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Published May 7th, 2026
There’s a particular discomfort that I know I’m not alone i
And it manifests in many different wa
It’s the fear of being incomple
Forgetting a slide in a presentat
Or turning in a draft work product with embarassing shorthand instead of a polished end produc
Leaving out punctuation or letters, missing the mark on an email addre
The urge to preemptively self-correct or anticipate every misinterpretatio
I say this with the hope that you’ll read this and find relief.
None of us are complete and never will be. Not in utero, life, or death. There is no final stroke of the brush.
You won’t be complete and you never will be, and that’s good.
Some of my favorite logic problems and thinking-traps to explore are those around recursive epistemology, the problem of the criterion, the Münchhausen Trilemma, or the extreme end of reflective equilibrium.
It’s the learned behavior to question the world around you that fuels curiosity. It’s rewarded for most things. And it’s hard to turn off that urge to know the bottom line answer.
I have good news. Here it is.
There is no bottom line answer. You won’t find it. You will always be able to ask another question. You don’t have to keep asking the questions. There’s the good enough answer, then there’s the theater of seeking more than you need.
I felt the urge to write about this some following my entry on The Great Binary Bujo. It’s similar to this in that at some point, you’re either using the tools to accomplish the goals or you’re optimizing the tools endlessly so much that you aren’t accomplishing goals.
Similarly, in Napping through alarms 💤, it’s the acceptance that I am just a human that needs sleep. Wow!
And another, DIY Job Search Engine - Tax Records with GIS - this is a weird one for me. It’s a blend of seeking a perfect outcome and accepting good enough. This was a extremely difficult project to put down. I’d say it was fun to work on, but a very easy focus point given how interesting the topic is. It was uncomfortable to stop and start using the tool before it was “ready for production.” I think this opens up another topic I’d like to explore in the future, outlines vs tutorials - basically, why I prefer to post the concepts of projects rather than my code or work product itself for public use. Another area that could be good - it’s important to show the website isn’t done. I’m thinking this would be tied to this overall ethos, but focus on the vulnerability that comes with showing 404 errors and WIP links.
It’s okay to be just okay, no one does or should expect your minimums to be above and beyond - that is a terrible thing to instill into someone. If your minimum standard is always above and beyond, then when you go above and beyond they only see you doing the bare minimum.