When me and my colleagues are tearing our hair out over a problem, I'll often exclaim "These computer things are hard!". It's delivered both as a joke, and also a reminder that it's okay to take a while to figure out the problem in a particularly complex system. Eases the tension a touch.
In particular, the set of exported shell environment variables is a sinkhole of state that can potentially affect every program we run.
If only we had a way to deal with state without it being mutable...