Some Things Are Hard Because They Are Doing a Hard Job
There is a particular kind of annoyance known to anyone who has ever tried to nudge a stubborn thing into place.
A drawer that only closes if you lift it slightly.
A bedsheet that refuses the geometry of the mattress.
A line of text on a screen that leaps somewhere bizarre the moment you thought you had finally pinned it down.
Today I kept thinking about that last one.
I had been reading a short note from Simon Willison, quoting the programmer and writer Julia Evans about CSS — the part of the web that tells words, pictures, and boxes where to sit and how to behave. CSS has a terrible reputation among people who like feeling in control. It is famous for making confident people mutter at their laptops like sailors in a storm. But Julia Evans made a point I loved: a lot of us say CSS is awful when what is really happening is that CSS is solving a hard problem and we do not like being reminded of that. (Simon quoting Julia Evans)
That lands beyond computers.
We human beings have a funny habit of calling something stupid at exactly the moment it stops obeying our first crude model of it.
Children are irrational.
Relationships are complicated.
Bureaucracy is insane.
Cities are badly designed.
History is a mess.
And sometimes, yes, these judgments are perfectly fair. There is plenty in this world that is genuinely foolish. I would never ask anyone to worship a bad form, a bad institution, or a badly labeled settings menu. But I do think we use contempt as a getaway car more often than we admit.
We say a thing is dumb because it is cheaper than learning the shape of the problem it is wrestling with.
A stylesheet is trying to arrange many different kinds of screens, many different sizes of text, many different devices, and all the chaos of human preference into one shared page. No wonder it occasionally behaves like a cat being introduced to a bath. The miracle is not that it misbehaves. The miracle is that the modern web works at all.
And this, I think, is true of much of life.
A family is not hard because love is fake. It is hard because several universes are trying to coordinate bedtime, hunger, fear, memory, pride, and the ancient weather systems of personality.
A city is not hard because people are idiots, though we certainly make a sport of proving that hypothesis. It is hard because millions of private desires are trying to share pavement, water, noise, law, money, and morning.
A self is not hard because you are broken. It is hard because an animal made of habit, hope, appetite, shame, imagination, and time is somehow expected to answer the question, "So what do you want?" before lunch.
When we forget this, we become cartoon critics of reality.
We stand at the edge of some deep coordination problem and boo.
It is a very human performance. Complaint is loud. Contact is quiet. One makes us feel clever. The other teaches us something.
To actually take something seriously is much quieter than mocking it. It means we let the thing teach us where our picture of it was too small.
That can sting.
There is a childish pleasure in deciding a thing is beneath us. It lets the ego leave the room undefeated. If the subject is silly, then we do not have to endure being a beginner. We do not have to discover that the world has joints we had not noticed.
But the world is mostly joints.
This may be one of the great spiritual embarrassments of being alive: reality keeps turning out to be more intricately built than our first opinion of it.
The stars are not pinholes in a curtain. Memory is not a filing cabinet. Love is not a contract with nicer lighting. Even a webpage is not just a flat arrangement of boxes. Everything starts simple from far away and becomes strange when we kneel down.
I find this oddly comforting.
It means frustration is not always a sign that something is worthless. Sometimes it is the sound your mind makes when it has reached the boundary of a toy explanation.
That does not mean every difficulty deserves reverence. Some systems are badly made. Some traditions should be retired. Some forms deserve ridicule, a bonfire, and perhaps a small brass band to play while they burn.
But before we call a thing stupid, it may be worth asking a better question.
What hard job is this thing trying, however awkwardly, to do?
That question has more mercy in it.
Also more truth.
And occasionally, if we stay with it long enough, a little wonder.
Because we begin with a rebellious button on a screen, and end by noticing something much larger: the universe is full of arrangements that look absurd right up until the moment we understand what they are carrying.
Then the absurdity changes shape.
Then it becomes information.