Paradigm Shift
To start, I’ve got a new job.
I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ten years ago. At the time, paradigm shift was simply just an positive phrase to me. Leaving behind an old and irrational worldview, and replacing it with something new and rational. Wasn’t that the most desirable direction for humanity?
A paradigm often flows downstream into what a society considers common sense, into its rules, and even into each individual’s identity. And yes, those individuals do not operate on pure rationality alone. Over the past few months, I felt, fully and painfully, just how strong and bitter the friction can be when personal irrationality collides with a changing paradigm.
The last time I wrote something related to my career was six months ago. By then, I had already admitted that the paradigm had changed. The worldview that first made me excited, and the people who embodied it, were no longer there. And yet for those six months — perhaps for even longer — why was I still holding on to an old identity?
We are born with nothing, and we die leaving nothing behind. Everything in between is something humans have invented in order to assign meaning to life. Without assigning meaning to anything, there is no reason to live. So, assuming we are not going to choose death immediately, let us take that as a premise. The most ultimate meaning we assign, then, is identity — or, in Maslow’s terms, something close to self-actualization.
Identity, put simply, is the statement: I am someone who does X, who has done Y, and who plans to do Z. Embedded within that are all the secondary things: status, knowledge, wealth, reputation, career. These things give meaning to a life that was given to us by accident. Fortunately, most humans are able to immerse themselves almost entirely in these meanings, so that thoughts from outside the frame of life do not interfere with everyday existence.
But if we think carefully, identity is never absolute. This is where the idea that humans are social animals comes from. The social consensus that proves one has high status, the reactions of others that prove one is popular, the capitalist system that proves one is wealthy — all of these emerge from social interaction. Perhaps Kant would say this is obvious. After all, apart from the sense of one’s own existence, nothing is truly absolute.
The first time I experienced a paradigm shift was three years ago: when I first learned programming, first worked and communicated in English, and my worldview changed rapidly. Alongside that shift, I built a new identity for myself. Few years later, unfortunately, once the identity began to ripen, the world started changing again.
For a long time, I pursued things that were intellectually fascinating, because learning them brought me immense joy. At the same time, I dreamed that one day I could use those intellectually fascinating things to help people. But at some point, I began to crave for something else: helping people more directly, understanding why people use certain things, and figuring out what makes a truly well made product different, even when the product itself appears boring. I could not solve this problem within my existing worldview. The world — or at least the world I believed to be rational — was changing rapidly, and it began to clash with my personal identity.
In the end, I am finding a new worldview, and with it, a new identity. Simply, I’ve got a new job. Once again, there are so many things I want to learn. Each day feels almost overwhelmingly fun. Identity represents an entire way of living. It feels like being born again. I am learning that writing code and logic is not the entirety of building a product. I am learning the weight and responsibility that comes after code changes: deployment pipeline, observability, on-call maintenance, and the presence of real users who pay for and depend on the product. I am also learning what it feels like to be in an organization where everyone has high agency and experiences, so where people understand not just what they are working on, but the details of how and why it matters.
The biggest shift is this: from let’s make something cool, and then figure out how to make it useful, to let’s make something useful, and then figure out how to make it cooler. Right now, I believe the latter is correct.