The Code

You were born with the hardware. You do not get to pick it.

Your body. Your baseline temperament. The wiring you showed up with. Some of it upgrades. Most of it does not. Men waste decades filing complaints about their hardware.

The hardware was never the problem.

You are running software you did not write. Code installed by your childhood, your fear, the people who raised you, the environment you happened to land in. Defaults you never chose and never read. And every day it runs, it produces your life.

Upgrade your operating system - rewrite the code

But before you can rewrite it, you have to admit it is broken. Accept your incompetence — plainly, out loud, without the story about why. You cannot debug code you keep defending.

Most men never get there. They protect the program instead of reading it.

And then the thing nobody wants to hear. Code does not do what you meant. It does what you wrote.

Your intentions are comments. They do not execute. You can fill the whole file with what you meant to be, how much you cared, what you were going to do — the machine skips every line of it and runs what is actually there.

Your outputs are the only honest record of your programming.

So go into the code. Find the function that fires every time you get angry. The loop that runs at nine at night when you are tired. The exception you have been swallowing for twenty years.

Rewrite it. Line by line.

Then judge it by what it produces.

"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." — Jean-Paul Sartre