A musing on the failures of perfection. Ah, the irony.
Some things should not be kept perfect. Things that have problems and troubles are improved and made better. If something keeps moving along perfectly, it gets weak and meaningless and when something does go awry it blows up big time and is irrecoverable. Of course sometimes when something goes wrong, you can't work through it and it's ruined. But when you do work through it, you're better and it's better. It's a good thing.
So what do you do when everything's seemingly perfect? Do you create some small problems, to keep everthing in balance, to make sure the whole is working all right and can handle a few problems? That would seem dumb wouldn't it. But if you're confident it can handle a few problems, it would be good to "stress-test" it wouldn't it? Factories do it for products, why shouldn't we do it for less tangible parts of our lives? So we'll do it.
How do we do it? Well most real-life stress tests keep bending one thing until it breaks. Do they have ones that push and prod all sides at once? Perhaps, but the former seems much more common. And certainly more useful as it can be used to measure the durability of the one part. So let's apply this to life. We have to pick one aspect of this "thing" we're testing. I dunno how we'd do that. I guess something not vital, so that when things break, nobody dies or gets permanently damaged. It's gotta be something that'll in the end make the whole better. So then we try to break it. This is the weird part. I would suppose it shouldn't be obvious, otherwise others involved will get suspicious and things might blow up then. (maybe that would be good, though :-)) But if we're not obvious about the problem we're creating, we're being manipulative and secretive. That alone could give us a problem to deal with, but I'm afraid it could be too drastic.
Thus... thus, thus. A bit of a dead end. Taking this into our own hands is far too dangerous. What shall we do then? Pray for a problem? Plant a problem seed and let it do the work? Sit idly by and let this "thing" become a routine, invisibly fragile, unimportant part of us? Maybe so.
Posted by Dave at December 17, 2003 08:44 PM | TrackBackhere's a comment for yourself!
If this "thing" is anything not mundane and routine, it'll get "used" enough to test all the facets. A real world test is always the best test for software or machinery or whatever. So living it out in the real world will test it and you'll see how things work and things will break and it'll all be good.
Posted by: Dave at January 28, 2004 07:26 PM