learning something new is such a double edged sword.
understanding something sets you on the path to harnessing, controlling, manipulating or avoiding it’s power or effects. in my professional life, this is my bread and butter. i’ve earned what i have by being better than most at understanding the business i’m in, the technology we use and the people involved. i’m not afraid of facing new situations or scenarios, i welcome being thrown to the wolves, i seek out conflict wherever i can as it always yields results. i’m a research junkie. i love fucking around and finding out. the key part of it all though is that it’s 100% done with a purpose in mind. as a result, even if the exercise is what most people would consider a failure, i will have learned something new and then can use that to influence other decisions. there are 2 things i like to tell my team all the time which i think might drive some of them a little bit crazy, but i do it anyways. “if you didn’t see it with your own 2 eyes, it didn’t happen” and “i may not always be right, but i am never wrong”. the former mostly used in the context of being faced with a problem that seems unsolvable, go back to the beginning and take nothing for granted, you missed something or were mislead by someone. you are missing information. the later is mostly used in the context of taking giant confident leaps in certain directions to solve a problem based on your gut feeling from previous experiences and if for nothing else it can help rule out certain factors quickly or at least you will have learned something, and if you learn something, then it wasn’t a failure, and you were not wrong to do it.
the flip side of the knowledge coin is that once you learn something, you can’t really ever unlearn it. and not all knowledge is comfortable. not all knowledge is helpful. not all knowledge is safe. at least on the professional side, this is less of an issue, at least for me. no one is going to get hurt. it’s all about money and time. yes, maybe you may lose money, but money comes and goes. you can always make more money. and time passes whether you like it or not, there are always 24 hours in the day and there will always be 24 hours in the next day as well.
on the personal side of things… well… that’s where it’s a little different. every time you learn something about someone else, your relationship changes. especially when you learn something about them they didn’t want you to know. that in itself is scary to me because there’s no take backsies, once you know, you know and now you deal with it, or suffer internally, but at least you have the choice. what’s even more terrifying is when you learn something about yourself. you can pretend to ignore it, but you will always know and you don’t really have a choice but to deal with it in some way or another eventually.
today i learned about limerence, and well… fuck me. i don’t really know how to process this new information. it almost feels too easy to now just blame certain feelings i have been dealing with and behaviors i’ve been exhibiting on something instead of figuring them out myself and properly correcting them. like seriously? what the fuck? reading the definition alone i felt a sudden, and overwhelming sense of relief. but at the same time, it feels… undeserved? and then i kind of felt sick.
then i took a look at r/limerence and my mind was blown.
even more so now i feel like this is a cop-out. it’s like when a client opens a ticket for an issue with one of their systems and the issue is caused by a known bug with no vendor provided patch, solution or work around. the only thing we can tell the client is that unfortunately it’s a limitation of the system and that there’s nothing to be done. i fucking HAAAAATE that. i much prefer situations that ARE fixable.
does my software have a bug? who do i need to talk to in order to get the developer to release a patch?
i think i need more time to think about this.