this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Programming
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This puts to words something I was recently thinking about pretty well, especially the part about being an "advice seeker" and not really being able to solve stuff on your own, which is something I've always attributed to just being a field where you are driven to, especially in school, to have The Correct Solution, and that one always exists.
I mostly struggled with this when I tried getting into art, especially music or drawing. Suddenly, there's no algorothm or The Solution, and you have to figure out something based only on your creativity and judgement, and there's no-one who will tell you "this is the correct answer", which for someone being used to there mostly being one, was something I never managed to get over to this day, because it simply stresses me to the point of creative paralysis.
Thankfully, due to enshitiffication of most of the services I was following, which basically forced me to drop them due to invasive privacy rules, AI integration, or not working in privacy focused browsers or over a VPN, it's getting better. I'm kind of looking forward to OpenAI, Google and Meta finally killing most of the internet, so I can let go when 90% of content is AI generated, 60% of websites wont work without chrome, and the rest is just porn.
That's a great point. The metric that really matters is "good enough for today", which can be very subjective.
Oh man, you're so right in highlighting how this problem manifests even in art. In a way, hobby related stuff is even harder because there's a weird pressure arising from a sense that you're not allowed to enjoy things that you're not good at. And like, how are you meant to get better at a thing if it doesn't feel permissible to be mediocre at it for a while? What if you don't want to get better at a thing, what if someone is happy to just have fun with a hobby and doesn't care if they are consistently mediocre at it, because they're doing it for themselves.
And it doesn't get better if you are good at the thing. Suddenly you've got people saying "wow, you're so good at that, you should sell them", and that's then even more pressure because it reinforces the constant feeling that not only must one strive for the "correct answer" in all things, but that progress towards this answer involves selling the products of one's labour because that's how we try to translate intangibles into measurable numbers. But the logic falls apart because excellent leather craftsmanship, for example, isn't at all related to one's ability to be running a business, and every time I have monetised a hobby, it kills the joy of the craft. Similarly, I have a friend who is an artist who used to be earning money from art, but they got sick of doing pet portraiture and got an office job so they could regain art as a hobby. Things that sell well != Things that are good (and that's even before we consider the Intrinsic value in dabbling in hobbies and creativity for fun's sake)