Sam Gentle.com

Harsh reality

It's strange that, even if you know you're good at something, even if lots of people tell you you're good at something, you still get a special kick from someone offering you a job. Similarly, you can create a thing purely on the basis of it being good according to your standards, without regard for other peoples' expectations. But it still feels great to see someone you've never met praising that thing. I think this goes beyond simple ego and into something to do with the nature of reality.

One of the best definitions of reality I've heard is that it's something that doesn't change when you change your mind. There are people who believe in relativism: the idea that there is no absolute truth, only the truth as you see it. While that might make for an interesting abstract debate, the point is that when you drop a rock and really believe that gravity will make it go upwards, it will still go downwards. Reality doesn't care what you think.

None of this would be necessary or even meaningful if our minds weren't so damn malleable. It's hard to imagine, for example, having to explain to a computer that there's a difference between things as they really are and things as you wish they were. But, for whatever reason, those seem equivalent to us, and it's easy to get misled. You think you're eating well when you're eating badly and not thinking about it, thinking you're making progress on some work when you've actually been distracted most of the time, and so on. It's actually very difficult to trust your own assessments when they are so easily influenced by what you wish was true.

And I think that's what causes the special kick you get from a good job interview or someone you don't know talking about you. There's no fuzziness there. There's no sense of, well, maybe I'm just making this up because it's what I want to believe. It's just harsh reality: these people have no reason to lie to you, and they're saying it anyway. Hard metrics are the same. Assuming you're rigorous, the numbers don't lie. If they say 5 hours, you did 5 hours. There's no room for fuzziness or self-deception.

This is the reason why I've started to prefer more quantitative self-assessments over vague qualitative ones. There's a feeling you can't get from introspection alone, and that's the feeling that reality agrees with you.