I look around the room and I see a laundry basket in need of optimization, an unsatisfactory rug, house plants that should be growing more. I need better tupperware, a kitchen remodel, some trick to clean my exterior windows that isn’t just me spending hours cleaning my exterior windows. Instead of looking around my living space with gratitude for the soft comfort I’ve built for myself, inflected with my peculiar tastes and preferences, I see lack. And that dissatisfaction becomes a sort of lingering fog, dampening my experience of the world.

The scroll doesn’t make you feel jealous, per se. I don’t even think it makes you feel shame, at least not in the way we usually think of it. It’s aspirational: it makes you feel like if you could just find the capital and discipline, you could touch perfection too.

Remodeling is the attempt to find “the one best way” with our physical spaces; wellness culture is “the one best way” with our bodies; productivity culture is “the one best way” with our work lives. And like all quests for optimization, they’re sinkholes.

If you’re an interior designer, if you see home space as an artistic tapestry, I get this; I believe you. But I also believe that we’ve collectively become very good at mistaking the feelings of optimization, organization, and control for fun. Organizing your fridge is not fun. Neither is watching someone do it. It is satisfying, and it is satisfying because it offers a flicker of control amidst the natural and amplified chaos of our lives.

instead of directing attention and energy towards the sort of structures that could make us feel less insecure — whether unions or deeper friendships or school year reform — we focus it on the self and the space around it.

But the very idea that we can “fix” this mindset is, well, optimization culture. “Fixing” suggests altering or shifting the existing parts. This bullshit requires dismantlement. But what does that even begin to look like? For me, it’s looking at my body, my self, and my spaces through the eyes of a friend who loves me the most. It’s extending that posture of grace for others. It’s talking back at the part of me that worries something is “off-trend” or will “look dated.” It’s finding that busted-ass coffee maker funny. Annoying, sure, but annoyances are part of the rich tapestry of life. It’s figuring out the parts of my living space that are precious to me, as we did in the Friday thread this week, and extending that feeling. Not the cost, not the aesthetic, but the feeling.

It’s remembering, over and over again, what a blessing it is to be simply, overwhelmingly, satisfied.

I've noticed that most devs, anyway, are either front-loaded or back-loaded."Front-loaded" means that the part of a project they really enjoy is the beginning part, design work, etc. Once those problems are largely worked out, the project becomes less interesting to them. A common refrain from this personality is "the rest is just implementation details"."Back-loaded" is the opposite of that. They hate the initial work of a project and prefer to do the implementation details, after the road is mapped out.Both sorts of devs are critical. Could it be that you're a front-loaded sort? If so, maybe the thing to do is to bring in someone who's back-loaded and work on the projects together?

Even if it's just a personal project, think about the time and money you'll need to invest, and the benefits and value it will provide. Think on why you should prioritize this over other tasks or existing projects. Most importantly, sleep on it. Get away from it and do something else. Spend at least a couple of days on and off planning it. Outline and prioritize features and tasks. Decide on the most important ones and define the MVP. If, after this planning process, you still feel motivated to pursue the project, go ahead!

Quick win is to ask yourself: What have I learned from this project? And make that the result of the project.

Find a job/role/gig where you think of the solutions and let other people implement them. Just always remember that it is no longer your project. You might have thought of something, but without the efforts of others it will never amount to anything, ever. So as long as you can respect the work of others and your own limitations in doing what they do you will do fine.

Find more challenging problems. I usually do this by trying to expand something that spiked my interest to make it more generically applicable or asking myself if the problem is actually worth a solution ('faster horses') and if the underlying problem is not more interesting (mobility).

it helps to promise other people something: Present your findings, write a paper, make a POC by an agreed upon deadline. Now you have to be empatic enough to want to meet their deadline and thus create what you promised with all the works that comes with it. That is your result. You also have to be selfish enough to tell people that is where you end your involvement, because it no longer interests you, regardless of the plans they have pursuing this further