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Sunday, Jun 4, 2023

Searls of Wisdom for May 2023

Greetings, Internet! I am back with a second issue of this stupid newsletter you forgot subscribing to.

McDonalds Japan's rice buns take meat out of the equation!

I spent most May traveling, so that's where I'd like to invest whatever attention you'll entrust me with by reading this. I'll try not to spill too much ink gushing over the nifty places I visited before I pivot into some deeper(?) thoughts on how our Extremely Online environment has rewired my (and perhaps your) brain's ability to calibrate something as fundamental as ✨D E S I R E✨.

(By the way, if reading the word "desire" felt icky and/or spooky to you, don't worry—I'm not here to take a detour into erotica. Unlike this newsletter, I'd have the good sense to charge money for that.)

How to decide where to go next

Last week, I got back from a solo trip to Japan. I made sure to visit a few familiar places, like my favorite six-seat bar in Golden Gai and my host parents' home in Hikone from my college internship days. But those were mere whistle stops on a journey to uncover as many obscure and fascinating destinations as I could. I used the trip as an opportunity to practice being less of an over-torqued tightwad, so I made a point of doing zero advance planning (unless you count my asking for travel advice from other conference attendees while covering RubyKaigi for Test Double).

My travels led me to several far-flung places I hadn't even heard of the day prior. I went on a quest for the perfect raw fish bowl in Ohmicho Market in Kanazawa. I took a ferry to the remote island of Yakushima and made the half-day climb up the mountain forest that inspired the art design of Princess Mononoke. At one point, I found myself stuck—and stark naked—in these caves during a rainstorm while touring the hot springs of Kurokawa Onsen. Before returning home, I made weird friends and got sunburned at a lo-fi hip hop festival in Kobe, where I got to see my favorite Japanese DJ, tofubeats.

It was a great trip, to be sure.

But it was something else, too.

See, I've spent over half my life with Becky. We got married 7 days after we graduated from college. And barely 3 months after our wedding, I was carrying an OG iPhone everywhere I went. As such, I've spent my entire adult life operating in exactly one of two modes:

With other people in person, fretting about how they feel, what they want, what they think of me, etc.
With other people online, fretting about how they feel, what they want, what they think of me, etc.

I know I'm not alone when I say that I'm never alone.

Prior to this trip, I'd never left the house for more than a few days without Becky. Prior to this trip, I'd never had my connection to attention-absorbant platforms like Twitter and Instagram completely severed.

This month, for three weeks, I would be alone.

More than alone, I would be free of constraints or expectations. I'd have work responsibilities. I'd have personal goals. But they were so broad and amorphous that it would be entirely up to me to define the parameters of success and for me to determine whether I'd succeeded. For the first time since college, I'd be flying by the seat of my pants. The anticipation was exhilarating—freedom, at last!

Not a video of me eating ice cream and taunting fate

The moment I strutted through Japan's customs, however, I immediately felt weighed down and aimless. A nagging cloud of malaise followed me onto the train. Over the next day, I could viscerally feel my mood teetering into hopelessness. I didn't want to go anywhere. There was nothing I wanted to eat. No one I wanted to see. And it's not like I didn't want to get the hell out of the stuffy, cramped room I'd booked in a shitty business hotel in the middle of one of Tokyo's most dilapidated red-light districts… I very much did. Japan is my favorite place on earth and I was completely rudderless—what was happening to me?

With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the answer: I had forgotten how to want things.

This made no sense at first. I can consume with the best of them. I buy all kinds of shit for myself. I go out most nights. I have a ton of fancy hobbies. My house literally borders Disney World! My insatiable wants are only occasionally punctuated by the brief dopamine rush of satisfying one of those wants. Hell, here I was traveling the world for nobody else but me. Why didn't I want to do anything?

Here's where I think things went sideways. Back in the prehistoric era of 2006—before the Internet was ubiquitous—humans had the luxury of making countless decisions free of concern for what others might think. Sure, sometimes there'd be other people around and they'd have to reach consensus on pizza toppings or whatever, but nobody walked around carrying a wireless leash that connected them to everyone else in the world. Nobody's worth was defined by the number of vanity points they earned on one of a handful of digital advertising platforms. Nobody's consciousness could be teleported away mid-conversation by tapping a notification… only to eventually snap back, dazed and distracted. More relevant to this discussion: to a reasonable approximation, nobody cared what your cat looked like, where you went for vacation, or why you stopped eating gluten.

Everyone has a set of things they care about. If you spend time with someone, you'll start to care about their set of things. If you're around a lot of people, you'll do your best to take their combined set of things into account. And if your smartphone enables you to be "with" an app full of thousands other humans, the things they collectively care about will dissolve into a sort of background radiation, subtly shifting your desires and decisions in ways you might not realize.

But here I was, all by myself. I'd quit Twitter. I'd uninstalled Instagram. None of my friends were even awake. As I chose where to eat, all that mattered were the things I personally cared about and …wait, what were those again?

