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
I’m fascinated by building as a means to learn how things actually work, how they do and don’t fit together. In my younger days I thought it was enough to listen to experts, study and internalize their explanations. But for better or worse I was naturally inclined to “trust but verify,” giving experts the benefit of the doubt but also checking the results when I put that received knowledge into action.
Often the results didn’t measure up to the promises made, often enough that I became skeptical of experts — did these guys actually know what they were talking about? And even if they did actually know some things, did the claims they were making go beyond their knowledge?
Worse, even when the knowledge was trustworthy and the claims in proportion to them, just internalizing and applying it supplied me with a tool that was effective but one I didn’t understand. I could turn the crank and good things would come out. But if the situation changed and now the things weren’t as good, didn’t fit the new reality quite as well, I had no idea why and no ability to figure it out.
Dilemma: is it more important to me to get things done, or to understand how things work in order to get things done? I decided that enough things were already being made without my help, the world doesn’t need me to maximize my output, so I can focus less on building and more on becoming a builder, learning how to make things, good things, useful things, well-functioning things, world-improving things. Learning by doing. Choosing projects for what they will teach me, not what they produce.
The sum total of things I end up producing isn’t all that important, at least to the world, there are more than enough good things out there. But becoming a person who can produce good things is its own contribution. My years of learning how to build left me equipped to build many different sorts of things, most of which I never built, at least in enduring form. But often enough in my life I encountered a need, imagined a solution, built or located the critical pieces, assembled them into something that could change things for the better. I never put a dent in the universe, but some folks in my immediate orbit have benefited from my project.
(I have one other thing to say about building, but it’s tangential and this is long enough, so I’ll stop here.)
This is so good. I think this is the key through-line of being a builder for me. I learned I can’t worry about the outcome, because that is actually none of my business. The work is the understanding and the figuring out and the assimilation.
I sometimes wonder if me understanding a problem, even without acting upon it, changes the outside world in unknown ways, in addition to changing my own interior life. Kind of like the tree falling in the woods koan. Can the universe hear it? Is something rearranged, however slightly? Does even reading and connecting with you here change the math? Are the ripples in the water the whole point?
When this happens for me, it feels inevitable. Like there was no other choice for me than to get it done. In those moments, the trying falls away (not that I haven’t also done a huge amount of trying in my life, which is a different kind of work.) The final product is rewarding, but truly the most satisfying part to me is knowing I can have this kind of life, as a tinkerer and a builder and noticer, and I can find and relate to others who feel the same.
You’ve sparked a thought , which I look forward to sitting with for some time: when assessing our life’s work, past, present, and future, do we focus too much on the kinetic — the results we’ve occasioned — and not enough on the potential — the things we’ve made possible?
Since I adore concrete examples, here’s one. My most recent project, probably my final one, is to learn chess. Maybe an odd pursuit to begin at 72, but my expectations for it aren’t the obvious ones, and it’s feasible to meet them in the time I probably have left. I’ve been working on this since the start of the year, work that has refined a sudden whim into a pretty clear understanding of why I might want to do such a thing. And at the same time shown me that my reasons are not common, that the usual paths towards mastering chess don’t fit my needs all that well, and I’ve needed to take bits and pieces of those traditional approaches and adapt them to create my own custom path.
And though it’s not required, I intend to build a public record of what I do, how I do it, and why I make the choices I do. For me, it will force me to clarify my thinking, be honest and accountable about the work rather than self-flattering or delusional. For the world … well, harder to say. Some people who follow the project, or read the final results, might find it entertaining, even edifying. A small number of those, in search of a rich hobby for themselves, may find it helpful in deciding whether chess is for them, or if my unusual approach might make it work for them, or give them a deeper understanding of chess, or spur them on to further thinking about the what and how and why of hobbies in their own lives. And a small number of those might decide to explore my approach, and use the record of my own project to guide them in creating theirs.
But what if none of that happens? What if no one explores my approach, or uses my example to help them find their own hobby, or even looks at my record at all? Well, I’m not and never will be in a position to make those things happen, they are completely beyond my control. But I’ve made them possible — building on my work can’t happen if I don’t do the work — and I’m thinking now that this is an actual, tangible, positive contribution to the world. Putting on my hunter-gatherer hat, if I visit or re-visit a place where food is currently abundant, fruit and nuts and game, I would count that as a good thing. My partaking of the goodies may make a good thing even better, but it’s the presence of the goodies, all the things that might potentially nourish me, that I think is the heart of their goodness. Maybe I never stopped by, maybe the game died uneaten and the fruit and nuts dropped and rotted on the ground — I don’t think that diminishes their potential goodness.
So I will build my record, with an eye to being entertaining and edifying to anyone who happens to take a look, and a help towards finding a hobby for those in search of one, and one particular path into the world of chess for those who might like to give mine a try. I can’t make those things happen. But I can make them possible, and the better my work, the more possible they become. All I can do is create the potential — but it’s something I can actually do. And I think it’s enough.