
- And there is the resonance… how that meaning spreads into every corner of our lives, rewriting our story in its own key.
When the resonance takes over, we stop experiencing discrete disappointments and start living in a whole disappointed universe.
In that universe:
- Every neutral comment sounds like a criticism.
- Every small mistake confirms the global fear.
- Every relationship becomes another place where we expect betrayal or incompetence.
The thing that actually happened matters. But despair isn’t about what happened… it’s about the story that tells you, “This is how it always goes. This is who you are now.”
That’s the trap: when a broken project or a broken workplace gets to rebrand your entire identity.
Don’t Be Consumed
The other day, after another weekend that felt more like unpaid overtime for two jobs we don’t own, I heard myself say it:
“Don’t be consumed by your work. Don’t get trapped in the negative spaces and despair.”
On the surface, it was advice for her. Underneath, it was a reminder for both of us. My studio closing, her practice spiraling… different stories, same physics.
There’s caring, and then there’s consumption.
Caring says: this matters, and I’m going to show up.
Consumption says: if this burns down, I burn down with it.
This piece is me trying to name that line. To admit how easy it is to cross it. To offer myself, my partner, and maybe even the people in charge who might stumble across this, a different way to think about the strings we’re all plucking so hard.
How Not to Live in the Negative Space
This is not a happy-ending essay. The studio still closed. The practice is still messy. No one has learned their lesson.
What I’m learning, slowly and imperfectly, is not how to avoid disappointment. It’s how to stop letting it define the entire shape of my life. I don’t always succeed. But here’s where I start:
1. Name the string, not the self
When something goes wrong, my brain loves to jump straight to “I am…” statements. “I am a failure.” “I am impossible to work with.” “I am cursed.”
The first move out of the negative space is to add four words: “I am having the thought that…”
- “I am having the thought that I am a failure.”
- “I am having the thought that I ruin every good thing.”
It sounds trivial, but it cracks the spell. It reminds me that this is a vibration in my head, not the voice of some God.
2. Refuse to carry the whole business on your back
We love to martyr ourselves. “If I just work harder, if I just care more, I can rescue this whole thing.”
The truth is brutal and liberating: you cannot out-care bad leadership.
You can show up with integrity. You can tell the truth. You can do excellent work. But you cannot single-handedly fix an owner who will not listen, or a system that protects its own dysfunction.
At some point, “I’m the only one holding this together” stops being noble and starts being another way to stay trapped.
3. Look at the rest of the instrument
When you’re in despair, the negative space feels like the whole painting. The canceled game, the hostile owner, the awful week… that’s all you can see.
So I force myself to ask:
- What else is true about my life right now that this story refuses to notice?
- Who in my life sees me as more than this role?
- What have I actually learned, built, survived, that this one disappointment can’t erase?
I’m not talking about “gratitude lists” for social media. I’m talking about reintroducing other strings into the mix so one broken note doesn’t get to define the song.
4. Choose where you vibrate next
I can’t stop my mind from replaying the loss. I can’t stop my partner from coming home with a day’s worth of chaos in her throat. But I can choose the next action I take.
Sometimes that means really small things. Making dinner, going for a walk, sending one honest message… something that feeds the part of me that builds instead of burns.
The disappointment string will still hum in the background. But I don’t have to tune the rest of my life to its frequency.
The Point
“The String Theory of Disappointment” isn’t about pretending things don’t hurt. It’s about refusing to let one hurt colonize everything.
Work will fail you. People will fail you. You will fail you. Studios close. Practices crumble. Owners panic. The people who should know better sometimes say “this really isn’t a good time” to someone whose parent just died.
You are allowed to grieve that. You’re supposed to.
But after the grief, or sometimes right in the middle of it, there’s this quiet, stubborn question:
Will this be one string in the instrument of my life, or will I let it rewrite the entire song?
I’m trying, clumsily and inconsistently, to choose the first answer. To remember that even when one note breaks, there’s still more of me than this one disappointment gets to name.
And when someone I love is drowning in their negative space, when I feel myself slipping back into mine, I come back to the same line:
Don’t be consumed by your work. Don’t get trapped in the negative spaces and despair.
There is more of you than this one string.
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Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own. All opinions are my own. The opinions expressed here belong solely to myself, and do not reflect the views of my current employer Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), any previous employers including AWS/Amazon, the Open 3D Foundation, or their parent the Linux Foundation. I am bound by NDAs with my current and previous employers and am not authorized to speak on their behalf. If you are a reporter or news outlet seeking official statements, please contact the respective company's PR department (I will not reply to such requests).
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