When I return to work on Monday I’ll have two days before I go on study leave. Seven days after that, I’m just on annual leave. We’re in the home stretch.

This week I’ve been struggling with decisions other people made. They were made with the best of intentions and there’s no blame here, but decisions were made for reasons that I can’t find and can’t reasonably guess at. So now I’m stuck unpicking the results of these decisions, and wondering why people don’t write them down.

I think we all assume that we will understand the context in the future, and that other people will understand the context too. But I think – after more than five years of writing about what I’m doing (apparently season 2 was back in 2018, and that doesn’t count the time I spent blogging at university, which started in 2012, and then there was that weird segue into Welcome to Night Vale fanfiction) – that there’s also resistance to writing things down because:

• someone can tell you that you’re making the wrong decision (and they might be right)
• someone impacted by that decision will one day come and point out that your assumptions at the time were faulty (and they might be right)

If you make decisions and never document them, then you can never be told you’re wrong. And that gives you a certain power, and a certain freedom from responsibility. I understand that urge, but I think it’s wrong. I think it’s wrong and I’d like to know how to convince people that writing down what you felt at the time might help people coming after you to understand why you did it.

I say this because I feel this resistance as I write thing down, both for work and in my personal life. I’ve spent a chunk of this week writing out a plan, and not implementing the plan. By writing out the plan, colleagues have been able to see what I’m planning and then disagreed with it. I’ve had to defend my approach, and in doing so, I’ve had to make it better. It’s maddening. It’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.

If we don’t expose our thinking to others – if we can’t find the courage to be brave – then we will be poorer for it. We won’t get any better, any wiser, and more full of love if we are convinced that we’ll be attacked for what we think.

People are always kinder than I expect, and it frustrates me that it surprises me anew every time.

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I’ve busted my phone. I dropped it on something pointy and the screen has shattered into so, so many pieces. And what I have now is a supercomputer armed with fifteen to sixteen thin slices of glass.

Alice Fraser has a joke: that one day computers (or perhaps the capitalists who own the computing) will no longer be satisfied merely with our attention, and sending an email will requiring whispering a shameful secret into the microphone of your phone. Which is funny, until I realise scrolling social media now risks causing me physical scarring, rather than just the regular psychological kind. Maybe she’s right, except it’s blood, not secrets, that they’ll demand. Quite what a robot might do with blood is beyond me, but I feel like it can’t be great. Not when it’s already got my fingerprints.

Because I’m that guy, the phone I’ve broken is a Fairphone. And that means I can buy a new display, and replace my broken screen, and keep using my phone. It’ll probably only last another couple of years, because every Android security update reduces its speed by what feels like 50%¹. Nonetheless, I’ve had it since 2019, so if I can make it last until 2024 I can be unbearably smug about my green credentials. Or set fire to Russel Brand. I think that’s the exchange rate.

1. estimated, based on my frustration ↩︎