Infinite Beginner

The process of beginning is a sometimes dire opening act. The confusion and insecurity in learning to do something for the first time induces a pain-like sensation in our brains. Or maybe it just sucks to suck at something. 

As such, sometimes our brains shelter us from this discomfort through a sense of unearned confidence. 

This phenomenon is ‘beginner’s bias’, whereby you immediately feel pretty confident about something within the first few hours, days, or weeks of starting. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know shit, but you tell yourself, ‘I feel pretty natural at this’. 

There’s probably a really sophisticated psych term for this, but this isn’t that kind of blog, so let’s roll with ‘beginner’s bias’. 

After this gestation phase of euphoric self-assuredness, reality sets in and the thing you felt pretty naturally good at suddenly starts to feel more complex, more nuanced, more specialized. 

You start to feel overwhelmed. You’ve officially entered beginner phase. 

Null Values

Coding is one of those pursuits where you can take a huge leap from knowing nothing to knowing what feels like a lot in a short time frame. 

Nowadays, its even easier with the unfathomable amount of resources online - GPT, Copilot, some variation of an ‘AI’ assistant ready to hustle you into a highly capable hallucination upon each interaction - and now everyone is a full blown ‘engineer’, or has ‘engineer’ suffixed to their job title, all because of a clever plagiarism machine and a well entrenched industry delusion drowning itself in a bathtub of easy capital. 

But sometimes you transcend.

Existing on the edge of something for novelty or a quick solution is distinct from letting something consume your psyche for so many years that you are now inextricably linked to that thing in spite of everything that compels you to unlink yourself. 

In spite of poverty, job loss, annihilation of purpose, social rejection, absence of meaning, and crippling anxiety, you still pursue that coveted…something. 

That dopamine hit of universal homeostasis when you crack that vexing spiral of logic you overlooked over and over again; the rush of epinephrine when you push that final commit to something astoundingly beautiful that only you and two or four or no other people in the world will ever really comprehend; that world destroying feeling that tightens your throat as you read the hundredth of hundreds of emails describing to you the ways in which you are not enough. 

Yet you begin again.

You find some place amid the grotesque reality of an industry and a craft besieged by demagogues, oligopoly, and atrophied generational dreams to open your IDE and write again. Not as the cynical veteran of ten thousand lost hours, useless features, and a duplicitous managerial caste, but as the ponderous, naive beginner typing wondrous incantations into a machine that you only know and that only knows you. 

The future suspends in an indifferent present and you wake again as the infinite beginner, casting off into a vast blinking nothingness to start over once more.