A philosophic approach to getting unstuck

In between periods of psyching myself out about stuckness, I’ve been reading a book called “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

I’ve been psyching myself out lately, thinking about one of the most painful scenarios in all of programming: getting stuck. Getting stuck happens more often when I’m working with unfamiliar technology, whether it’s a new codebase or language or library.

There’s no way to anticipate when I’ll get stuck. And I haven’t come up with a surefire way to get unstuck. Imposter syndrome rears its head, and grows particularly I know that being stuck has consequences. Like missing a deadline. And then the problem balloons into something much larger than what it is. 

I used to think this sense of stuckness only happened in technical work. That feeling stuck was simply a disjointedness between my understanding of the problem and the reality. But stuckness is everywhere, even in creative fields. It can appear as writer’s block, second guessing every word even before the pen meets paper. 

In between periods of psyching myself out about stuckness, I’ve been reading a book called “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Published in the 1970s, author Robert M. Persig considers the technological plague that has stayed with us till today –a plague that doesn’t stem from technology itself but our inability understand technology. Our sense defeat in the face of the uninterpretable. It’s my fear of getting stuck, and it’s Persig’s inquiry into why some people would rather never see the inside of a motorcycle.

But stuckness, I am learning, is a mental state more than anything. Persig calls it a domination of “feelings of separateness from what he’s working on.” In philosophical terms: “a duality of subject and object,” which prior to the feeling of stuckness, was not divided at all. This separateness, Persig explains, can come from within or without. 

I’ve found that in technical contexts, this separation comes from without: a seemingly unsolvable problem that exposes the separation. But in creative contexts, the separation comes from within: perhaps a lack of inspiration or more likely, overactive self-editing. Regardless of the source, stuckness can be characterized as the moment all sorts of negative emotions about our work arise: frustration, impatience, self doubt. In the moment of being stuck, we cease to care about the work. The object has temporarily lost its value or quality. 

The way to rekindle the connection to our work requires what Persig calls, gumption. It’s what happens to someone who “connects with Quality,’ who’s “at the front of the train of his own awareness.” In our more contemporary era, one might call this a reframing or a change in perspective. One of the most important factors to sustaining gumption is time. We need to be able to leave the work in order to come back to it with a sense of inner peace. Only then can we let go of the feeling of being stuck. This is hard to do with a deadline, and it is why sustaining care is difficult. In the face of external consequences, we lose sight of the object before us. 

Sadly, there is no way around the deadline. But there are ways to refill our level of gumption more quickly. This may mean getting meticulous about documentation so that you can reference prior decisions more easily. Or it may mean avoiding what Persig calls, “value traps” in which we prematurely think we’re done when we aren’t in fact done. The aim of these solutions is to bring us back to caring, to feeling connected with our work.

The thing that I fear in being stuck is that I can’t move forward. But care about the work itself, rather than the prospect of moving forward, allows us to sit down and examine more closely. It provides the patience to exhaust all possibilities, and the clearheadedness to find another path.