What We Train Our Brains For

This is a bit of a continuation of my last post about burnout, or at least a tangent.

I have no tech news to share right now nor any startup tips, so this is what you get 🙂

A thought I had a bit, well, for a long time, was what were the occupational hazards of computing, tech, and to a lesser extent office work in general.

Not so much the dangers of not getting enough exercise, or eye strain or whatever, but mentally, how does it change us?

Is it me, or do online forums lately feel like they are full of pedants who have stopped trying to be nice to each other? We could say that is a cultural preference in behavior, much like (apparent) German directness vs Americans like myself who cannot end a conversation without saying “thanks!” 15 times. Or New Yorker efficiency (which I appreciate!)

But it’s not.

In tech, it feels we are always looking for problems. We spend our time fighting outages and preventing them. We do code review. We try to get the most done with the least amount of time possible. Everything is about not screwing up.

If you have a startup you are leading, not screwing up may also mean avoiding company death, navigating political hellscapes, avoiding bad hires, and fighting through competition in the market. All of this involves imagining all that can go wrong and trying to steer around it.

I feel this does two things that aren’t healthy.

One, we become focused on the negative, so we train ourselves to see flaws. This focuses us to be negative by a fault, and we see this online when say, there’s a post about a cool article. The first comment will be a criticism of a minor point wrong in the article, and then there will be chains of comments criticizing the criticism. It’s like nobody even read the article. This also leads to a lack of appreciation and gratitude where nobody says “that was a really great idea”, “I like that they said this…” or “thanks for sharing!”.

Two, we become too wired for logic, rather than meaning. I for one developed this thing when talking to normal people, I can spot when the sentence grammars are not constructed the way that is most efficient for communication, or when there is a logical flaw in the usage of “and, or, or not”. I spot cardinality errors with casual uses of phrases like “always”, “never”, “everyone”, or “nobody”. Being too wired for logic convinces us that our own logic is always correct.

Both of these viewpoints I feel are strengthened by practice, at least according to my theory that we get better at what we do, and slowly changed by what we read, do, and think.

Further, when in groups, we are likely to emulate the central attitude of the group and then try to apply our own spin. When we see others being too logical or too negative or too anxious about failure modes, we copy those behaviors, and there becomes a bit of an online feedback loop. Not specific to just tech, but when people are online, we are subceptible to viral ideas. The original concept of “memes” was not about unfunny GIFs, but was about the idea that ideas travel in their own ways. And ideas too, morph and evolve like biological organisms. If tech tends to put idea-spores out into the world that validates the concept of negative and failure, those ideas rub off on us more.

I’d like to see more optimism because I think that’s good for creativity, but I’d also like to see people be less stuck in the future instead of the present, because I think that generates anxiety and keeps people from enjoying things.

How would we change our industry to make it encourage optimism and presense more? That’s a good question! Expressing gratitude and appreciation more is a start, being less focused on velocity and roadmap, and having more time to pour over designs and make beautiful work might be another. Allowing everyone to brainstorm and bring their own design into the picture may also help, so engineers can dream more instead of just being those responsible for avoiding fault and failure, and finding fault and failure in others.

Maybe this theory is crazy, but maybe it’s something useful to think about.

I tend to think my skills in navigating a successful startup course (about avoiding politics and disaster) set my brain up to over-optimize for thinking about disaster later. Is our widespread burnout in the industry caused by a similar industrial focus on negative things? Is that one of our occupational hazards that we should avoid?

Good question. I would say maybe yes.

Some of us noticed we were sitting too long and got into standing desks and taking walks and things like that. What have we done about the positivity and excessive focus on testing and uptime, in lieu of creation, appreciation, craftsmanship, originality, and design?

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