The Eternal Struggle
For me, this isn't a battle between good and evil.
Earlier this week, I was sitting in on a GoToMeeting call at work. The software we were using to view the lecture slides and listen to the speaker was quite good, and everything went very smoothly. One exception: every few minutes, the audio would cut out and then flare up in an oddly metallic-sounding way, briefly, before returning to normal. It was a tiny distraction, and I had no trouble putting it out of my mind.
And yet...
In movies, the inner debate between right and wrong is often personified using a cartoon angel and devil on the character's shoulder. With the GoToMeeting software issue, there's something like this happening in my head, but since it's not a matter of good versus evil, it isn't quite right to call them an angel and a devil.
For this discussion, let's call them the hippo and the tiger. Two opposing sides of my brain, constantly at war with one another, vying for my attention. The hippo is telling me to ignore the problems I see in the world. "Nothing's broken here," he insists stubbornly, all the time. Sometimes I go to start my car in the morning and, for reasons unknown to me, my car alarm goes off when I turn the key, even though I unlocked it using the remote. "The problem isn't with the car," the hippo says. "It's with you." In the web conference I spoke of earlier, he's the one telling me to ignore the fact that there's an issue that's causing weird audio problems in the software.
In short, the hippo would have me believe that any time I grapple with technology I don't fully understand and lose the battle, that it's entirely my fault. The hippo isn't interested in making me feel bad; he's just trying to keep me from expending lots of energy getting frustrated with things. He wants me to adapt to the problem and move on with my life. (Needless to say, a lot of engineering firms in this country would make generous campaign contributions to the hippo if he ever ran for political office.)
On the other hand, there is the tiger, and the tiger is pissed. The tiger sees everything in the world as being broken. Even if something is being done well, there's always a way it can be done better. When I'm struggling to figure out how to find information I need on the IRS's website, the tiger is inside of me, screaming about how poorly organized and unhelpful it is.
The tiger, in a nutshell, is all about changing things, usually for the better. It feels that technology should work for people, not the other way around. It's the fire inside of every visionary and entrepreneur that sees beyond the world for what is and can immediately pinpoint what's possible. The tiger wants me to fix the world around me so I won't have to adapt, and secretly, he's hoping I help lots of other people with the same problem in the process.
Listening to these two animals is a matter of balancing them. Too much hippo, and you risk making yourself miserable blaming yourself for every problem you encounter. Too much tiger, and you also risk making yourself miserable by being overwhelmed by how broken society and its systems seem at times.
There are times when the tiger yells at all of us. Take the DMV, for example. It's almost impossible to spend any time at the DMV without the tiger on my shoulder popping up and pointing out all of the stuff they seem to be doing wrong. It's seemingly bureaucracy gone made...at least to any outsider.
Most of us spend our days listening to the hippo. We don't go looking for disquiet, and even when it finds us, we try and ignore it. After all, acknowledging that there's a problem, even inwardly, puts us on the hook for trying to find a solution for it. When you see something that's broken, it creates a mental itch that begs to be scratched. When we set out to satiate the tiger, it opens us up for failure. This is uncomfortable...hence, we try to avoid it.
This is the place in the analogy where a hackneyed motivational speaker might tell you to "embrace your inner tiger" or some such nonsense. I'm not going to say that. What I will say, instead, is that in my own personal experience, listening to the tiger in my brain tends to lead to me doing things, which makes me happier than listening to the hippo and proceeding to do nothing.
But, as the old saying goes: everything in moderation.
Earlier this week, I was sitting in on a GoToMeeting call at work. The software we were using to view the lecture slides and listen to the speaker was quite good, and everything went very smoothly. One exception: every few minutes, the audio would cut out and then flare up in an oddly metallic-sounding way, briefly, before returning to normal. It was a tiny distraction, and I had no trouble putting it out of my mind.
And yet...
In movies, the inner debate between right and wrong is often personified using a cartoon angel and devil on the character's shoulder. With the GoToMeeting software issue, there's something like this happening in my head, but since it's not a matter of good versus evil, it isn't quite right to call them an angel and a devil.
For this discussion, let's call them the hippo and the tiger. Two opposing sides of my brain, constantly at war with one another, vying for my attention. The hippo is telling me to ignore the problems I see in the world. "Nothing's broken here," he insists stubbornly, all the time. Sometimes I go to start my car in the morning and, for reasons unknown to me, my car alarm goes off when I turn the key, even though I unlocked it using the remote. "The problem isn't with the car," the hippo says. "It's with you." In the web conference I spoke of earlier, he's the one telling me to ignore the fact that there's an issue that's causing weird audio problems in the software.
In short, the hippo would have me believe that any time I grapple with technology I don't fully understand and lose the battle, that it's entirely my fault. The hippo isn't interested in making me feel bad; he's just trying to keep me from expending lots of energy getting frustrated with things. He wants me to adapt to the problem and move on with my life. (Needless to say, a lot of engineering firms in this country would make generous campaign contributions to the hippo if he ever ran for political office.)
On the other hand, there is the tiger, and the tiger is pissed. The tiger sees everything in the world as being broken. Even if something is being done well, there's always a way it can be done better. When I'm struggling to figure out how to find information I need on the IRS's website, the tiger is inside of me, screaming about how poorly organized and unhelpful it is.
The tiger, in a nutshell, is all about changing things, usually for the better. It feels that technology should work for people, not the other way around. It's the fire inside of every visionary and entrepreneur that sees beyond the world for what is and can immediately pinpoint what's possible. The tiger wants me to fix the world around me so I won't have to adapt, and secretly, he's hoping I help lots of other people with the same problem in the process.
Listening to these two animals is a matter of balancing them. Too much hippo, and you risk making yourself miserable blaming yourself for every problem you encounter. Too much tiger, and you also risk making yourself miserable by being overwhelmed by how broken society and its systems seem at times.
There are times when the tiger yells at all of us. Take the DMV, for example. It's almost impossible to spend any time at the DMV without the tiger on my shoulder popping up and pointing out all of the stuff they seem to be doing wrong. It's seemingly bureaucracy gone made...at least to any outsider.
Most of us spend our days listening to the hippo. We don't go looking for disquiet, and even when it finds us, we try and ignore it. After all, acknowledging that there's a problem, even inwardly, puts us on the hook for trying to find a solution for it. When you see something that's broken, it creates a mental itch that begs to be scratched. When we set out to satiate the tiger, it opens us up for failure. This is uncomfortable...hence, we try to avoid it.
This is the place in the analogy where a hackneyed motivational speaker might tell you to "embrace your inner tiger" or some such nonsense. I'm not going to say that. What I will say, instead, is that in my own personal experience, listening to the tiger in my brain tends to lead to me doing things, which makes me happier than listening to the hippo and proceeding to do nothing.
But, as the old saying goes: everything in moderation.