howdy friends, happy wednesday!
In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highways Act into law. 25 billion dollars ($290 billion w/ inflation) later, the United States of America had 48,000 miles of big, smooth, shiny roads from sea to shining sea.
Sixty-seven years later, we now face the prospect of needing some $85 billion per year maintaining our highways. At this rate, we exceed the original price tag of the entire system once every 3 and a half years on just making sure our roads don't collapse.
Highways are pretty durable, but there's only so much you can do against a torrent of ten-ton semitrucks spawning potholes by the minute. It's like the extreme-sports edition of erosion— if we don't keep repaving them, our roads would turn into the Grand Canyon real quick.
Designing and building something like the Interstate Highway System is an incredible, grand, once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment. Why don't we see the decades of systematic improvement and maintenance in the same light?
Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you're done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem.
But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems: you have to work at them forever until you die. You can’t, as far as I know, just brush your teeth really really well and then let ‘em ride forever.
—Adam Mastroianni
I've been thinking about this idea a lot— how nearly any real-world problem needs constant attention over time, and yet we pretend it's a one-and-done deal, whether out of laziness, necessity, or lack of foresight.
In a utopian world, everything we make would have infinite durability, and all the annoying maintenance needs of our creations would disappear. Instead of constantly deploying band-aids to prevent society from collapsing, we'd be able to spend more time on the things that grow when we cultivate them: friendships; relationships; knowledge; backyard gardens.
One thing I'm finding really enjoyable about writing is how low-maintenance it is. I can write something, completely forget about it, and it'll all be for the better. Each piece splinters into its own diploma problem, isolated from the messiness and demands of a larger writing practice (which is certainly a toothbrushing problem).
It's almost as if certain types of writing don't want to be maintained. Letting a thought work its way through history, unperturbed, makes it more valuable.
Right before I graduated from college, I decided to put up my notes online for a few of the harder classes I'd taken (and learned the most from). I'd written them all in using Obsidian 1 and wasn't happy with any existing solution to publish them, so I decided to make my own website theme called Amethyst and released that too.
Both of these got weirdly popular. A couple thousand people visit my notes site every month (they show up before some official course notes on Google... y'all fix your SEO pls), and Amethyst has 100 stars on GitHub.
Despite similar levels of usage, exactly zero people reported any problems with my notes in the last year; in the same time, 10 people opened a GitHub issue report for Amethyst.
I already spend 8 hours a day writing code for my job. I don't want to go home and then keep writing even more code… So I procrastinated on resolving all the issues until this week, when some very friendly users had a lively discussion about how completely broken everything was and I figured I should probably (finally) help out.
In the software world especially, building stuff is the easy part. Once people start using (and breaking) it, the fun part is over. As long as you're still supporting it, you need to keep upgrading all the dependencies, solving users' problems no matter how niche as they come up years after you've forgotten how any of it even works.
The whole Amethyst arc helped me realize one thing: if I want to keep trying and building new things, I can't be maintaining all the old stuff at the same time. (Maybe this was subconsciously part of the reason why I started writing in the first place, and I've just learned how to form the thought into words.)
I'd like to spend my time making things that last, instead of babysitting old creations. Given that we don't live in a utopian world where everything has infinite durability, this might seem overly idealistic. That doesn't mean I can't try.
Maybe writing will be the answer; maybe it'll be art, or music, or photography, or some deep tech we haven't discovered yet. Even if everything else I make dies with me, finding that one thing with a life force in itself will make it all worth it.
🏝️extras
stalk my online reading: Curius
stalk my offline reading: bencuan.me/bookshelf
stalk me on twitter: @bencuan_
ww mad libs: Want to suggest a topic for a future Wednesday? play the whimsical wednesday mad libs!