It's All A Mess
Cleaning up messes is the opposite of being baby.
This offhand Visa tweet triggered something for me:
Adult life is enormously about cleaning up messes. Cleaning up messes is not sexy work. Cleaning up messes is very low status compared to building on green fields. For instance, Google’s company culture is built entirely on giving promotions for green field development, which then never gets maintained because you don’t get promotions for maintenance and growth. Perhaps we can see how this has affected their products somewhere.
But cleaning up messes is both important and daunting, and it often feels like our life can become one giant mess — an endless set of todos that bleed into each other.
Personally, I suck at cleaning up messes. I think the mess should not have been there in the first place; I long for the world where we just don’t make messes, and we keep things neat and tidy as we go along. That’s what being a good engineer is all about, after all — design, forethought, planning, strategy, architecture. We do all this design, analysis, simulation, and architecture work in advance to minimize messes (which we normally call “technical debt”… unless you’re in aerospace engineering in which case you call it “catastrophic failure resulting in vehicle loss, and loss of all 7 crew members at 73 seconds into flight”).
I’m an engineer! I don’t cause messes, I prevent them — it’s everyone else who is causing these messes all the time, and that’s why my job is important. Right?? So I shouldn’t have to clean up any messes. Everyone else should have listened to me when I explained how to prevent it, or better yet, they should have anticipated their mess and prevented it themselves. They should all think like engineers, and if they make a mess they should clean it up themselves! Fuck their messes! I shouldn’t have to clean up after them all the time! Im baby!
But then I had an actual baby.
See, the thing about babies is they make messes. She’s a chaotic deity, a goddess of destruction and creation. She’s growing, and learning, and becoming capable, so I can’t possibly blame her! I mean, just look at her! She is literally baby.
But then… what about those messes that I’m not responsible for, that I keep ignoring because “shouldn’t someone else who caused it be responsible for that?" Having a baby helps me see what’s actually going on: most messes are created by systems that do not and can not clean up after themselves (yet). These systems (like my baby daughter, for instance) need to be nurtured and improved so they can clean up after themselves, yes, but in the meantime, someone needs to clean up the damn mess. And that person is dad (eg. me.)
If the system was capable of cleaning up the messes around you, it already would have done so! Better yet, it would have prevented the mess from building in the first place! My 6 month old daughter is not going to clean up her food messes.
So I can’t be baby, because SHE is baby. Someone has to be the adult who cleans up the messes, or everything just becomes one big mess (and, in fact, we can read about the eras in history when this happens to civilizations).
But I’m not just making an appeal to responsibility. Sure, it would be responsible of me to clean up my daughter’s messes. But who gives a shit — vague ideas of “responsibility” have never appealed to me, and perhaps this is one of the reasons I have always historically disliked cleaning up messes. No, the real prize is way sweeter. Cleaning up messes is a method of accumulating power.
The very existence of a mess implies a gap in systemic capabilities (in other words: a gap in a system’s power to solve problems). If I consistently clean up after a system, then that system is reliant on me to be functional. In other words, I am an important and powerful component to the functioning of the system.
People often describe cleaning up messes as “thankless” work. And though this may be true, being thanked is not a requirement for becoming invaluable and powerful. By cleaning up my daughter’s messes, I become invaluable to her and invaluable to my family. This in turn fuels my confidence and desirability, which makes me happier and better and more capable, which gives me a real earned respect in and outside of my family. Cleaning up messes is the most straightforward way to level up, and I want to level up for my daughter, to give her the best life and the best father I can. Cleaning up messes is the opposite of being baby — it is literally what it means to “adult”. Ironically, babies do not want to be baby, they want to clean up messes most of all.
When we think of owned power (as in, power which no one can take away from you), there is no power greater than the power to clean up messes. It’s yours, no one can take it away.
I want to cultivate the power to clean up messes big and small for myself, for my family, and for the systems around me. Not just the interesting design and engineering bits. And boy am I trying.
I will conclude with a general theory of messes:
A mess is an undesirable circumstance for which there exists no automatic or systemic solution. It is "unaccounted for" in the deepest sense - no existing process or system is designated to handle it.
Some properties of messes:
They persist or worsen by default, and never “clean themselves up.” — Any situation that would naturally resolve is not truly a mess, but rather part of a functional process.
The very existence of a mess implies a gap in systemic capabilities. (e.g. If a system could handle it, it would have already done so.)
Messes often fall into accountability grey areas
The question "shouldn't someone else handle this?" often signals a mess
Many messy systems are in a developmental stage (like babies)
The long-term solution is helping systems mature to handle their own messes
Given that all messes are inherently unsolved, you may be the best solution to any particular mess that you notice, if you are capable of cleaning it up.
Cleaning up messes is not thankless work, actually. It’s work that gives you extraordinary power over the messy system, as you become an essential part of it. Anyone who wants to remove you from power would have to take on your messes (and most of the time, they can’t.)
It’s okay to be baby, but when you are no longer baby, consider cleaning up.
Messes often seem overwhelming, but are literally manageable, often taking far less time than expected for extreme psychological reward.
love this