Recently, I started a new job with a vague and fancy title. I am a Process Architect, specifically a Business Process Architect. Now, as titles go, I understand how pompous and jargon-y it is. I have worked in IT and IT-adjacent fields for over 15 years, and I know that the words we use – that any profession uses – to describe our field [and the world] are terribly problematic. “Jargon,” is a pejorative term for in-crowd language. It is a word leveled by outsiders to say to insiders, “your words are stupid because they deny others entry to your magisterium of knowledge and that hurts my feelings so I am mocking you.” Hurt people hurt people. But jargon and any specialized vocabulary also hurt the people who use it because over time it comes to define the horizon of possibility, it describes and encapsulates in language the dominant paradigms of a discipline. That makes the thinking of that discipline rigid, which is to say not resilient or adaptable, and therefore structurally at risk.
My late grandfather always wanted me to be an Architect, well here I am, Gramps. The things about my brain that would have made me a good, real architect are also at play in what will eventually make me a good process architect. I see the logical conclusions of the things that people and machines do – the processes – as solid things like walls and stairwells and foundations. So in the way an engineer can look at the structure of a building and say that it is unsound [or susceptible to earthquakes or high winds, as an example], I can look at a body of procedures [lets say the various permutations of how a customer service agent works with an end user to troubleshoot a technical issue] and see how they succeed or fail to produce their intended outcome. I can’t put that on my resume as it turns out, but I have tried. It ends up sounding about as specific as something like “communication skills” does. I hate the term “communication skills” because – as with many things – if you don’t already know how to do that then you don’t know what it is. It is a term that can’t teach you anything other than your own ignorance. At least in our current resume parsing AI milieu, “communication skills” means something, but terms like “systems intuition,” or “preternatural pattern recognition,” and “process architecture,” don’t really [not yet?]. This is because, as far as I can tell, almost no one can do this thing that I can do and that means that they don’t believe in it. People have been not believing my “systems intuition” for my entire life and yet, like clockwork I have watched the things I have said about systems constantly come true.
People around me have a sort of amnesia about this that boarders on the gaslight-y, but it is just my lot in life. It’s “ok.” These days I acutely feel as though my lived experience and therefore my wisdom exist in some sort of Bermuda Triangle of other people’s perceptual blindness. This is to say, the things that I am most interested in communicating to people – the things I see as my unique contributions to the world – are unbelievable to other people.
The thing about “overthinking” everything is that it’s cumulative, perhaps even exponential. Every single day since I was about 4 years old I suspect that I have been doing about 40-140% more thinking – calculating, ruminating, processing – than the average person. That sounds made up and I am not sure it isn’t [those numbers aren’t real, I can’t measure them, though some studies and Harvard Business Review articles use numbers like these], but keep following me. Let’s say my brain was an actual computer [it isn’t]. What I am saying here is that with the same amount of ambient data out there for me to crunch as anyone else, my brain’s processor processes it faster [say 40-140% faster] than the average brain’s processor. That sort of makes me think that now, at the age of 40, I have done enough thinking to have the functional wisdom of an average 56 – 96-year-old person. It’s quite a range because, again, these numbers aren’t real and I have no idea what “average” processing bandwidth is, but I can tell you I sure know what normal processing is [I have a very large sample size], and that is not what is going on over here in this brain.
Also, I suspect that wisdom is more an exponential growth than a linear growth thing. I have this “problem” where I constantly seek out new information. I am not dealing with the ambient data that most other people would be. So the more I download into my head [hundreds of pages a day on dozens of topics] the more all that information crashes into itself causing more and more patterns to precipitate out of the larger “chaotic” mess of data. Not all patterns are real or mean anything – some of them are just hallucinations – as the AI folks say [or maybe they are artifacts or spandrels]. Still, it is sort of staggering how often I have already thought a thing that I end up having like a verbatim conversation with someone about. It happens almost continuously in my daily existence. Because my mental simulations of reality so often mimic reality, now that I am older and my memory is not as good as it used to be, I sometimes can’t remember if a thing I think happened only happened in-my-head-in-the-past or happened in-reality-in-the-past. I live in a lot of parallel universes. I live in the multiverse. I get a lot of migraines. It’s sort of lonely? Hey man, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle: be kind.
