Kill your darlings. Kill your self.

True story: Just a few days ago I invested a significant amount of time in analysing data entities and structures of a legacy database. It was one of the tasks issued to lay the foundation to reorganise business domains and products along business capabilities to finally modernise and get rid of legacy tech.

They were hundreds of entities and while I was doing this, understanding and categorising them, one was canceled and entirely removed by someone else because it was already known that it was obsolete, outdated, unused. Did I feel joy for having less work? Was I glad for the removed complexity? Managing one tiny step closer to the goal of shutting down legacy tech of monolithic proportions?

Nope. I was not.

In that very moment I felt a short pang of loss, a missing of a data entity limb which I did not even knew existed two weeks ago. It had grown on/to me. I had taken accountability for it and then it was ripped from my, not even cold and dead, hands. I felt this and was baffled. What did just happen? The very moment I had those feelings I was also aware that the aversion I went through was counter-productive to the efforts and goals of the project. Did it happen to me before? If it happened to me, it must have happened to others as well. How often does our work transforms itself and becomes a part of us and to what extent? This was a small occurrence, but what about the big ones?

Follow me for an Constructivism road trip.

One or two months back I was part of a discussion on LinkedIn in the comment section of a post which was pondering about what could be considered reality and truth. So far I have a very strict opinion regarding this: Nothing can exist without its matter – which is basically just energy in different forms and humans actually came up with a lot of ideas, concepts and beliefs to deal with this and the smart ones try to get to the bottom of it through science™. Humans are not adequately equipped to think in Hadrons, even though our thinking (and anything else) is done in… Hadrons.

Another person involved pointed out I’d be advocating ideas more radical than those of Descartes and that my answer would not cover immaterial concepts of our soul, self and consciousness. “There’s no contradiction, they are not immaterial.” said the ontologist idiot savant me, sporting no proper philosophical background at all, bringing just another online discussion to an ungainly end. But seriously, how am I supposed to believe in a matter-less soul and consciousness, when dementia or Alzheimer can turn any sane, brilliant mind into mush? Yeah, let them transcend into the realm of one of their true gods in their afterlife, the poor sods. Hopefully someone made a backup of an earlier state.

To be slightly more accurate: As our knowledge is proxy-knowledge, concepts consist of proxy-matter. The matter the thing itself consists of (let’s say, all atoms of a ‘chair’) and the synapses and patterns of all people who understand and replicate the idea of a chair regarding those atoms.

Anyway, my ontologist understanding implies you need brain matter for your thinking. I brushed the topic here (Abre numa nova janela) regarding my interpretations how AI works. It’s a principle called ‘neuroplasticity (Abre numa nova janela)’ - when brain matter grows, your synapses and their weighted connections develop, you are learning. But it’s more: You are changing as a person. Your conscious is changing, your soul is changing. Change the matter, be someone else.

There’s a prospect isn’t it? If the “You” is not some ephemeral, intangible concept, how could anyone with a growth mind and the will for life-long learning not use all available tools to improve? I might dive into self-optimisation another time, but I did avoid digressing into my aversion for religion two paragraphs back, I will be able to steer off the over-performing Neuro-Linguistic-Programming-crowd as well.

Laboro ergo sum.

So, when I was working intensely on those legacy data entities, the work did something to my brain. I understood them, their structures. I “re-engineered” their conception and my assumptions regarding their purpose and relevance became more and more accurate. Brain matter may happened and thus, work became me. It integrated with everything else in my brain, became part of my experiences, a tiny fraction of my identity. Because that’s what our brain is constantly doing, integrating and processing signals, sorting out the bad and keeping what reveals patterns, what makes sense. It’s Cinderella’s Neural Cybernetics.

And here’s the kicker – I believe that’s the reason why I reacted the way I did: Someone did change something I perceive as a part of mine. They did so without my acknowledgement, without my permission. It created friction, a state where my brain and thus me, is not any longer in sync with my perception of the outside world.

In this case it was a small thing. Stronger guardrails and “emergency” protocols enabled me to deal with it silently and effectively. It’s for the greater good, accept it and move on. Good boy.

Humans are not very good at change. There are people who will believe and tell you otherwise, but that is just change which sits well with their existing personal perception of everything (which ain’t fundamental change in terms of brain matter, it’s reinforcement). If a person believes in a chaotic, egoistic, competitive, survival-of-the-fittest world the ‘change’ is not a rapidly-changing, fast-paced environment. They expect that. The ‘change’ is a stable environment where the modus operandi is cooperation, slowness and compromise. Good luck with that.

For encountering ‘change’ we have coping strategies of ignorance, simplification, anger, surrendering and denial in place. Quite often we just survive living pre- and post-change in dissociative states of mind, living double-lives. Real change must be processed and sorted and contextualised to allow us to come up with instructions to deal with it. The ability to do so heavily depends on the size of the threat to our brain matter identity, the qualitative dimension of cognitive dissonance.

The more a person grasps the idea that any insight on anything might be completely wrong, the easier this person can process contradictory change - but it slows them down in everyday life because they cannot generate reliable action guidelines. Coping mechanisms allow them to take action, but may also lead to an accumulated increase of hidden friction over time. And someday in the future everything might collapse because this individual’s action are not compatible with their personal reality any longer.

“But they were such a pillar of the congregation.”

