A bit of a random thought. Coming to mind while considering a personal matter / reviewing a bug in my thought process.

While I’m not an engineer or ‘coding type person’ myself, I’ve worked with enough people that have that mindset, and have develop ways of understanding that seem beneficial and effective. Metaphorically at least.

The mind as a legacy code base: At times we can be distracted. We can find it hard to focus on what we need to focus on. We might even start on some negative reflections, or destructive trains of thought.

What if these issues are just the result of a few lines of code? Tiny programs, or background tasks, or scripts that were written into our brains long ago, and that no longer function as they should? Or perhaps they’re even completely unnecessary now, but running still and constantly and invisibly clashing.

Worse yet, what about malicious software? Ideas installed without clearly thinking or properly considering the origin or risk.

They’re all just lines of code in our head. They all take processing power. They initiate unhelpful background logic loops, seeking for resolution. They could be running within our main operating system (loaded and updated throughout childhood), or inside recent applications, installed for education or professional purposes.

We carry on daily, assuming everything is fine and running optimally as it should, but we neglect to recognise that there’s no virus software in our heads. No bug fixes updated overnight (other than low-level dreams, trying to defragment entire busy days one at a time).

But in our busy lives, there’s very little time to pause, sit down, and calmly review a million lines of legacy code. We just carry on. Running slow from time to time. Crashing occasionally if we’re unlucky. And envying younger machines with newer versions of childhood OS, and less (for now) redundant and conflicting experience.

Weekends, holidays, and breaks are opportunities to maybe address some of this. As are thoughtful conversations with friends. Although, all these situations risk sharing the same bugs and issues. Or, introducing entirely new ones.

Therapy then is the closest we get to virus software and bug fixes. The only practical opportunity to address the legacy code base deeply enough to find and replace particularly unhelpful lines of thought.

Failing these opportunities though, we can also just crack on. Write more code with hope that things just resolve themselves, all the while claiming that issues aren’t bugs: They’re features. 🤔