Reactive or Proactive?
As with many others, I grew up in an environment of financial instability from my early teens up till I became financially independent, around 21-22 years old. When you’re a kid growing up in an environment like that you often tend to think “what could I’ve done to prevent that?”
Generally, you cultivate a proactive set of tools. You cultivate your mind to experience life like that, to a certain extent.
I was always that kid. I abandoned my studies because “I needed money and I had better things to do with my time than study with their own pace.”.
This is partially true.
I learnt to be proactive. To plan, anticipate, grind and succeed. A positive feedback loop is the best way to build confidence, which is a great asset to have.
However there is such a thing as over-preparing. If an animal prepares too much about winter, it’ll probably die in the summer.
There’s also the notion of over-preparing in programming.
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil”
Being proactive in software is, in my opinion, a bad thing. As in life, software programs aim to solve the problem at hand, with the most efficient way. The moment you are anticipating a specific change, rather than change in general, you are not efficient enough.
Now software is lifeless. It does not complain.
Our own software though does. Each moment we overprepare for something, even if our anticipation of it proves to be true, our reward system says “Hey, you called that! Take some cookies.” However, I can clearly identify in my mind that there’s a piece of software that hates waste. It raises my cortisol levels as long as there’s unused stuff, or overoptimized stuff etc. I can feel the waste. However this conflicts with my experience that says “be proactive, it’s the way to succeed”.
Recently I heard the quote that “fear often dresses as preparation or professionalism. Ideas tend to die before they even take breath when people tend to prepare too much or try to be ‘more professional’ in relation to some vague standard in their minds.
I don’t think that being proactive is a healthy way of living life, at least for me.
In programming there are also reactive systems. Systems that do execute specific orders of instruction after specific events occur.
Today, 2 people stopped me in the street, asking me for instructions on how to get to a location in the year 2026. After that I ordered some food and the order came wrong, but it was still delicious.
I did not plan for those things. I did not anticipate them. I did not prepare for them.
The fun thing is that when I observe my mind and body when reacting to stuff in comparison to when I’m living proactively, I find that I’m more calm, more present and more content.
Being proactive is also kind of a power trip. You learn to impose your will upon the world but this is not experiencing the world for me.
I’d like to live a life in which I let things come as they come and pass through me. I don’t want to go after things let alone anticipate them.
I’d like for years to come and pass as if nothing happened. I’d like to let life be and let myself flow with it.
I’d like to be no one so that I can be.