#14: this definitely does not scale
on scalability and throwaway work
i struggled with my US banking setup when I first interned in the US years ago. thankfully, when i reached out for help, someone contacted Plaid to get them to support my bank. without this, I wouldn’t have been able to use Venmo, and that wasn’t even the original problem I had!! i remarked to my roommate that this level of direct customer support didn’t seem scalable long term, to which they replied sagely: do things that don’t scale. earlier this year i learned this is the title of a 2013 Paul Graham essay.
DOES THIS SCALE?
at my software job, scalability broadly refers to a system’s ability to accommodate an increasing amount of work. your app works fine right now for 1 thousand users, but what happens to cost and latency if you were supporting 1 million users instead? your code base is fine for a few people to work together in, but what happens if this turns into a few hundred? you want to anticipate and be prepared for the future.
while you want to plan ahead, there’s a balance between waiting to get things perfect versus making some imperfect progress—any progress!—and that being better than no progress at all. a tradeoff here is that you might have to abandon things in the future that no longer work. you might knowingly spend years building something that will have to be completely rebuilt in the future. and maybe that’s the right call! but in an ideal world, wouldn’t you want to minimize the amount of work you’re throwing away?
“minimizing throwaway work” spills over into the rest of my life. i catch myself thinking i need to know, with 100% certainty, what I want to do with my One Wild And Precious Life and everything i do must be in direct service of this perfect plan. everything builds on top of what i’ve already done. every skill, habit, and effort lasts me a lifetime. the roadmap never pivots. everyone will look at me and say wow!!! you drive your life plans with such clarity and efficiency! everything you do ladders up to your north star vision and you’ve managed to identify and mitigate all possible risks! your north star vision is perfect by the way. you obviously have no character flaws! and then everyone will clap.
i have not achieved the life described above. but the pressure to live scalably remains! here are more examples of times i’ve worried about scalability:
decorating your room as throwaway work
i’ll only be in this apartment for a few months. why furnish and decorate when this will quickly result in additional work when i move?? so far, when i’ve found myself in this scenario, even putting up a couple sticky notes has made a world of difference. it can be sad to invest in something that you know will be temporary from the start. but why withhold joy??
hobbies that don’t “scale”
why learn this language if i’m going to forget it?
why get into pottery if i’m not going to make a career out of it?
why run if i don’t have any goals—why put time into something if i won’t get better at it?
why write on substack if i don’t know how long i’ll keep writing here? what is the point of putting time into ANYTHING i will eventually abandon??
i understand but resent the productivity ascribed to hobbies. but i don’t know! sometimes the answer to why do this? is because i want to. why not honour that!
photos accumulating over time
why worry about time when you can ALSO worry about resources! i have a lot of photos in my camera roll and i don’t know how this is supposed to scale over time. decades from now, will I have hundreds of thousands of photos stored locally on my phone? shouldn’t I find a way to minimize my cloud storage bill and the phone storage i need?? i’m attached to my memories, accidental videos and screenshots and all, and the older they get, the harder they are to part with. maybe not everything needs to be optimized. or alternatively, maybe it’s critical I remember what the sky looked like on October 24, 2014.
i have finite time and resources, so of course i want to be intentional with what i have. but i’m standing in this meadow surrounded by these beautiful rolling hills and you’re telling me i should run straight through it?!?! as a kid, i wondered why people bothered with holiday decorations when this just generated work—avoidable work!—to put them up and then pack them away again, year after year. i get it now. with every passing autumn, i get it even more.
this is piece #14 in “if only i had a fourier transform for this feeling”, a series of reflections on what i learned while studying engineering physics in university. thank you for following along <3
I hear the neighborhood that the photo was taken in is pretty nice tho 😉