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October 25th, 2021: Your problem is, you're trying to understand it

After reading Tomasino's post on Vim [1] recently, I've been thinking about how I agree with it while also wanting to share something that runs counter to it. I've been in similar situations before but I've not always made the same choice. Then while reading Cory Doctorow's brilliant Pirate Cinema, I came across an excellent representation of this dilemma.

Our lead, Trent, has just finished building a laptop with components thrown together that were never designed to work together. He also has a lot of other esoteric requirements of how all this should actually work in tandem, and spends hours scouring the internet to understand things before he can implement it. His mentor of just a few hours then offers some advice to him:

"Your problem is, you're trying to understand it. You need to just do it."

When Trent complains that this wise-sounding quote didn't seem to be practicable, his mentor expounds on the matter. The analogy that follows is one of the finest I've ever come across when it comes to coming to terms with doing without understanding.

“What you’re trying to do now, you’re trying to learn something about as complicated as a language. You’ve learned one language so far, the one we’re speaking in. But you didn’t wait until you’d memorized all the rules of grammar and a twenty-thousand-word vocabulary before you opened your gob, did you? No, you learned to talk by saying ‘goo-goo’ and ‘da-da’ and ‘I done a pee-poo.’ You made mistakes, you backtracked, went down blind alleys. You mispronounced words and got the grammar wrong. But people around you understood, and when they didn’t understand what you meant, you got better at that part of speech. You let the world tell you where you needed to focus your attention, and in little and big pieces you became an expert talker, fluent in English as she is spoke the world round.

Especially when it comes to technology, beginning with something new can seem very overwhelming and intimidating. The move from Windows to Linux was terrifying. I tried reading about it but there just seemed to be so much information and so many opinions on how to go about it that I just grabbed an USB stick and plugged it in and dual booted. In no time, I'd moved to using just Linux and then began to slowly build up my knowledge of the command line and so much more that's going on when it comes to Linux. It's practice that makes you realize just how much you actually need to know, and you can always dip into the rest.

Then I discovered Arch Linux and reading through the installation guide made me click on every link on it and sent me down a dozen rabbit holes all at once. The best way to go about it once again ended up being booting into the install medium and then following the bare minimum to get a working system and then slowly build it up. It was months before I knew what all the components that I'd thrown together were actually about and even then there was plenty that it took even longer to figure out.

Then came the move from X to Wayland. Renting a VPS when I'd never played around with even a home server on a VM before. It was a year or more before I was confident enough with it but now I self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and a couple of friends. All of this seemed unimaginable up until it just happened.

This is not a decision that you're ever truly done making. The thought of trying out something like Void Linux or Alpine is still overwhelming for I find myself thinking about all the new things I'd need to learn. It's perhaps even more difficult now when I finally have a system that I can reason about to a fair degree. I've been putting this little experimentation off for months now. I recently got fascinated with BSD but bogged myself down with trying to understand how it differs from Linux.

There is so much comfort in a setup that you truly understand and maybe even more importantly, feel confident about. The alternate is rife with uncertainty and confusion. It's never fun to feel like a beginner again in a field or domain that you have some sureness in. To feel helpless and frustrated in the face of things that you could do effortlessly under a different platform or setting. And then comes the exhilaration of being a beginner again. For the way your world expands when you step into the unknown and choose to stick with it is dizzying. I'm not saying it is the best way to go about everything. There are so many other considerations, including just how much time you have to spare to experiment with a setup that's been working just fine and which you and others perhaps depend upon. All I want to say is it's definitely an approach always worth considering.

Admittedly I didn't grok vim much either when I moved to Neovim. It's also true that my Neovim config too is made up of a bunch of code borrowed from all over the internet. I finally set up LSP for it yesterday and I am only beginning to understand what all the different plugins are for. I've been slowly going through the help pages for them and having a whole bunch of aha! moments. It'll be a while before I understand this setup the way I understood my previous one but I'll get there. And then it'll be time to get somewhere else, once again into the great unknown.

[1] vim

CC0 low-key, 2021-10-25

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