Unmaintainable Chemistry
Ξ October 2nd, 2007 | → | ∇ Culture, General, Philosophy |
Have you ever had a job that drives you insane? Good, you’re normal. So here comes my job rant. In principle I love my job. I have easy hours, great benefits, and sit at a desk all day doing things that I love (coding, coding, and more coding). The thing is though, every once in a while, meaning daily, I have to stop doing what I love, and fix other peoples messes. Messes made because other people didn’t test what they built, or think very far ahead when they coded.
Now don’t mistake me, I’m not getting all high and mighty about programming styles, but I find that I have a pretty easily negotiable style, and I like it.
That’s not really the point though, nor is my preference being ignored by others the point. But I have a seriously difficult time trying to grasp the ‘just make it work’ philosophy of so many people. Not even the people I work with particularly. Just people in general. I don’t understand why people don’t ever want to take the time to do it right in the first place. Instead they put band-aid after band-aid on the problem until they have a heaping pile of gauze and sticky and plastic. Then they wonder why they can’t feel their finger anymore.
I see this in my job daily, but it occurs to me that it’s a much much larger problem then lazy developers. It’s cultural. To look at the band-aid analogy, only from a different light. Look at the way our allopathic practitioners handle our medical care. They ask you what’s wrong, and then give you a perscription medication to ‘fix’ it. Except the medication doesn’t fix it. It alleviates the symptoms. To fix it, you need to know what caused it, and that would require a much better understanding of the human body than western doctors have. (Yes, I know there are a lot of great doctors out there, many of whom take good care of their patients. But there is a philosophical epidemic in the western world, particularly in North America, that indicates medication is the solution to our ‘problems.’)
But even looking at the poorly conceived concept of medicine isn’t a big enough picture. Why do we get sick in the first place? Laziness. We do exactly what some of my co-workers do. Instead of taking care of ourselves and building a healthy life to begin with, we do what’s easy, and work to get by. Then we are constantly supporting and reevaluating, and changing our lifestyles, or adjusting our bodies chemical balance to try and restore ourselves to a comfortable state of living. Just like my coworkers who just keep adding an extra line of code here and there to ‘get by.’ Eventually the projects source is so fixed that it’s unmaintainable and requires an expert who has studied the monstrosity just to make a minor adjustment, or it works in some frankensteinian manner that is unweildly and ultimately ineffective.
This is exactly what happens to our lives. Instead of making the changes that will bring us back to Actual health, we settle for the easy choice that returns us to an operable state. And every time we compromise and attain an operable state, we go a little further into that morass of chemically altered confusion that becomes more and more difficult to maintain and uphold.
I’m no better. Just like every one of us I’ve been conditioned to pursue a livable life with as little work as possible. It takes me enormous effort to make small changes to my lifestyle and patterns, to try to live a healthier, cleaner life. I struggle every day to detoxify my body and mind, to cleanse the misconceptions and damaged awarenesses. And I often fail.
That said, I am trying. And I encourage those around me to do the same.
