Photo: Bokeh / Tomedia. Ancient Marble Bust in Shadow.
I am in two minds about my ego at the moment, which is a strange thing to say when I’ve spent most of the past six years convinced I’m not good enough at anything I do.
People see what I build. They compliment it. There is work sitting in front of me that I can point to and say, yes, I did that. Somehow very little of this seems to make its way into the bit of my brain responsible for deciding whether I am a failure. That bit apparently has its own information supply, and it is very committed to it.
Then I work with someone who should understand what I’m doing, and they don’t. I explain a fairly basic task. It doesn’t translate into something they can do. They have more education, more years in the industry, more of the things I assume should make them better at this than me.
And suddenly I am the bee’s knees.
This is the problem. I seem to skip the fairly reasonable position of being good at my job and go straight from doubting everything I do to letting somebody else’s struggle feed my ego. I don’t like either extreme, and I don’t particularly like admitting the second one.
Apparently there is a middle ground
I grew up being very self-critical. Everything I did could have been better, which sounds useful until you realise you can apply it to absolutely everything and never give yourself credit for finishing anything.
I have also dealt with schizophrenia and OCD growing up. I don’t know how much of my current thinking belongs to that history, or whether I’m trying to find an explanation for something I haven’t properly understood yet. When I recorded the voice note behind this, very late at night, I was wondering about all sorts of possibilities. I don’t have a diagnosis that explains this particular swing, and I’m not going to invent one here.
What I can describe is the experience. I can look at the work I’ve done and still feel incapable. I can also look at a task somebody else cannot do and become far too impressed with myself. Neither reaction seems particularly proportionate to the thing that happened.
Being held accountable is good. I need that. If I’m wrong, I want someone to tell me I’m wrong, and if I haven’t done something properly, I need to fix it. The difficulty is that criticism can land in a brain already prepared to treat one mistake as evidence against everything else. Meanwhile, being right can produce the complete opposite overreaction.
I would quite like to be able to receive information without immediately turning it into a verdict on my entire existence.
They should know this
I’m 26. I’ve worked with people in their thirties and forties who, on paper, should know more about the same industry than I do. This happened in previous jobs and it keeps happening. Sometimes I give someone a piece of work that seems basic to me, and the understanding I expected simply isn’t there.
That does concern me. I don’t think I have to pretend it doesn’t in order to be humble. If somebody’s job depends on understanding a thing, and they cannot explain or do that thing, we have a practical problem. The work still needs doing.
But I also catch myself making a much bigger claim than the situation supports. Being better at this task becomes being smarter than this person. Their age becomes something I use to make the comparison feel more impressive. Their education becomes another reason I should apparently be amazed at myself.
I know for a fact that I am not the smartest man alive. I don’t particularly want to be. There are plenty of areas where I lack understanding, and socially and emotionally I can struggle with things that other people seem to manage quite naturally. I know this about myself, yet I can still forget it remarkably quickly when I’m frustrated at work.
I think of knowledge as a rolling spectrum of information. People pick up different things, use different things and forget different things. Even in the same industry, that distribution is going to be uneven. I can reasonably expect somebody to know the fundamentals of their job without treating every gap as a ranking of our value as people.
Knowing that doesn’t mean I always behave as though I know it. That’s why I’m writing this.
I keep checking whether I can still do the work
AI makes this more uncomfortable because I am offloading too much to it myself.
Every so often, when I get the opportunity, I take a basic coding task and check whether I could still do it by hand. Can I explain what is happening? Can I make the change without handing the whole problem away? So far, the answer is yes, which is good. I’m not fully dim-witted yet.
Then I see people accept something they cannot explain, and I get worried. I want to know whether there is still understanding underneath the output. A completed piece of code tells me that code exists. I still need to know whether the person responsible for it can recognise when it is wrong.
The irritating part is that this concern can be completely reasonable while my reaction to it becomes egotistical. I can be right that a task hasn’t been understood and wrong about what that entitles me to think of the person doing it.
And because I use AI heavily, I have to keep applying the same question to myself. Otherwise I am taking the convenient part of the tool, ignoring my own dependence on it, and then using somebody else’s dependence as evidence of my superiority. That would be a fairly spectacular lack of self-awareness.
I would like the evidence to count
I don’t want to fix my ego by going back to believing I’m useless. I’ve spent enough time there already. There is something exhausting about repeatedly proving to yourself that you can do the work and then finding that the feeling of failure has survived the evidence again.
I want to be able to say I’m good at what I do and let that sentence stand. I want to be able to make a mistake without deciding the whole thing was a fluke. And when somebody else doesn’t understand something, I want to deal with the missing understanding instead of using it to temporarily feel better about myself.
I haven’t worked out how to make that middle ground feel normal yet. For now, I can keep checking my own work, accept being held accountable, and try to let a compliment count without needing somebody else’s failure to back it up.