On the Pleasures of Difficult Work

I want to share something I enjoyed, because I learnt something from the experience. This is about the mental state of running a business. I'm a bit of an elitist, so maybe this doesn't apply to every businessperson, but maybe bits of it will apply to you, and maybe you'll enjoy reading it so that you won't feel that you're completely alone in your work. I don't know - proceed, at your own risk.

Before accepting responsibility for running a business funded by public money ... I was 32, and I'd already spent most of my life thinking that most people get emotionally traumatised by very silly little things. Well, now I have more experience in emotional trauma, so I am logging some notes for my journal.

I started active mental conditioning when I was in college - my main project from 2003-2004 was trying to figure out if conscious experience can be thoroughly quantified (it can; I moved on to other projects). Part of that work involved various tests to determine the limits of what can/cannot be done with a human mind (fall in love with an apple; switch on and off empathy; remain stimulated in solitary confinement; be happy on demand; grieve on demand; read a page a minute; etc.). so that was a good period of training. It was one of the things I was more happy about getting from college - finding things to do which were more challenging than what the Malaysian high-school system (and the American college system, for that matter) had to offer.

So extending that, here's what I've managed to learn between the ages of 32 to 37, during which time I have been running a small cafe in Petaling Jaya. This period of work has generally been rather stressful for me, due to the limitations of the project (also not the focus of this post). In general, I seem to have managed to find something challenging to do with my time, but in order to achieve that, I think I've reduced my quality of life from being blissfully enlightened to having a modicum of what it's like to suffer in the trenches like a normal person.

If easily available obstacles offer insufficient opportunity for profit, then ripping the skin off an object is a sure way to feel around its structure, and to discover other strengths and weaknesses in its surrounding business environment. Over the years, some of the domains I encountered issues with included sewerage systems, ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration, insufficiently-offensive architecture, venture-capital-funded land grabs, immigration permits, and so on and so forth. I've ended up spending weeks spooning through grease, faeces, mildew, and sawdust. I now know what it's like to have really whiny dependents, a government which I can't trust to manage itself, and angry debtors *sic* howling for blood roughly all at the same time ... nevermind the customers, I've always felt they have been the least harmful component of the entire experience.

I didn't take a complete break from work for over four years. Our operations have been oriented around 24-hour availability, and the management of crews that can deliver this remains concerning even if one is supposedly stepping out of the office. If I needed to travel for person reasons, I would always need to know the shortest route directly back to the office, for example, in case of emergency. I formed new relationships; I lost quite a few.

SARS-CoV-2 lockdown has been a really interesting experience. Two whole months with no babies to feed. Wow. It's been a good time to just catch up on my roots and focus on work that couldn't be possibly done otherwise ... weeks of just thumbing through reams of documentation, and pressing buttons in order to try and figure out how to run the giant factory that is software development in 2020.

It's been incredibly scary, because as usual, it's a business risk. We don't know what regulators will require after lockdown - it could force us to terminate our business model completely. We don't know whose tempers will have flared as various people (who find this pandemic-thing intimidating) might have come to all sorts of epiphanies about what they want to do with their lives, their time, and their monies. We don't know if there will be new parties out to destroy us. And that's normal, and it's normal for us to be on heightened alert going into the next phase.

Software development in and of itself is pretty scary. In the case of working without pay, without obligations, and without feeling a need to be tethered to social norms about what counts as sanity, one does move in and out of spaces which are both completely dark and precipitous. Sometimes you encounter a cascade of impacts from wave upon wave of badly documented work, which must be engaged with, massaged, fondled, and finally smacked into a usable result. And it's not your fault, it's just the broken nature of the world which presents these puzzles which hinder most businesses from occupying high ground. But that's what makes them useful - an opportunity to spoon shit, and to reform it.

Ah well, just wanted to journal a bit. There you go.