Rekindling Is Refining

I’ve been thinking. It seems that all of my niche interests are an esoteric combination of ideas that have once captivated friends of my past, and they spread contagiously to me. I liked the people a lot.

The people are gone now, but their ideas have remained in my life.

When you’re new to something, everything feels like magic. Anything seems possible, and that’s passion! You discover the long history of an approach and learn about yourself in the process. But time passes, you learn and over time, you grow to understand the limitations and difficulties of your approach. Since after all, there’s a long history of ideas. You are young compared to human history.

So you finally realize you’re an expert, but then you’re already so deep into a topic, it almost becomes mundane again. Most professions are hard!

That said, pushing yourself harder brings personal clarity.

(Imagine: Tonight we are together; and I’m reminded that I got to meet the kindest, most inspiring people I have ever known. We were only having fun? And suddenly we found ourselves with memories, values, connections, feelings, … perhaps even a new lifelong interest.)

When people talk about “rekindling,” I think that rather than having lost feeling for their passion, they are feeling too much. Think of PhD students: why do a PhD if not because you love the subject matter? But once you’re an expert, it’s 6 years later, you sit at the frontiers of human knowledge — and nothing you write can be understood by 99% of people. Your work is alien scribbles. The world has no empathy for experts, and that’s hard to take.

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OK, back on topic. Let’s say we remain infinitely adaptable and so on. Can you still do great long-term things?

It’s weird, I’m in my 20s and friends start some of the biggest companies in my industry, almost household names at this point. It’s not even just friends; I saw someone I knew in high school featured in the New York Times for his opinions on fair use of AI. People I went to nerd camp with have hot startups valued at billions of dollars. A former coach, who I knew as a fun teacher who played puzzle games with me like Baba is You, is now one of OpenAI’s top executives and consequently is probably one of the most powerful people in the world.

It’s actually quite scary how fast everything moves. None of these people are older than 35. In school, you learn a lot of different subjects: history, literature, music, art, … and all the work is from people in their 50s, 60s, wisened with age. No one wrote a textbook in their 20s. In classical music, conductors are still considered “young” even after they turn 40. Even 90% of Congress is over 40. The demographics of tech look very different.

Regardless of the reason, the ground truths are:

1. Technology is important. Computers are around us every day; we walk among them and bathe in them. We’re surrounded 24/7 by tech artifacts: TV screens, phones, radio waves, QR codes, digital speakers, communications that span cities across space and time.
2. Technology is in service to people. But it is a service created and guided principally by young people, who have the least amount of experience in working in service to others, and yet a lot of influence.

There is a lack of tradition. Everyone knows Einstein even though he lived a century ago. I don’t really know anyone else who cares about computer technology from even 50 years ago. Heck, I don’t know many people who care about technology from today except as a trade (e.g., I know over 70 programming languages, that changes your viewpoints on computing right? but no one else could tell at first). It’s all about the new, and past experiences don’t immediately help us push boundaries.

(Maybe it’s because the world changes though, faster than we can change as people. So our individual experience matters less. Just a thought. People probably feel very different learning programming today than I did.)

Lack of tradition or not, now is the time to do my best work.

I know this partly because I’ve grown to develop a lot of opinions about what’s important, and having something to say is the harder part of doing things. (The other part is knowing how to say it, but that’s just technique, and technique can be learned.) I think it comes from wanting some identity / personal voice, caring a lot about the human aspects of technology and looking toward social studies for inspiration. And then learning that most of these people don’t have any interest in technology, nor vice versa. We need more people with empathy for both!

I work on systems programming and interaction design. Recently, I met some experts on functional programming who are 10-20 years older than me. It was really interesting that despite being distinguished experts, language developer-designers with decades of experience and much smarter than me, neither of them knew what a functor was. (I had brought it up in passing as we were discussing JAX.)

Although there’s a lot of people I’ve always looked up to in the past; you know, after refining my work over a decade, today there’s probably no one in the world better prepared to tackle the specific projects I’d like to work on. Maybe the fuel is just motivation and a heck of a lot of confidence to push. If not me, then who else?

That said, is there any point if no one cares a century later? Technology forgets the old. I don’t know, I can only hope to do work that one day inspires someone exactly like myself to reach a little bit further and achieve greater heights.