On being tenacious

I have been working through some technical issues regarding upgrading the operating system on the web server that this blog runs on. This post isn’t about those issues, although I’ll likely write a long post on that topic someday soon. Apologies for the frequent outages over the past 48 hours, though!

What I am talking about here is a strange quality or aberrant pattern of behaviour that I possess regarding technical problem solving. I am basically almost entirely unable to walk away from an unresolved issue.

This oddity fuelled my technical career. Someone would say “I don’t know how to do that”, “That can’t be done”, or “No one has been able to make that work”, and off I’d go. More often than not no one said anything: I just saw the problem myself and got mentally trapped into fixing it.

So this post is a brief look into my brain’s misbehaviour around ‘unsolvable’ technical challenges: the good and the bad.

Some clarification on what I mean

My doggedness didn’t start when I began my computing career: I was like this as far back as I can remember. The thing my career taught me was how to take a very small step back from time to time. I never really learned how to ‘abandon’ a problem, though.

My persistence is really linked to ‘misbehaving’ technology. What I mean here is any engineered system, almost always computing related, that is supposed to do a thing but which, at least under given conditions, does not. For some reason these kinds of problems trigger some mentality deep in my lizard brain that I can barely control.

What happens when I fall down the rabbit hole

The problem once perceived becomes almost the only thing I can think about. My fingers will keep typing out google searches, my brain will incessantly create possible debugging and problem isolation scenarios, and I’ll be compelled to revisit the issue over and over.

I won’t feel any proper relief until I solve the problem. Sometimes a workaround or ‘hack’ will help me set the issue aside for a while, but I almost always feel compelled to go back and try to make it work ‘the way it is supposed to.”

Even writing this post is almost impossible because I still have an unsolved technical problem on my mind. I’ve got a work-around in place, but I know it isn’t working ‘as designed.’ And my stupid brain keeps going over and over possible corrective or debugging scenarios that I could be trying. This is true even though I have spent probably 20 hours trying to resolve this issue over the past two days.

The bad side of my dogged pursuit

The downsides are obvious. I can’t concentrate on other important things like my social obligations. When I’m not actively working on the problem I am distracted and curt with people. Completing basic daily chores becomes incredibly frustrating as they are interfering with My Work™.

And I am even worse when I’m fully engaged in solving the issue. My need to focus becomes overwhelming as I navigate debugging and trying to uncover possible corrections. People, noises, the need to eat or go to the bathroom: everything gets in the way and is growled at to various degrees.

The good side

The primary ‘goodness’ for myself that comes out of my behaviour is that I can solve problems that are considered ‘unsolvable’ by others. This is tremendously satisfying when I finally reach that goal. The disordered or faulty becomes clear, functional, and obedient to its purpose.

I suspect that dopamine rush I get when a problem is finally resolved is a big part of why I find it so hard to shut down my behaviour. And it is so deeply bonded in my psyche that it actually physically and emotionally ‘hurts’ when I do.

Being able to solve the ‘unsolvable’ has also been a foundational part of my professional life. It is often not recognized by the business folks, though. They look at what the ‘packaging’ (documentation, marketing materials) says for a particular technology and just assume that is the ‘truth’.

In my career there are many times that I fought tooth and nail to turn the very often broken and messy reality of complex technology into something closer to the fiction the documentation often portrays. That was sometimes recognized by the business and kept me employed for many years.

Conclusion

What is actually ‘wrong’ with my often unhealthy tenacity? Is it some variety of obsessive compulsive disorder? Should it be treated?

I’m quite sure that I’m mentally ‘broken’ in a lot of ways like most people are. I have developed a few beneficial techniques to ‘slow my roll’ down the inevitable technical rabbit holes. It isn’t easy or comfortable, but I can do it well enough to avoid completely alienating friends and family.

But I have never had much success in stopping my behaviour completely. I don’t think I really want to, either: I honestly love solving difficult problems, and my aberrant behaviour is the only way I’ve found that I can do so.

Sorry, but I have to get back to work on that OS boot problem… it won’t fix itself, dontcha know.