For about 3 years, I have struggled to write this basic truth of my life on my blog and every time I have started I copied it into my super-secret writing folder [that place is WILD] and cut it from here. This is because it feels like it reads like, a) nonsense, b) arrogance, c) insanity. What am I trying to say here? I’m smarter than you and it’s hard for me? I might be a true oracle on earth but I use that power to be a mid-level bureaucrat [thanks late capitalism]? I’m right and it doesn’t matter because no one will ever believe me? When I was in college I had this vague sense that I might die one day from being right and not believed. I called it Terminal Cassandra Syndrome and I tried to make it a joke because it seemed like the sort of thing that other people desperately wanted to laugh at since if it wasn’t a joke then what did it mean. Even now people will say to me, “You know, I never thought about it that way, but you’re right,” and I respond, “yeah, it’s my life’s curse.” And they laugh?!?! Ya’ll, this is the hardest thing.
I’m only writing about this now because of a few things:
- the new job and the concomitant epistemological spiral of trying to figure out how I can explain to people how to fix thousands of businesses processes that my brain has already fixed and the grief over all the things I will not be allowed to fix because of Cassandra Syndrome and also actual limits of time, plus the anxiety of needing to “deliver” tangible solutions, [a whole mood]
- I’m having a WICKED and VENGEFUL Scorpio season
- my 9th grade son’s favorite teacher [earth and space science] committed suicide this week and the first thing he said to me about it, other than that he was “fine,” was that he was more worried about his peers than himself which made me concerned that he was going to struggle to process his grief, as he [and I] often struggle to process or even be aware of our internal emotional and physical states
- I write CONSTANTLY but I post rarely because I fear that my writing is weird,1 doesn’t make sense, and also like it makes me seem like I am maybe not an internally consistent personality [and that is something we “require” of people even though it is a total illusion and we punish people in various ways for failing to pull it off], but I want to connect with people and feel like writing is a big part of how I do that
I wish I could call this “a lot,” but it’s pretty standard. I still read the news today [it was mostly bad], I still got out of bed and walked the dog. I will still take my daughter to see the film version of Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour and probably also have coffee with the church ladies and maybe even plant some bulbs. I, in fact, have only had time to write about this standard “a lot” experience because it is Veteran’s Day Observed and I am a State Employee. That means that, despite all of the above, today is a “good” day. Actually, today is a good day, I don’t think I need the air quotes. They [the wise natives of the internet who leverage the collective unconscious to generate the memes] have often said, “adulthood is saying, ‘but after this week things will slow down a bit’ over and over until you die.” I have discovered a new place on the other side of adulthood where, with every breath and every to-do checked off, you no longer expect that things will slow down. This is just the speed of your life. Accept it. It’s a process. It’s how you are freed from the cycle of suffering.
Process.
Apparently it comes to us from French from Latin, where there were both a noun and verb form [as we have in English]. The verb form appears to be older comes from procedere where “pro-“ is “forward,” and “cedere” is “to go.” The noun form comes from processus, “progression, course,” or if understood from the verb form, “a going forward.” I don’t really know Latin, I’m not any sort of expert there, possibly I am wrong about all of this. In recent years, since reading Temple Grandin, I have encountered the frequency illusion of people suddenly saying, “I’m a visual thinker” that I am certain I would have written off as a metaphor and ignored, were I not attuned to the idea of “thinking in pictures.” When I started reading about the internal experience of fellow autists many of them describe the literal, visual way that words express in their mind’s eye so that idioms and figurative speech can be confusing. Sort of like hearing the phrase “mind’s eye” and seeing a literal floating eyeball inside a skull [incidentally this happens to me every time I encounter this phrase, so it is deeply ironic that I would have thought “visual thinking” was a metaphor, or rather it’s just a sad symptom of the ways that my own metacognition is a product of the neurotypical gaze, but whatever]. See also, Beholder.
