The dominant interpretation of Karma in the Western culture is “eventually, justice will be made”, something like “there will be a judgment day and everybody will have to pay for their deeds”. While this is technically true, it is also incomplete. In the sense that there is no “external” judge that will analyze your activity and reward / punish you.

Karma means simply “action” and combined with emptiness and confusion, it can be a real bitch. Why? Well, since you experience and produce at the same time your reality, your actions (karma) will tend to crystalize in habits, and, eventually, in mindless (as in auto-pilot) activities. If you do something consistently, then, at some point, you will do that with less and less effort, and even without thinking that you’re doing it. Think how easy it is to use keyboard strokes to open your favorite editor, indent code, or copy and paste. Before becoming these auto-pilot keystrokes, those were all conscious actions, that you repeated on and on and on, until you’re not even realizing you’re doing them.

If your actions are “good”, then you will produce “good” outcomes on auto-pilot. You will literally have a hard time avoiding all the good stuff that will come into your life.

But if your actions are toxic (and by that I mean actions which are harming others – or yourself – in a consistent way) then the outcome will also be hard to avoid.

Zooming back in to our programmer lives, each commit you push is actually karma, and will generate consequences. If your code is good, then the outcome will be positive. You will continue to write even better code, people will respect you and you won’t be made into a bad meme on the Internet. If the code crashes a lot, or harms the user’s computer, then the outcome will be, obviously, not good: your repo will be a mess and nobody will want to do pair programming with you.

There is a more detailed version of this article on my personal blog, so if you're interested have a look at it: Buddhism For Geeks.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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