For the Love of a Thing

Not Every Worthwhile Endeavor Is a Performance

Sometime during the early years of being a software engineer, I realized that often the act of merely putting a problem into words revealed a solution. I lost count of the number of times that, after wrestling with a thorny bug for hours or even days, I finally broke down and went to my colleague’s office next door to try to explain my problem and solicit ideas. But I began to observe a pattern that repeated itself: even before I had finished putting the problem into words, the very act of doing so revealed the underlying cause and pointed the way toward a solution to my problem.

Once I recognized the recurring consistency of that phenomenon, I found myself experimenting with the effects of being more intentional about putting other kinds of thorny or complex issues into my own words. I began to wonder if doing so might help me better understand even issues that were far afield from debugging troublesome software. Over the years, writing has become a tool for me that almost always helps me better understand my own thoughts about an issue.

The act of putting my thoughts into words is thus formative of my own understanding. I write to know what I think about things. It was only years later that I came across Flannery O’Connor, who had famously said, “I write to discover what I know.”

Well, me too.

But there are also performative possibilities that attach to writing, regarding which I share in O’Connor’s ambivalence. She once wrote, in a letter to a friend, that the best time for a writer is when he has finished his work, and before it is published and “begins to be misunderstood”. That observation is, to me, both hilarious and oh so true.

It was also O’Connor, if I recall correctly, who observed that there are far more people who want to be authors than there are people who actually want to do the work of writing. It is far more congenial to have written something, than it is to sit alone for hours, wracking your brain as you struggle to discover how to put your thoughts into words.

I wonder how anyone who is drawn to writing primarily for its performative potential can ever really stick with it. No doubt some do but I’m quite sure I could not. I write almost entirely for the formative effects on my own thinking, also for the challenge and enjoyment of the doing of it. Ultimately, it is the love of the thing that keeps me at it.

It is one thing to want to be a writer, but it is quite another thing to have something actually worthwhile to say. I have had the happy experience of finding that there are a surprising number of Substack writers who have useful, interesting, and often quite beautiful things to say. What a happy discovery that has turned out to be.

Writing software, which I do most days, is not entirely dissimilar to writing essays: the internal structure of really good software is almost always both beautiful and cogent. It is this potential, both for beauty and for cogency, that has always juiced my attraction to software and to writing. Beautiful software designs are almost always more resilient when they are finally put into action. I suspect that there is a corollary in there somewhere alongside the effects of beautiful prose.

The tension between love for a thing itself, and love only for the possibilities it presents for self-promotion, is especially germane just now. There is an insidiousness in the way some technology nudges young people especially toward ever greater heights of self-consciousness. As it happens, the Biblical story of the Fall - the self-inflicted and fatal wounding that took place in the garden of Eden - manifested itself, in part, as a kind of explosion of self-consciousness. Technology that magnifies self-consciousness would, in that sense, be furthering and magnifying one of the unhappy effects of that Fall. Just thinking out loud here.

We live in unprecedented times, where self-consciousness is concerned, because most young people carry around, in their pockets, devices with which they can put themselves on display and seek comment from the whole world. The distorting effect on their psyches, of having what amounts to a palantir in their pockets, is just beginning to be admitted to and understood. The early returns are anything but good.

Young people often represent big lumbering bags of potential, but with very little to show in the way of accomplishment. This state of affairs isn’t their fault - they simply haven’t had time either to acquire actual skills or to apply them. But being full of potential, they also have an innate intuition that they need to prove themselves in some way. This is actually, in my view, quite appropriate. This is the time in their lives to acquire skills to prove themselves. Not least because the safest place in the world for a young person to be is in pursuit of, or in possession of, skilled competence in something worthwhile. Accordingly, anyone who truly cares about young people will encourage them to structure the incentives in their lives around developing a worthwhile competence. Such incentives are notably and naturally in tension with conceiving of their lives as performance art for consumption by strangers.

It is their understandable intuition that they need to prove themselves which is being exploited by the attention merchants. Our contemporary technology milieu offers the omnipresent opportunity for putting oneself on display to a vast audience. The approval young people naturally seek at this time in their lives is being weaponized against them. Their attention is being hijacked into spending precious hours diverted away from developing the kind of genuine interests outside of themselves that might otherwise pay dividends toward the accumulation of useful expertise. Instead of cultivating genuine, outward-facing interests, they are being encouraged to marinate their thought-lives in the toxicity of continual self-absorption. It is a grave mistake for anyone to conceive of every endeavor as just another candidate for garnering the attention of the TikTok hordes. A person is most likely to develop true competence if she pursues a thing out of genuine interest in that thing for its own sake, free from the base alloy of shallow self-promotion.