Somehow, I'd come to depend on a vague sense of everything that mattered to the whole damned Internet in order to decide how to best feed myself. What does so-and-so recommend? How would this ramen look next to her chicken salad sandwich? What does it say about me that I just want McDonald's right now? But being alone and off social media, the illusion that any of that mattered was dispelled. I didn't need to know what others might suggest and they didn't need to know that I eventually opted for a potato bacon pie.

Finally, it dawned on me that I was woefully out of practice answering the question, "what do I, as Justin-assed Justin actually want to do right now?"

With a nascent understanding that the problem was not knowing my own wants as well as I thought I did, I forced myself to sit for a minute to collect my thoughts before rushing out the door. It was as if I had reawakened a long-dormant muscle. I began listening for and responding to all my errant curiosities and desires. It felt deeply uncomfortable the first few days, but I gradually ascended to a higher plane of selfishness. It felt good. I knew I was a changed man when I caught myself stopping for five minutes to "appreciate" a chair. Gross.

But there were useful effects, too. Rather than making dinner reservations first thing in the morning, I started waiting until I was hungry to make just-in-time dining plans. Instead of booking trains in advance, I used the Smart-EX app to choose my next destination mere minutes before hopping on board. And if something I was on my way to do lost its appeal, I'd turn around and do something else. I stopped planning ahead based on what I assumed future-me wanted and instead started "living in the moment" by reacting to realtime feedback from my own brain—what a novelty!

It was one of these chairs, by the way: Man, that is a handsome chair over there

After a few weeks of this, something akin to a daily routine had emerged. Well, I guess it was more like a meta-routine. Instead of repeating the same activities at the same times each day, I would pause each morning, noon, and night to think through what it was I truly wanted to do and how I wanted to feel after doing it. And instead of thinking through the possibilities in terms of other people, I earnestly prioritized my own interests and enjoyment. And just like everything else in my life, I immediately started min-maxing my own happiness—each day becoming more efficient and effective at identifying the things I wanted to do and avoiding the things I didn't.

It all felt pretty nice. Would recommend.

I suppose my return to the states created another series of doubts for me to puzzle over. I've been scrutinizing things I have ostensibly been doing "for myself" for years, asking whether they were ever really for me. And as for things I do "for others", I'm starting to see how often those were based on invalid assumptions to begin with (including the assumption that others always know their own desires). And while I'm sure social networking apps meet some kind of need in people, I'm more certain than ever that their ubiquity, scale, and business models collude to pickle people's brains in jars of insatiable, manufactured wants.

Okay, good talk.

One more thing I really want

(Content warning: obscure programmer words. If none of this makes sense, skip to the next section.)

Speaking of things I really want that nobody else in their right mind cares about: I'm on the verge of finally making a mocking library for Ruby in 2023 that's as robust as my favorite mocking library for Java was in 2010.

While I was at Kaigi, @paracycle told me that after a year of waiting, this issue in Sorbet had been resolved, which means I finally have everything I need to create a type-safe test double library for Ruby. This is a dream I've been chasing for at least 13 years. It spawned one of my first gems in gimme. If you're curious what I'm talking about, I dusted off my Java skills a while back to demonstrate what I'm referring to in this screencast, demoing how pleasant it is to combine automated tests, a robust type system, and a well-appointed editor to turn coding into a paint-by-number experience that magically generates your class files and method declarations for you.

In response to this breakthrough in Sorbet's expressiveness, I'm currently iterating on a branch of my Mocktail gem that publishes Sorbet RBI type signatures for its public API. If released, users will be able to automatically consume them with tapioca, greatly enhancing this very particular kind of test-driven development. If I can actually get all this to work, it would drastically alter how I write Ruby code and open the door to creative workflows that most Rubyists have never experienced previously. Exciting!

This other thing that doesn't even exist but that I already want

Monday at 1pm Eastern during the WWDC keynote, Apple's going to announce a fancy VR headset and I'm going to want to buy it.

I'm sure Apple will also announce an updated Mac Studio shipping immediately and a Mac Pro shipping "later this year", and I'll really want the Mac Pro but I'll have a real pickle of a time not settling for the more affordable, appropriate, and impulse-purchasable Mac Studio.

Anyway, if you plan to reply to this email, I recommend doing so before 1pm on Monday. Between 1pm and 3pm, I'll be busy watching the keynote. After 3pm, all my devices will be running the next beta operating system and my Mail app will probably have stopped working. 'Tis the season!

You really want more?

If somehow you read all this and thought "I could go for even more content from this guy", yikes. But also, here's some more stuff I posted this month.

For Test Double, I already mentioned my RubyKaigi Field Report, but the video of my and Meagan's RailsConf talk is also now up. It was a weird session that we met with a similarly weird approach to editing—check it out!

I also posted a bunch of mostly bite-size content over at justin.searls.co. But if you read just one of these, it should probably be this photo essay on my trip to Yakushima.

Here's the whole list: