Real & invented struggles

10-05-2025

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

Despite having to literally bake RAM sticks, scavenge electronics and make "unofficial" arrangements with other teams to gain access to their stockpiles, I much prefer an environment where you're limited by resources, but not by structural straitjackets. Although that seems counterintuitive, I believe that too few resources are less of a constraint than the self-inflicted handicaps of modern technical/scientific fields.

Not only that, I'm sometimes happy to be handed real limitations to work around. For instance, having no access to commercial software and resorting to developing an open source alternative you can share with fellow colleagues across the world results in real benefits for all of us. Simpler hardware means your solution is accessible to more people, whilst being more efficient.

I could come up with a myriad of examples, but this type of physical limitation feels rewarding in the right environment: it gives you the opportunity to learn more about the systems you're working with, and it's universal - these are problems other people will face, and your solution might be the gasp of fresh air they were looking for.

So why do these "real" limitations feel rewarding when you overcome them, but "fake" obstacles created by inefficient, self-serving, ego-lifting bureaucracy feel like a Sisyphean hurdle, of which there is no pleasure to be derived, even after it's all sorted?

"But I wasn't born to be this/I was born to fight dragons"

When a new discovery extends the "scientific playing field" we have to work with, such as the importance of non-coding RNA, viable perovskites, or the Higgs boson, all that we have built doesn't stop working. MRI machines still work, DNA still gets transcripted into RNA, even if we have to challenge standing models. Science/engineering is an unending march, closing in on the machinations of the universe, which is often times a fixed point.

Your effort feels valued. You can flex your thinking muscles and spread your wings, even if for a brief moment, confident in that at least one other person will appreciate your effort, and your mark on this world (however small or short-lived) is assured. It doesn't feel like wasted effort, for you're fighting a real enemy - resource constraints have always existed, they will always exist, and, more than ever, human existence depends on developing more efficient solutions.

"You will never understand/How it feels to live your life/With no meaning or control"

Failed company structures, unnecessary bureaucracy, endless forms, jargon? This isn't nature, these are man-made problems, the primary cause of "blue-on-blue" in collaborative environments. These are humans playing against the nature of their own race, in deciding to aggrandise their importance at the expense of those doing real work.

Once solved, little prevents these fake problems from returning in an organisation (or society) permeated by meaningless competition and individualism. As a matter of fact, unlike solving a problem in nature, mastering one of these invented struggles all but guarantees its return. The post the person responsible for that problem occupies depends on it, after all.

That fake problem will return in full force, like a metastatic cancer, drawing on the blood and oxygen of a group, preventing it from achieving its true purpose, and resigning it to focusing on merely staying alive amidst an avalanche of rituals. It will entrench itself so deeply in that organisation, that no notion of a working structure without that "fake problem" exists. The boundaries of what is superfluous effort and meaningful work will appear to overlap, "there's no better way of doing this", one will claim.

The problem, now masterfully rebranded as a "solution" and given a cute acronym/name (Agile, KPI, PDR) will mutate further, and blind managers to the work being done by their subordinates. Because speaking to people is now too hard (and they have to present concrete "results" to their own bosses, and so on, so forth), your higher ups will resort to measuring your efficiency in whichever metrics are more convenient to them: papers published, lines of code typed, project milestones completed.

Shortcuts will be made to achieve these numbers (Goodhart's Law), and the impact of your organisation will diminish in real terms. But since numbers are going up, no one minds, or they stopped caring. Apathy will take over, passion will wither, and suddenly everyone is focused on doing the absolute minimum, for they have no energy left to do anything else. Or, worse, they might be chastised for doing the right thing and caring about their work.

All minor decisions are now embroiled in bureaucracy - so much as changing a light bulb requires meticulous political navigation. Instead of doing what amounts commanding a truce between two warring nations, workers might just do the absolute minimum that doesn't require exposing yourself to conflict. You cannot win, there is no pleasure to be had in feeding a system that makes your life worse by "filling bureaucratic needs".

"Hear ye discouraged workers/You who hurt and don′t deserve it"

These are all issues which would not exist if, ironically, some people did not do their jobs (or were less obsessed about them), which makes this especially frustrating. If the doctor doesn't show up to the practice, people might die. If sanitation workers go on strike, entire cities become uninhabitable. However, there are certain roles which if unfulfilled, not only have no discernible effect, but might even have positive impact at times.

In Herbert Marcuse's "One-Dimensional Man", it is understood that one of the final goals of capitalism is to suppress workers - not through violence, but by distancing them from the fruit of their labour. In early industrial times, workers were "cogs in the machine", meaning that organised industrial action could interfere with production, so workers held power.

In contemporary society, however, it is primordial that workers are made spectators of the process of production, capable of being replaced either by more amenable personnel, or by AI/automation. This nullifies their bargaining power, and makes their demands seem unreasonable. One of the steps in this process is to remove all pride and satisfaction employees have in their work.

Furthermore, organisational compartimentalisation will take hold. The physicist will not speak to the programmer, and the programmer will not speak to the electrician. For all they know, the results of their work (and the work of others) are black boxes - you will take X as input, and output Y according to pre-specified rules. Questioning these rules, or asking for more detail, will be seen as inefficient and combative, and the "high-level managers" dedicated to "overseeing operations without getting mingled in minutiae" will hold all power.

The engineer might agree to unsafe demands to save money, the scientist might falsify data to bolster their company's numbers. What other option do they have? Their participation is minimal, it's trivial to replace them. They're doing as told, why should they question things if the true nature of their work is hidden behind a veil of "reducing inefficiencies"?

This is why it's of utmost importance that certain movements realise that facing natural limitations and being proud of what you do is not the root cause of the decline in working conditions. Natural limitations drive human curiosity, working towards a better world is human nature. There is nothing wrong with being proud of fixing drain pipes or flipping burgers, in fact, realising the importance of your work is fundamental in the process of achieving better work conditions.

Not all work is made equal, some solve real problems, some solve invented ones.