I’ve been meaning to do this for a very long time. Long enough that I’ve known for years that this is how I would open. This domain’s ICANN records will be a permanent reminder of just how long it took. In a way, I’m just as sad that the procrastination marathon is over as I am happy to have finally done the thing.
The obvious first question is why even bother. What do I have to say about anything that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by someone else? Also, who is even reading? It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. This is for no one but myself. I’m doing this for the sake of doing it. Everything else is secondary.
I’ve always been a strong believer that making a habit of formulating thoughts in one way or another (speech, prose, poetry, interpretive dance) will result in clearer thinking and better argumentation. This is not a new or profound thought but it still catches my by surprise just how big the effect can be. Knowing (or imagining) that these thoughts will be read (or heard, or danced) by other people always brings out my worst insecurities in an incredibly constructive way. I feel forced to examine every aspect of an argument or idea. This even extends to small things like rarely-used words or phrases being scrutinised and double-checked. Stop me on the street, catch me off guard, and ask me how confident I am that I know what eloquent means, and I’ll swear I am 100% certain I do. But you can bet I’ll look it up if I ever decide to put it in text to be seen by other people, even if it’s a chat message in a slow conversation. Examining beliefs and assumptions works the same way. It’s one thing to know something, a fact or story, and be able to answer questions about it off-hand, but if I write about it somewhere, anywhere (semi-)permanent, I find myself verifying every tidbit before I claim it as a fact. It’s also why, for me, Rubber Duck Debugging works so well, especially when the duck is a bug report entry field.
Nothing makes me question my sense of self like reading old pieces of text that I wrote. It doesn’t even have to be that old, anything beyond 3-4 months in the past will do it. And it can be almost anything; emails, chats, commit messages, bug reports. I think we all have this feeling that we’re always the same person. We remember conversations we had years ago and imagine that we spoke, thought, and behaved exactly like we do today, or in the worst case, in a way compatible with our current understanding of our self. We feel that our state of mind is this uninterrupted and more or less unchanged stream. That might be true to an extent and it probably describes how people experience us day-to-day. Find some snapshots of yourself with large gaps between them though and it might weird you out. When I read things I wrote five or more years ago, anything that’s more than two sentences, I see sentence structures and word choices that make me feel alien. It doesn’t just feel like someone else’s text, it feels like it’s some weird impersonator trying to sound like me and failing. That’s the best case scenario. Sometimes it feels like I’m reading the ramblings of an absolute moron.
There’s not much I can do about the impostor who wrote that crap in the past, or the moron. They’re not going anywhere. But I can use them. To a much lesser extent, the same effect works on smaller time scales (days or hours). Writing thoughts down and coming back to them the next day for a second pass always helps, often by making things more concise and at the same time clearer, or more eloquent, one might say. I’m not one to publish anything long-form off the cuff, without a second pass, so putting myself in the situation where I do it more, force myself into the practice more regularly (we’ll see how regular that regularly really is), can only have positive outcomes. There’s literally no downside to this, right?