Shame Piles

I spent a good chunk of my teens and twenties thinking of my self as a musician, but for much of this period it would be more proper to refer to myself as an “instrument owner.” I do occasionally write, record and sometimes even perform music, but for the most part I have had a significantly larger collection of gear than was warranted by the music I was making. Even when I am actively making music, most of my equipment isn’t plugged in or at-hand; it is instead piled up in closets and in corners.

As a programmer, I am always looking for an opportunity to create abstractions, and I realized there were parallels between this and my other over-provisioned hobbies. The milk crate full of soldering equipment and unfinished electronics kits, the kitchen rack with the stand mixer and sous-vide circulator, the tub full of legos, the dresser drawer full of ascots, even the bookcase full of books I will not read: all of these are instances of “shame piles”. I call them this because I see them as representations of the person I aspired to be but never became; they are the activities that I (quite literally) do not have a place for in my life, but I cannot bring myself to let go.

I think shame piles can also exist in software: I wrote a thread about this a few months ago, but the tl;dr is that a lot of software has half-baked and seldom-used features that stick around for the same reason as shame piles do – they seem too valuable to just throw away, but they’re not doing you any good just sitting there.