It’s been very interesting for me to read my post from previous year about Life, productivity, and faith. After almost a year my situation has changed a bit (although I’d prefer it to change more, in a sense), so I thought I’d like to share some of my views.
First things first: after giving some more thought to the relation between salvation and love, I guess a correction is necessary. While catchy, my idea was probably wrong after all. Of course, thoughts about salvation and/or damnation (depending on one’s attitude) can be huge motivators for practicing love. But I suppose I didn’t make this obvious enough: doing everything to get to heaven is much more than a way to motivate you – this is basically the goal, period. And these days I think (though still far from being sure that I’m 100% right) that the two are basically one and the same thing. My current answer to the objection of “thinking about getting to heaven is egotistic” would be that it’s not only because of you. It’s also because that’s where those who love you want you to be – they want to meet you there. (All that remembering that the “where” is not in a sense of a physical place.) And the first of those is God himself, obviosly.
With that explained, let me get to the main point of today’s post. I’ve been reading a bit about minimalism recently, and I am more and more tempted to introduce some minimalist changes to my life. (This can be even seen in my previous post, though it turned out to be more difficult than I thought – or rather, I turned out to be more procrastinating on that than I thought.) Of course, minimalism is not really a new idea – you can actually find it in the Gospels and in the Church’s teaching (which is not a surprise at all, of course). The new thing (at least for me) are some associations I came upon lately.
It seems that there are some well-known software engineering principles which seem to apply very well to life in general. It was kind of funny for me, but now that I think of it, it should not be surprising at all. Software enginering is about managing complex systems, and human life is surely a complex system, so some common generalizations are to be expected. The first one that comes to mind is probably YAGNI. Enough said – I don’t have a lot to add to it, really. Another one is KISS.
Of course, as with many (if not all) analogies, this one is probably not perfect, and I’m not trying to say that blindly following principles from one field in another one is necessarily a good idea. (Worse is better seems especially suspicious, in both computing and even more so in life, and Python’s famous “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” is an easy recipe for disaster.) But I’ll definitely keep YAGNI and KISS in mind from now on when thinking about whether to get rid of some thing or not.