Cerulean Cordillera

I’ve never noticed before, but taking mostly engineering classes sorta trains your brain into thinking only in terms of problems and solutions. As in, what kind of problems are there, which ones need to be solved, and what techniques we can use and how we can solve those problems. Even the background classes, like Electricity and Magnetism, were designed to drill into you “these are the phenomenons you should know and these are the equations you should remember in order to solve the problems you encounter.”

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, if most of your intellectual growth came from an engineering education, everything looks like a problem to design solutions for. Looking at the tree branches swaying in the wind, for instance, makes me think of data structures, on what branches and nodes to store what information and how we can get one place to another quickly. When I force myself to make more natural associations, I think of the wind passing by the branches like how fluid bodies behave, and in turn wonder whether this phenomenon can be exploited in some sort of way.

This gets especially bad when it comes to handling relationships. Often, when people complain about their lives, they’re not looking for any solutions, because they’re perfectly capable at coming up with their own. Instead, they’re just looking for an outlet to let out their frustrations, someone to listen so they can feel understood. But sometimes this engineering thought pattern would immediately trigger the moment someone presents a problem, and even when I am aware and know that I should not let those thoughts come out, already a part of the brain is occupied with processing and doing away those thoughts when they can be used in more constructive ways, like paying attention and actually listening.

What separates engineering from general science is the difference between solving problems and satisfying general curiosity. Scientists are only curious, they want to learn and find out. There is no end goal, and if there is learning, then it is good. Ideally, their minds would wander freely and they would learn whatever it is that they find interesting. It’s basically satisfying a natural urge to just learn more things and be entertained by cool thoughts. In contrast, engineering is usually about an initiative, an end goal to achieve, and sometimes even though the goal seems like something you would want happen, the actual steps involved are really things you have no interest in. So you’re forced to plough through things you don’t like while keeping faith that it will all pay off in the end. But this is not guaranteed either, especially if you were vague about the relationship between the goal and yourself in the first place.

If I play the violin, science is like playing whatever I want, however I want to. Engineering is like honing my techniques repeatedly through exercises in the hope of mastering some pieces I was tackling. If I try to make myself into a better person, science is like just look at myself, try different things, and see what happens. Engineering is like designing specific practices (e.g. a specific plan to replace a bad habit) and follow through while recording progress towards the end goal. If I were to blog, science is like just writing anything I want on my blog whenever inspiration hits, while engineering is more like planning and designing the blog to fit a particular audience and generate a particular revenue figure.

It’s basically being carefree versus being serious. Of course, this isn’t to say that science as a discipline is carefree. A “discipline” by definition cannot be total freedom, and since the field is a human system, I’m sure there are a lot of limitations and inefficiencies that limits what is acceptable. But this does make me think of another very confusing question:

Look at all the life advice out there, a lot of it is engineering advice. You see this in most self help books or “how to” websites. But these advice make me imagine that the best person would be this highly disciplined, overly serious person who is 100% focused on the goal, overcoming any adversity that comes his way, getting past great disappointment and grief, and continues going, never giving up.

But then, there is such a thing as trying too hard. And when you’re trying too hard, you actually make backwards progress, usually because you burn out due to human limitations, or because trying too hard is very socially unattractive, so it sets you back if your goal is anything social-related. In any case, it’s not good to be overly serious. Heck, it seems that the optimum would be to be both serious and not serious at the same time. Now all I have to say to that is… WTF?

And here, an engineered approach just doens’t work because you can’t be serious about achieving the state of not serious. I guess there needs to be some balance, and that balance point is very difficult to find.