If you ever wondered why many people prefer easy answers over the complex ones, there might be an unpolished gem hidden inside those last paragraphs. Or maybe not - depending on your friction.

Finish the piece, then destroy it.

Back at the university when I was studying illustration and design I had a semester of painting led by Marik Lechner (Abre numa nova janela). When it started I was deeply insecure working with brushes (those tiny sticks with hairs clamped to them on one end) and actual paint on paper. You know, back then when most humans sucked at art because we had no GenAI. We started out doing very simple strokes in black. When I finished my task of some chairs in the classroom – I really wanted to know how ‘good’ I was (me, not the piece!). The tutor walked over, said it was nice and told me to destroy it. Paint it all black. Let all the effort, the materials, the time, the expectations, the anxiety go to waste.

I did not realise back then, but that tutor removed an obstacle in my head and changed my perspective. He provided a safe space for me to deal with a change: What if my art does not need to qualify? Does my art have any significant worth just by its investment of resources? What if it has only relevance when I give it? What would happen if I take the relevance away? If I destroy MY work, will it change MY identity – for worse?

The stuff we do, is stuff to reassert us. We are in a constant cycle of brain input, pattern recognition and reinforcement. How much potential for ourselves do we throw away by not exploring other options because they do not even make it to conscious thinking since the signal sorting? How much do we lose because we are predicting our own self-fulfilling prophecy?

A long time ago I believed in astrology. I would be a Pisces and my path in life was pre-defined: creative, empathic, weak of will, drug abuser. Then I met somebody and I felt that soulmatey connection and was convinced: Got to be a Pisces as well!

They were an Aquarius. I needed to know why, eventually stumbled across the Barnum-effect (Abre numa nova janela) and was devastated. It took some time but finally I decided that I wanted to shape my life myself instead of letting some weirdos do it for me by relating arbitrary fiction to the definition of a calendar (Abre numa nova janela).

What if your coping strategy does not consist in ignorance, simplification, denial, counter attack or cognitive dissonance? What if you reassess that friction and think really hard about it and maybe welcome the change, instead of petting and feeding your darling, that existing part of your identity which is hardwired into your brain?

Work is identity.

Most work we do expects us to interact with other humans. And much of the decisions we’d like to take and ideas we’d love to see come to reality are outside of our control. It’s a source of constant cognitive friction. In a work environment we cannot really walk away from this unless we walk away from the work itself. I’ve seen all the kinds of how people deal with it.

People numbing their friction with any kind of substances or diversions.

People revelling in denial, coming up with half-assed reasons and scapegoats.

People resisting change and sometimes even sabotaging decisions and ideas.

People sinking into solitude, coming up with bad solutions to outdated problems.

People using brute force to push their decisions and ideas.

People damaging other people because it’s easier to channel the pain.

People dropping out temporarily/completely.

(Not proud but I already scored on all of them, what about you?)

As the humans we are, we want the reinforcement loops to make sure we are right(eous). Loops, which include all the narratives we tell ourselves to calm our brain down. We need reassuring feedback for our identity, our brain matter, to justify its state in question. It’s about survival, about the capability to act. So we’ll spread our conceptualised coping mechanism from us to others, festering, infecting. That’s rather counter-productive because we amplify the not-closer-to-truth for purely egoistical reasons. We are toxic people to our community then and as it happens, even a workplace is one.

The bigger your inability to process change, cognitive dissonance, the greater the chance that you will be irrelevant in a heavily changing work environment. The aforementioned “growth mindset” is a positive framing for this.

But don’t get yourself fooled. Killing your darlings is hard. It has to be, because they represent you. The killing consumes your energy. It makes you vulnerable. Sometimes a simple insight will lead to a chain-reaction of multi-dimensional rabbit holes into the depths of your being. But I have to! But I can’t! It’s forbidden! It’s my duty! I cannot fail!
Have your darling be loved enough, killing it will threaten your identity. There’s a point where my sermon here won’t help anyone and the best option is to see a therapist.

Strategies for a darling killing spree

• Listen (like in understanding, not debating) to people with opinions controversial with yours. You don’t have to adapt their ideas. It’s about exercising the reasoning why this chafes you the “wrong” way.

• Ask other people of all kinds for feedback. You know, with saying thanks and treating the feedback as outside perspectives and not attacks.

• Use your impulses as event triggers. If one of the coping strategies mentioned above come up, ask yourself why they come up. Ask yourself why you cannot handle it gracefully. Gracefully means giving your brain safe space to compute.

• If you feel like digging too deep: Get support. Stay away from people promising easy solutions, there are none. Your brain needs to materialise an identity which you do not know yet. Even if you have an overnight epiphany, your brain still needs the reinforcement.

• If you feel safe enough, construct worst-case-test-scenarios with a safety net, Then let other people take decisions you thought you’d have to make. Give up control. They will do it differently but not necessarily much worse than you.

• Accept that you could believe in a misconception. Regarding literally everything. It’s just Hadrons after all.

• Don’t take important decisions without counsel on your own. Those “loving family fathers” killing their wives and children because they had no other choice? That’s not handling change, it’s the inability to come up without any other solution because their brains have none and their identity did not allow them to divert.

I came here because someone deprecated a field on a database. I think I now understand a bit more of ontology and constructivism and cybernetics. It may be wrong. I didn’t get to this in a day, neither was this text written easily. I took my time and so should you. Be humble, be gentle, to yourself and others.