Things take a surprising amount of work
There's a famous refrain in some circles -- "reality has a surprising amount of detail". Today I want to talk about something obliquely related to this, about my own experience of details, and interest.
For some reason, as I've gotten older, I've consistently and repeatedly been surprised by how complicated things are, or how much work it takes to do things. When I was younger, I simply didn't appreciate the sheer amount of work going into just about everything that surrounds us.
Before I learned to program computers, I used to think that there must be some easy, low-code way of making mobile games, for example. There was no particular reason I thought that, I just assumed it because there were so many games around.
The older I get, the more interested I get in how work gets done, how things get made, and how people keep track of things. Because there is just a surprising amount of complexity, and nuance, and contingencies to almost everything. In some ways, its overwhelming, but on the other hand, it makes me more and more amazed (and grateful) that anything works at all.
I think one of the starkest examples of this is simply the built environment around us. Go for a long drive down a country road, and just think: people had to lay every foot of that asphalt, put up every individual telephone pole, attach the telephone wires, dig all the ditches, build every bridge and guard rail. Drive for miles and miles, and they all just keep coming. Just an unfathomable amount of work, across every road, every place that people live.
It's a great reminder of how much we really do rely on each other in everything we do.