The Software Engineer's Phenomenological Cage

Choosing to become a software engineer had consequences. It affects the work you do all day, the social position you occupy, the effortful action you must consistently take maintain your physical, spiritual and mental health, your freedom of movement, the people you get to be around… A single minute of reflection reveals never ending observations about the decision taken.

In a deeper sense, your mind and spirit has been molded to it. Any intellectual effort forces you into a pattern of thinking and interpreting that is unique to the deliberate process you have painstakingly forged your mind to conform to, the one you have been habitually doing for years. It shapes what you notice about the experiences in front of you, which ultimately impact the implicit metaphysics your mind molds reality to.

You cannot avoid to systematize everything, naturally and obsessively. Every phenomena captured gets converted into a series of elements and interactions, like an OOP object, an API or a system’s design graph. Each component gets their own name, and get assigned a set of other components it can interact with, following a small and simple set of rules. A multitude of simple parts, operating under the rules and constraints you set, become the only explanation possible to reality. When things go wrong and don’t fit, you break up the problem in multiple parts, split it on any difference graspable and continue from there until the thought-atom is found. This is called ‘compositionality’ - the belief that the whole is fully explained by parts plus interaction rules.

It is not that you are wrong, but you can’t escape seeing things any other way. You become limited on the broadness of truth you can achieve with the mind you have, because not all problems a reduced to the parts divorced from the whole.

You just wish for a variety of perspectives. You look with great envy at the man who lives a different lifestyle, you just wish to think with their brain… It is as if you context window is saturated, your nerves are wired like this for just as long as your body survives. A structural prison of the mind, co called Déformation professionnelle, that is the price paid. No one else can think with your brain either. Nobody escapes the structure that trapped them.

It is known that learning a new language becomes harder as you age. It is worth developing a mind that is bilingual in its modes of thought.