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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I constantly interpret everything in life as a programming optimization problem. It drives everybody around me crazy.

This is the Law of Instrument. It's a disease. (It isn't a "neurological effect", pace what the other commenter suggests and despite whatever neurological correlates it has, strictly speaking.)

To broaden your horizons, consider diversifying your interests. Don't use ALL your time programming. Devote some of the free time you might be using to program for others things that broaden the mind. Try good literature (classics), good philosophy (approachable in the way its written unless you want to become a scholar of this stuff), and leisure. Literature helps you break out of the prejudices of your own culture. Philosophy lets you develop a clearer grasp of the big picture and ultimate reality. Leisure (NOT recreation) entails the passive absorption of the world around you and allows it to enter into your mind without you running your gears all the time. Contemplation is perhaps the purest form of leisure. It dissolves our alienation from reality. Turn those gears off and you have a better chance to break out of your mental rut.

Over time, you will put programming in its place.

thanks for the lecture, but I already have a garage full of hobbies (to which I apply computer optimization techniques) and a family (to whom I've tried, but failed, to apply computer optimization techniques). I read for fun, etc, but I don't think any of that is going to change my mind.

It's not all bad.

If you can stop yourself from finding faults with everything, thinking about life in terms of complex systems is not a terrible idea.

One day, I read a foodback (a feedback suggestion) at Google from Jeff Dean. He told the food people they could turn a buffet line into two lines by letting people go down the other side at the same time, doubling throughput.

You might enjoy reading "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions"

I do that too! That's part of the reason I was wondering what it does to our brains long-term

When you start dreaming about yourself being code and consisting of modules you know you've done something to your brain.

I once had a dream where I could 'pipe' physical objects through a bash command-line...

And that's how I started having problems enjoing games like Factorio.

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