The topic title is a nod to Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it like to be a bat?”, a thought experiment about the nature of consciousness.
I enjoy a day-in-the-life account, it tells me something indirectly about the character of the teller, or, when I’m the teller, is a good exercise in articulating some aspect of my inner life for the benefit of those not living it.
But trying to answer the question “What is it like to be an X?” is even more challenging, more rewarding, since it pushes me to be specific about what it is that makes me an X — a father, an agrarian, an anarchist, an autodidact, an IT guy, a Christian, an ex-Christian, a reader, a writer — specific enough to convey that stance toward the world to another person.
The tagline for this website is: where builders come to think. In a way, builder-hood is the glue that binds us together, a quality that interests us enough that we take the time to participate in this forum.
So I’d like to pose the question to all of us: what is it like to be a builder?
(I’m working on my own answer. But please don’t wait on me if you have an answer you’d like to share!)
This week, for me…it’s exhausting haha.
I think it’s just balancing work life and family life gets harder when there’s no clear delineation between the two. The line gets very blurred.
For me, being a builder is making external the systems that I see/think/feel in my head. It is proposing a solution, hearing “that sounds too complex,” then building it anyway and hearing, “wow this is amazing.” It is both the deep noticing and the knowing when to ignore. It is focusing and then refocusing and then sometimes having to say to myself “open the document; stay in the document.” It is seeing the challenges of my world as a giant box of Legos that will surely fit together if I can just get out of my own way and let the builder play.
Wow, well done! I’ve read this several times, and one of the lessons I’ll try to take from it is: be concise. Not my strong point, obviously! But you’ve made several profound observations here, each in a sentence or two, which allowed me to read slowly and stop to ponder each one. Much more nourishing than being carried by a torrent of words that gives me the feeling of thinking without actually requiring it.
Some scattered reactions:
“building it anyway” reminds me of the platitude “The person who says it can’t be done should stay out of the way of the person who’s doing it.”
“both the deep noticing and the knowing when to ignore” — skills that can only be developed while in the thick of building.
“seeing the challenges of my world as a giant box of Legos” — you can “build” anything in your imagination, from “pieces” you envision (vaguely), but building in the real world starts with bowing to the limits imposed by the real pieces at hand and proceeds by exploring the real possibilities for combining them.
My initial thoughts on this topic were turning (in my mind, anyway) into a very long essay — the opposite of an icebreaker. I see now I need to take a small piece of that and lay it out in very short form. Thanks!
I’m in a season of life with very little free time, which I first saw as a limitation but I now I see as a gift. I don’t have much time to overthink things, and so I lead with my intuition. Glad you enjoyed it! Looking forward to reading yours