there was a time when people insisted that their children absolutely had to study.
then it became: school isn’t important, the work you do is.
now, most work is also losing its importance because the boundary of “being able to do it” is disappearing.
so now, what we don’t do increasingly defines us too.
what we consider worth doing, and what we choose not to do even though we could.
“stating values” is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Anyone can have a very proper worldview, manifesto or brand purpose written for them. Most of their lists of values will probably consist of more or less pleasant things: sustainability, freedom, justice, honesty, love…
if the values people claim to stand for are the same, what will make the difference is:
are you sincere? what are you sacrificing to stand by your values? when you have to choose only one of the two, which one do you turn toward?
the things we describe as the deepest are now on the surface.
the visible surface of an idea can be beautiful, purposeful, even lofty and profound. But today, when you go all the way down to its deepest point, what you find is code.
for example, when we want to make a “love app,” we have to describe how it will work.
if you wrote your idea in a vague form like, “I want to make an app that will help people show more love to each other,”
it would first ask you:
what do you mean? between friends, family members or partners?
will there be mutual communication, or will it work more like a personal reminder? and so on.
as you answer these questions, it turns the idea—which even you didn’t fully understand at the beginning—into a specification.
and let’s say the idea reached through these answers is this: “it will help people remember events and dates that matter to one another. Users will be able to record dates and events that are important to them with the person or people they love; the app will remind them on anniversaries or at selected times.”
it is no longer an idea floating in the air. for this specification to work, there need to be user profiles, a way to connect with friends, a private feed shared only between connected people, reminders, pages for entering events and dates, reminders and entries that remind you of themselves again, special things for 5-, 10- and 20-year anniversaries…
the decisions made here, the design principles established, and the things that change during the process are all reflections of an intention shaped by philosophical decisions.
in the end, you say “create the app,” and code—the final link in the chain, but also its “deepest” layer—comes into existence. on the surface, it may look like any other app, but as you go deeper behind it, you find the answer to the question “what is love?” expressed in code.
