What's The End Goal?

I thought I’d make this post since it’s been 30 days since I’ve started this design engineering journey and now there’s no turning back. I want to lay out some thoughts as to what the end goal is for myself (for now) and what my vision looks like.

I want to build beautiful things. Things that add a particular beauty to the world that is 1:1 mine while also reflecting a greater virtue of care. The quotes “Any job worth doing is worth doing well” and “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in” both encapsulate what I’m going after on a fundamental level. I’ve always cared about the details, the smaller things. Every nook and cranny matters. I remember designing my Shopify page a few years ago for my clothing brand and being frustrated I wasn’t technical enough to truly act on my vision. I remember seeing people and brands with so many more resources than me just producing terrible, awful, inconsiderate things that were so deprived of care. Or maybe it wasn’t a lack of care but a lack of taste. What’s the difference? Both involve the attention mechanism, taste is just care reified in a certain manner.

What I’m getting at is that I was (and still am) frustrated that these people with so many more resources and such big audiences seemed to not have the virtue of care. It’s a lack of consideration for Us, for the users, for the world. Why should we be forced to consume something that is so half-assed, produced in a container with no taste?

My end goal is maximizing slack by being the best at care, design, and technical ability. I want to inspire and be inspired, and have the abilities to act on a vision with as much slack as possible to create beautiful things. I want to see something like a poster or a video or a film that will bring up a vision that I can then act on and translate to something like software design because I do have the necessary skills. Aesthetics have always mattered to me, it’s only now that I can understand why exactly they matter and how to attend to them in a caring and effective manner. Software will continue to eat the world, and if we’re not careful, we will end up in a world of ugliness that is a container of evil.