Christmas is the time of year when I’m most likely to think of Naughty. We first met in the run-up to Xmas, we first made love just after. I go to my parents for Christmas these days, and they now live a stone’s throw away from Naughty’s hometown. Etc. etc.
So it’s been my habit – if something you do once a year can be called a habit – to wish her a happy Christmas, via the Internet. She never replied, I never expected her to. It was just one of those things.
Until this year, when she did reply, asking me not to contact her again.
I was mildly surprised – I thought we’d parted on relatively good terms. But I’ve been wrong before, and probably will be again. So that’s one less name on the Christmas card list. Figuratively speaking.
I was also mildly surprised by my reaction. Or lack of it. It didn’t bother me as much as I might have expected. Admittedly, it’s been a few years & all. But even so..
So I thought about it. I’d read her blog before messaging her, that would doubtless have had some impact. And it wasn’t hard to think up a reason or two. Like, when we were together she was a girl dreaming of traveling round the world before going to University at the far end of the country; a few years later and she’s not even left her parents’ house yet.
But that’s a little on the analytical side. Doesn’t explain an emotional reaction.
I thought a bit more. And it seemed to me that it was one more example of something that’s been bugging me for most of 2011. And that is: How happy most people are to be mediocre. The world is full of people who aspire to do nothing more with their lives than work 9-5, go home & watch TV, and wait for the weekend.
A simple “acid test” is to look for the presence of at least one of the following traits:
- Creativity – do they spend a significant amount of time making things, writing, painting, whatever.
- Learning – do they spend a lot of their time reading, studying, experimenting, etc.
- Insightfulness – are they able to take what they already know, find holes and inconsistencies in that knowledge, and come up with new ideas on their own?
Most people fail on all counts.
When I first came across Naughty, it was the blog of a total stranger that I just happened to read. But that casual scanning of a couple of posts was enough to make me think “Wow.” Because she was a master of the third, hardest trait – she was insightful. Anyone can read a book or mess around with paint. It’s a real talent to be able to look at the world and change the way you think about it.
That was then. But when I took a look at Christmas.. There was just nothing there. No flashes of inspiration, not even a spark.
Obviously, I don’t claim that reading a few posts can tell you all about somebody’s life. There’s all kinds of good reasons why I might be wrong. Maybe she’s concentrating on other things and her blog isn’t where she posts the good stuff any more. Maybe she finds it harder to write the insightful stuff on a blog that isn’t anonymous. Maybe her university work takes all her resources. Maybe I’m just wrong.
But somebody who could write a few paragraphs that grabbed my attention when I knew nothing about her is now writing stuff that I find uninteresting even when I remind myself what a remarkable mind wrote it. Somebody who wanted to roam the world is excited about going to London. Somebody who wanted to wake up every day feeling lucky is content with a relationship that she describes at best as “very nice”. Somebody who could completely change the way I thought about things is now writing mostly about trying to lose weight. Somebody who had so much potential has just stopped showing signs of it.
Like most people, Darkly and I bitch about some aspects of our jobs from time to time. One complaint predominates, and it’s a quote from a Pratchett book: “People only think for themselves if you tell them to.”
Darkly moved last year from one of the most challenging schools in the country to a small private school. Despite popular belief, you don’t get particularly good teachers in private schools. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because teachers who can’t inspire interest in what they have to say would get eaten alive in a tough public school, whereas those who can get a mob of unruly drug-addicts-in-training to sit down and listen don’t need to restrict themselves to teaching kids born with a silver spoon.
Since she’s an outstanding teacher, Darkly’s encountered a fair amount of frustration in the new workplace. For example, a co-worker who was complaining that she couldn’t get the kids to do their homework properly. Asked what she did about unacceptable homework, she had no answer other than “give it a bad grade”. Darkly explained her own method: First time you mark the book and find work that’s unacceptable, write “Do this again” in green ink. Next time you mark it, scan back for green remarks and check if the work has been done. If not, orange pen a reminder. Next time, a red pen informs the student they will be redoing the work in detention.
This isn’t exactly a world-shaking technique, involving nothing but a bit of thought, three pens, and a few seconds per book. But this is what makes Darkly an outstanding teacher with pupils who know they can’t get away with not doing work properly. And the reaction from the teacher she was talking to? Was a look of bewilderment.
Myself, I work in a small department with a handful of other programmers. We were all hired on the basis of an enthusiasm for computing, hacking, and that kind of thing. Our job involves spending all day on our computers. So we use a lot of software, and a lot of it is in-house stuff developed specifically to make it quicker and/or easier to do our jobs.
Since the job is constantly evolving, our processes are too, so our toolset needs constant upgrades and tweaks. So you’d think there’d be an established process improvement procedure in place. Right?
Well.. there is. I’ll try and sum it up in layman’s terms: I do it all.
If you want the more detailed description: I do almost all of it, and my boss does some when he’s got the time.
Seriously. There’s not one single part of our job that I haven’t changed to make it more efficient in the last two years. I regularly inform people about new tools I’ve added, new features, better alternatives, etc. I document stuff on our wiki.
Nobody else does this. They happily use what I provide, but despite being just as capable as I am of making software jump through hoops.. they just don’t do it. The closest they ever came? A few months ago, two of the newer starters told me about an idea they’d had that they thought would be helpful. It was, to be honest, something I’d thought about a while previously, but not bothered to do anything with as it was a low priority. So I told them that, yes, I thought it was a good idea. Well done.
So, did they go away and implement it? Nope. They said “Great. Can you set it up, then?”
Sigh. One brief glimmer of hope, and the next moment it all goes dark again. The biggest frustration both Darkly and I face in our day to day jobs is trying to get people to think for themselves. And we’re both in jobs that you would think would demand that of everyone.
The trouble is.. people are so accepting of mediocre. In fact, there’s generally a lot of peer pressure in place to prevent you being anything else. Because if you’re mediocre, then there’s no pressure on anyone else to be anything else. But if you have start with the same resources as they do, and you build something amazing with it whilst they just sit around complaining that they don’t have enough.. well, then they look like idiots. And it’s easier for them to try and stop you succeeding than it is for them to get off their rear and do something.
Put half a dozen crabs in a basket and if one tries to climb out, the others will pull it back in. Kinda sad that humans still have the same instinct, really. Conformity is valued in most societies, and since most people won’t be brilliant..
So it’s easy to accept mediocrity. If everyone else is just as unimaginative, why should you exert yourself? And it can be so safe and easy to take the easy option. Why go anywhere when you could just stay put? Why try to learn if everybody else is ignorant too? Why do something risky when you could safely do nothing? Why follow your dreams today when you can put them off until tomorrow?
A lot of people do that. People with potential, people with dreams.. they imagine a glorious future, but the prosaic matters of today always seem to be so pressing. So they keep postponing the future by yet another day.
And then one day you wake up and you realize that years have gone by and you haven’t done anything and everything you ever dreamed of is still just a dream and you look at your life and it’s safe and sensible and normal and above all it’s grey. Dreary. Empty. Boring.
And you can either give up on all those dreams you had, and stay in your safe, boring, dreary life. Or you can walk away from the life you never really wanted in the first place, and oh my god is that hard to do.
It’s what I did. I was lucky: I only had rent and a girlfriend to worry about. Some people get to that point married with a mortgage. Some people have kids. I know quite a few. My brother got divorced last year. His fiancee got divorced too, but she DID have kids to worry about.
It sneaks up on you. You have someone in your life who you get on really well with, they’re nice, they’re safe, they’re reliable, you have a history, you understand each other.. and then you realize that all that’s true, but you’re not in love with them. Maybe you never were. My future sister-in-law married a guy and had kids with him before she realized she had never loved him.
I could never bring myself to say “I love you” to Crafty. Eventually, I realized that it was because it would have been a lie. That’s when I ended it. That’s why I tend to be very suspicious of other people who describe their significant other as “very nice” or “very sweet” or other flattering terms, but never as “I adore her” or “I love him” – if you can’t say those passionate words, it generally seems to be a reliable sign that there’s no passion there.
In many ways, my relationship with Darkly is like my relationship with Crafty – we’re friendly, we’re affectionate, we live together.. but it’s so much better, because there’s a firmly drawn line in the sand: We’re just friends. Very close friends, but only friends. It’s an improvement.
And I haven’t made all that much recently, but I’ve learned a massive amount, and I’ve got a few things planned – I’m working on a few software projects, some for my own amusement, one or two that I’m working on with Darkly that we may be able to turn into a serious product. This might be the year I finally manage to build myself a car, too – things are in the pipeline. And I’ve no money worries any more. It’s been a bit of a dull year, but it’s been a good foundation for doing some interesting things.
The thing is.. it’s been a lousy year. A lot of time stuck at home. A lot of time studying instead of having fun. A lot of time being sensible instead of doing something fun. But it’s been A YEAR, and it’s been done to give me the ability to do better things in the future.
Almost all the people I encounter in day to day life.. their every year is like my last year. And not because they’re building towards something better. Just because they don’t have any inclination to do more. They’re not working to better themselves or their lives, they’re just.. continuing. Living on from one day to the next, without changing or growing at all.
To them, this is safety and stability and security. All nice words. But to me..
I’ve got to be honest: To me.. that’s a good definition of Hell.
It sure isn’t what I could call living. If you end today the same as you were yesterday.. what was the point? What have you gained?
How can you be HAPPY to live like that??
I just don’t get it..
