Avner Shanan

Questions I Live With

I recently read a post on “Living Questions” that got me thinking about the questions that I keep returning to. I’ve been looking for an excuse to write something here, and this felt like a good one, especially since we’re more than halfway through Blaugust and I would like to keep up my nominal participation by publishing at least one post this month¹.

Here’s a list in case you want to jump ahead to them:

• What stories can infrastructure tell us?
• How can I better manage my ADHD?
• How can I make a difference?
• What problems am I approaching with an incorrect/unhelpful framing? How do you find a more useful framing for a situation or problem?
• How do I be more deliberate about the way I use my energy/capacity/focus?
• How can I use the data I’ve collected to improve my life? What can it tell me about my health, both physical and mental?

My Questions Practice

I first started taking a more structured approach to tracking the questions in my life while reading Visakan Veerasamy’s Introspect, a meme-y self-help book that I quite liked but which may not be everyone’s cup of tea. One piece of advice he gives is to “[m]ake lists of all the questions you can think of.” He’s big on lists, and this isn’t the only one he recommends making (nor the only one I made while reading that book). I have found it somewhat useful, mostly as a way to intermittently dump everything that’s filling my brain up onto the page in a way that I can build on. Not all of the questions that get put down this way get turned into their own page in my notes, but since I use notetaking software that has backlinks that isn’t a problem. I usually reference questions once or twice to let evidence that they’re useful or interesting enough to me build up before I give them their own page.

My Questions (A Selection)

What stories can infrastructure tell us?

I’m a software engineer by trade and a tinkerer at heart, so I am always excited when I get to peek “under the hood” of systems that aren’t normally exposed. I also get a kick from doing a bit of my own mental reverse engineering, trying to figure out why something was designed a certain way, what constraints were at play, what problems the designers were trying to solve. An example: my wife likes to tell the story that on our honeymoon in Italy, the single thing I took the most pictures of was the garbage boats in Venice. It hadn’t occurred to me to consider how they got rid of the garbage until I saw the garbage workers hooking up a dumpster to this garbage boat’s little crane. A garbage boat! With a crane! Of course Venice has garbage boats, they have canals instead of alleys. The built environment has tons of juicy narrative nuggets like this once you learn to look for them.

How can I better manage my ADHD?

A question I will be answering for the rest of my life, I’m sure. I wrote a post full of ADHD resources last year. In addition to the resources listed there I have a lot of work to do as a late-diagnosed ADHDer: replacing maladaptive coping mechanisms, building up skills, and learning to accept that there is a certain amount of overhead to running my life that is unavoidable, to name a few.

How can I make a difference?

For me this question is rooted in the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, which literally means “repairing the world.” My sense of justice and my understanding that I have a part to play in enacting it goes back just about as far as I can remember. The kind of difference that I can make, the size and scope of action I’m willing (or able) to undertake, and the focus of my energy have all changed over the years and I expect they will continue to do so. In some regards this question isn’t a single question but a question-fractal (or maybe a lattice? something geometric and mindbending, certainly). The more you dig in, the more there is to learn and do.

What problems am I approaching with an incorrect/unhelpful framing? How do you find a more useful framing for a situation or problem?

This dovetails nicely with the previous question. One way to make a difference is to be more effective, and one way to do that is to make sure you’re framing your problems correctly. Sometimes all it takes is a shift in framing to find a solution. This practice of listing out my questions so that I can better articulate and manipulate them is also part of how I approach answering this question around framing. It’s much easier to take a step back from an issue and investigate your framing of it when you’ve spent time articulating it explicitly “on paper” rather than just in your head. This can be an extremely powerful metacognitive tool if you put in the work.

How do I be more deliberate about the way I use my energy/capacity/focus?

This is part of managing my ADHD but also the health issues I’ve had in the last few years. When you have less energy it pays to be more deliberate about how you’re using it, and that’s not something I’ve always been very good at it in my personal life.

How can I use the data I’ve collected to improve my life? What can it tell me about my health, both physical and mental?

It makes me a bit uncomfotrable to admit, but I’ve become a bit of a digital hoarder. I have a bit of love/hate relationship with tech (leaning much more towards the latter these days, as is true I think for many others in the industry), so its’ not unusual for me to both have and use wearable devices that generate and store lots of very personal data, and also to feel like I can’t trust the companies that are storing all of that data. In order to square the circle of these two opposing views, I export this data on a semi-regular basis, attempting to make my data more concretely mine both by being in direct possession of it as well as by putting it to my own unique uses beyond those dictated by quarterly KPIs.

All this was true before the health issues of the last few years and it’s become even more relevant since. In fact, this has come up on the blog before, when I posted about publishing my first python package. That package, visible-to-sqlite (GitHub), is part of an answer to these questions, part of my system for exporting data from various apps and converting them into sqlite databases so that I can explore them with Datasette.