When I encounter the words “process, progression, course” what I see in my mind’s eye is actually the diagram they show you in 9th grade Science of the wobble of the Earth’s Axis. It’s “funny” to me that the diagram in my head is actually an illustration of the phenomenon of precession [which incidentally includes the same root “cedere” or “to go,” but the opposite prefix, “pre-“ meaning, “before” as opposed to the “forward” of “pro-”]. I think what does creates the image is the word “course,” as in something set on its course, like the earth or a gyroscope or – in truth – any process that is started in the vague direction of “forward.” The Clockwork Universe.
I feel like we think of moving forward in a “progress” sort of way: an advance. And we think of advancing and progressing and moving forward as both inherently good and inevitable things. But that is a teleological assumption. Moving forward is really only a statement of what is behind you, not that there is anything meaningful about the direction you’re going in. I struggle with this A LOT in my work because as I am designing a process, or redesigning a process, there is a teleos [an “end”] in mind. And always, always, the people who tell me what the end is have not thought [probably even 20%] as much about it as I have. Our end goal, our future state, is achieving greater efficiency in business processes [!]. This sometimes feels like the Final Solution for workers to me. I have some guilt about being a person who assists in the automation of human tasks for greater efficiency because, again, for what end? It is not as though once we have automated all the tasks we will truly provide good lives for all the people who have been replaced by my super efficient processes, because capitalism. It doesn’t have to be that way, I sometimes live in a parallel universe where people are just taken care of because we share benefits of the collective unspooling of labor for survival. I never mistake that strand for this one. And because I mostly don’t live there I often wonder what on earth all our progress and efficiency is for.
I would like to fix a larger process than say IT Portfolio Management [that’s a thing – look it up], but the people in charge of those bigger processes don’t understand the logical conclusions of them – or worse they really do – so they would never let me do that work [and they say people don’t want to work anymore!]. It is also possible that I would overheat my processor and just die trying to do a thing like that. I try to console myself with the enormity of the Great Process that likely leads to the heat death of the universe [which I get some people don’t want to believe in, but also “Entropic Exhaustion” is probably my new band name]. It reminds me that, truly, this progression and this course are not doing anything other than moving in a direction and that direction is pretty random, it lacks a goal. So many things can, and will, happen that I can’t predict. Thank god. It is comforting to know that there is no obligation that comes with my processing speed, that there is nothing that I must do. We are not headed in a direction for a reason, we are just headed in a direction. I’m just doing my part as an information system to reduce entropy, even if I don’t know why. We are going forward. I don’t need to have grief because we invented agriculture and manufacturing and nuclear power and AI, or act like we should have not gone forward, like we should have stopped somewhere in an “ideal” eternal state or that we will eventually. That isn’t how linear time works.
We are just in the flow of time, moving forward, where every forward eventually is behind us.
- I don’t think I have ADHD, not really, but recently I encountered a meme that was basically like “living with someone with ADHD is like microdosing wikipedia.” As the kids say: It me. As you may note above, I have a lot of links in my post. I had a therapist in high school tell me that I communicated a lot parenthetically. I find that conveying my ideas in the narrative format of writing is perfectly fine [I can be a very good traditional, narrative-style writer, though I would not say this is my best work] but the real magic happens in the allusions. Poetry does this well, but I am a shitty poet, so instead, my real form is the parenthetical. I want to tell you the thing, but I want to tell you all the turtles under that thing, hidden in the narrative. God bless hypertext and the new multi-dimensional forms of writing we can create on the Internet! You are free to ignore the hypertext, but I think they make it better, and I promise that all the open tabs do form a cohesive probability cloud of a narrative. ↩︎
The Oracle of Z 