Why am I such bad photographer? Why do I not care about such things? Why am I so bad ad drawing? Why do I not have the patience for that? Why do I not try to create things that are trying to be optically pleasing? Why do I not create sculpture? Or handcrafts? Why am I not?
There are obvious answers. Talent would be one. Laziness an other. From the obvious ones, I like to think that I employ my creativity more and better in the abstract. Earlier in my life, I would have said that historical epistemology, sociological systems theory and actor-network theory would have been my playing fields. Nowadays it’s software architecture and software development. And I guess essayistic journaling. Ruminating on things, how they could fit. Thinking about thinking and writing about writing. It’s thinking and writing. But it’s not beautiful writing. If it’s that, it’s kind of accidental on purpose, maybe. But not in English. It’s mostly functional, because my voice won’t come out as easily in English as it does in German. Which is not even always a bad thing.
I sometimes long for being able to write about mundane things like how does it feel to live in a different country (notice, that I didn’t say Finland; I immediately went abstract abain…), for example? Or being in an international relationship, or whatever? I force myself to write about this stuff sometimes, because I want to preserve a kind of public record of the years I went through, but I ordinarily would write about more abstract things.
I do notice that a lot of my abstract thinking has either become private and found a place in my notes app, instead of my blog, or has become purely thinking because my life is so full of stuff and non-abstract life that I can’t indulge in this kind of stuff too much. But what am I even saying. Even if I don’t get to spend all of my time thinking about the act of writing-thinking in the abstract, my life is still full of the abstract: Because I’m a programmer and the act of programming is at its root a work of abstracting. This way of abstracting just feels much more concrete to me nowadays. It also doesn’t feel as explorative, because in the end I am supposed to abstract for money, meaning I am supposed to create, to produce really, business value with my work.
I recently learned an interesting thing about my inclination for abstraction: It wants to be explorative. I think I’m doing my best creative work, when I can look at a legacy body of work - this could be an abstract published text, or a legacy code base - and am allowed to take my time with said body of work. The notion of refactoring comes to mind: In programming this is defined as a behavior preserving code change. This enables the restructuring and renewing of legacy code bases. Something similar could maybe be claimed for often times unwieldy abstract texts, too. I am able to dissect them and reassemble them. So that I can explain them, use parts of them, recombine them, take parts of them and combine them with other parts from other texts and be innovative with them. At least for me I can do that pretty well. The opportunity to do anything with that “in the open” has kind of passed though. I do not envision myself publishing many papers about new aspects of actor-network theory, for example. I do envision myself using this muscle to become pretty good at thinking about the craft of programming, though. I am happy to say that I get payed for spending about 8 hours a day writing and thinking about code. Most of this is relatively mundane web development in a more or less proprietary legacy framework, but even then it lets me imagine and sometimes even actually do some applied creative abstract thinking.
And that’s awesome and interesting to me. And I want to become better at it, I want to do more of it and I want to be able to take on more responsibility so that I may contribute wider reaching solutions to this code base of ours, so that others can use and appreciate them. I feel in this way I am not, nor was I ever, that different from creatives that work within a less abstract medium.