Nothing in particular published. I have a video half-way recorded and would like to finish it but I mostly wrangle the new baby and enjoy the time off. I’ve outlined a couple of potential blog posts related to the ID3 work but no idea when they get more fleshed out.

Firm Conviction

My pattern of thought was simpler when I was a teenager. My music is good. Mainstream religion is bad. The teacher I don’t like is evil. My friend is a good person.

With time every single one of these thoughts have been somewhere between pockmarked to completely obliterated with nuance.

The music I like has sometimes turned out to be produced by really nasty people with terrible opinions. In some cases you can hear the opinions in the music.

Mainstream religion helps and hinders in a wide variety of ways. It is intrinsically linked to culture and the best and worst of it is really hard to actually connect to faith specifically. I’ve met people of strong faith who are terrible people, I’ve met people of no faith who are good people. The majority of the people I’ve met aren’t near the edges or corners of that chart.

Teaching is really hard. I don’t envy trying to get teenage me to do things I don’t feel like. Most of my teachers that I disliked were not particularly evil. Potentially a bit tired and worn down or actually intentionally trying to provoke some kind of engagement from me.

Lots of people I like have done bad things, things I disagree with or been a bit of a jerk to me over time. Holding my friends up to be pinnacles of anything is unsound.

I’ve been eating vegan for double-digit years now. I established a conviction that it is a good thing in my teens, I didn’t actually go vegetarian until sometime in my twenties and then vegan a number of years later. But the ideological and philosophical underpinning is something I’ve had for a long time. It is also an idea that is grayed and somewhat washed out by nuance at this point. I don’t think it is the one solution people should be looking at to fix everything that is wrong with health, environment and society. I still think it is roughly a good move for a lot of people, especially in my part of the world. We can grow plants quite effectively.

I don’t let all the nuances of local meat being versus transported soy necessarily change my ruleset. If I try to adapt significantly to every new piece of data I would go quite mad, quite quickly and feel obligated to spend my life researching things I largely am not very interested in.

This can sometimes be a challenge when running into an enthusiastic (often new) vegan. I don’t hold an aggressive conviction and generally keep it to myself. I live it as a firm and deep commitment, I have no intention of changing. I don’t find it an exciting topic of conversation. It can be nice to commiserate with a fellow plant-muncher over the occasional challenges or fantastic options found. Generally I don’t enjoy spending time or thought on it.

The idea has been nuanced to death if I cared to map it but there is a convenience in the clarity of the ruleset. It’d be an f-ing pain if I applied the nuance to it. Right now I can skip entire aisles at the store, I can filter out big chunks of things from what I consider buying and eating. It is not the perfect criteria for the optimal life, it’s a coarse-net heuristic that serves me well for living in line with what I believe. If I saw things that upended my understanding of things entirely, I’d change it but I see very little value in optimizing it and don’t find it very interesting.

(If you find a need to discuss vegan diets with me after reading this you’ve missed the point and failed to read the room, I have zero interest in discussing it, it is an example, it is not the idea of this writing.)

I think it’s important to be open to re-evaluate things as you grow, learn and ingest new data, ideas and information. I don’t think you should let nuance paralyze you into your entirely life being ”it depends” and ”what if”. Opinions and beliefs help us take a perspective on life and move forward. They shouldn’t be stagnant but they shouldn’t change so often we don’t have a leg to stand on either.

Looking at tech, a coarse-grained thing I hold to be true is that I don’t really like the modern JS ecosystem. There is an infinity of asterisks I can add to that. I try to speak in a nuanced matter about it and I don’t really care to spend a ton of time and energy on the things I don’t like. What I use that belief and feeling for is a coarse filter for technology. I’ll be less likely to pick a tool built in a way I disagree with. I like Elixir, I like the BEAM. I don’t think they are the only good choice. But unless something dislodges my faith in these tenets it’s a waste of my time to re-evaluate them constantly.

I’ve experienced the path from teenage to adulthood as an erosion of clarity and ever-more nuanced human mess getting into everything. Nothing is ever finally solved, nothing is truly clear-cut, no machine runs without maintenance. I find this onslaught of nuance exhausting. Important. Exhausting. I try to be open to it and I try to maintain what I feel is my way, my direction and my truths in the face of a complex world.

Establish convictions, opinions and ideas about the world. Re-evaluate and change them if they don’t serve you or seem to be causing harm. I think that’s preferrable to a constant concern about doing things truly correctly because no two people will ever agree fully on that.

If you have anything to share on the ideas above, aside from the dietary choices, let me know at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

I appreciate you reading this. Thank you for yo

- Lars Wikman