My Tools Are Broken So I Cannot Fix My Tools
New Yorkers: come hear me talk about hiccups at the excellent Nerd Nite.
Some of the hardest problems in life are where the tools you usually use to fix things are themselves the thing that's broken: your tools are broken so you cannot fix your tools.
Many mental health conditions have this issue: your brain is what you use to evaluate and understand stuff. If you have a condition that means you don't trust your brain's evaluations, how do you fix things? You can try to develop meta-awareness – "I am not my thoughts," "you don't have to believe all your thoughts" – but ultimately you still need to figure out which of your thoughts you do trust. For example, should you believe the thought "you don't have to believe all your thoughts"? The whole thing is very hard to do when you don't trust the tool you use for trusting.
Similarly, the main way we fix interpersonal issues is through conversation. What do you do if you're in relationship with another person and for whatever reason you're conversationally misaligned? Your conversational misalignment means you can't fix your conversational misalignment, and that makes it hard to fix anything else.
My favourite comedy writer is a guy called James Mickens – once styled The Funniest Man At Microsoft Research, and this may be still be true although I think he no longer works at Microsoft Research. He once wrote a piece about systems programmers, the people who write the fundamental code that everyone else's less-fundamental code goes on top of, and from which I stole the name of this post:
As I paced the hallways, muttering Nixonian rants about my code, one of my colleagues from the [Human Computer Interface] group asked me what my problem was. I described the bug, which involved concurrent threads and corrupted state and asynchronous message delivery across multiple machines, and my coworker said, “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you checked the log files for errors?” I said, “Indeed, I would do that if I hadn’t broken every component that a logging system needs to log data. I have a network file system, and I have broken the network, and I have broken the file system, and my machines crash when I make eye contact with them. I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS.”
Is there any solution to this? Any way to fix your tools when you've destroyed the tools you use to fix things?
p.s.: