If you’re trying to learn something new, you might consider re-calibrating your frustration sensitivity.
For the sweaty information theorists, it’s a little like perplexity. You could think of it as a meter: how far you are from the path that you’d like to follow? How far you are from familiarity? (That’s perplexity.)
You’re at the stove again. The pan’s hotter than your last relationship, which is saying something. Eggs hit the surface, die instantly, their sizzle a mocking eulogy. Three times now, you’ve let frustration hijack the stove, cranked the heat to “fuck it,” and turned breakfast into a pyre.
The eggs don’t burn themselves, champ. You burn them.
Are you a moron because you’ve incinerated three eggs? Three wobbly ovoids that could’ve powered your morning stroll, a dollar between them? You lose more every hour with your hindsighted taste in equities.
Maybe you feel like a moron because you’ve failed to learn. Each time you burned the egg, each time you heard a dry crackle from the pan and felt your blood pressure rising, you could have caught yourself and adjusted your strategy.
It’s the difference between a chef and a arsonist. You? You’re the latter. You’ve confused “trying harder” with “turning the burner up,” like effort’s a fucking gas pedal. Newsflash: frustration isn’t fuel. It’s the warning light you’ve ignored until the engine’s smoking.
Some kinds of frustration feel more like a siren blaring a warning: you’re on a dead end. It’s not always clear when to heed that horn and when to plow through, plugging your ears with wax.
Here’s the irony: every time you incinerate an egg, you’re inches from a breakthrough. If you’d dialed the heat back just once — just once — you’d have seen the pattern. The sweet spot. The fragile equilibrium between effort and sanity. But no. You’re allergic to nuance.
You could have switched to the other door, the last straggler left unopened after each of its neighbors swung open to reveal a goat. You could have pondered the rate at which heat conducts within a coagulated protein gel.
But you didn’t; you assumed there was something unconscious, something about the way you cracked the eggs into the pan that you’ll automatically get better at without consciously trying. You didn’t even stop to consider that maybe the muscle memory, the learning ability that taught you to walk, ends at the point where something detaches from your body.
When you’re working with machines, you can’t simply ask, “does this feel right?” You have to consciously analyze the machine, count its axes and parameters, point and call, prompt yourself. It’s the difference between a surgeon and a butcher. You at the stove, burning your eggs? You’re the butcher. Keep the flames high, keep the eggs charcoal.
The choice is yours: adapt, or keep burning.