Tool fetishism

It's not how fancy it is, it's how you use it.

The bottleneck to your greatness almost certainly isn’t having the right app, gizmo or device for the job, unless you’re building a fusion reactor.

There’s a multi-billion dollar market in selling illusions of silver bullets and shortcuts, and none of them really do anything.

Toolkit optimization beyond a good-enough level is a form of idolatrous fetishism, a kind of procrastination masking as preparation.

Typical offenders:

• To-do apps. Anything more complicated than a simple checklist is masturbation.

• Note apps. Midwit trap - “maybe the right ecosystem of subscription services mixing and matching my mediocre text, perhaps with an AI overlay, will make me actually smart”. Nah fam, if your notes aren’t coming out smart in plaintext, the bottleneck is between your ears. If you can’t do it with Apple Notes, you won’t do it with 15 different interconnected apps either. The only possible exception is when you’re such a prolific note taker (like me) that you have 15,000+ notes and Apple Notes stops working, in which case Obsidian’s got you covered fam.¹
  

  

• People who will “start running” when they find the right shoes, and the right route through the park. (Meanwhile half the world’s top athletes started with ratty secondhand Adidas on a dirt road in Africa).

• People who will “lose weight” when they find the perfect diet that doesn’t require them to practice self-control, and doesn’t have any haters. (Now partly saved by GLP-1 inhibitors.)

• If you own a Kindle, iPad AND reMarkable, get help.

• Coders endlessly evaluating new languages/frameworks/IDEs/tools instead of shipping code. (Now partly saved by AI coding)

• Virtually all of self-improvement and “personal growth”, fishing for obscure life-hacks that’s just trying to find ways to avoid doing the handful of ultra basic 80-20 things that everyone knows they should be doing already.

• Overlap with bourgie Veblentraps: expensive pens. Everyone who actually seriously writes by hand uses a $5 Stabilo or Muji. Technically, they’re perfect and unbeatable. I should know, I upgraded to them from a $500 ruthenium-plated Montblanc.

It’s like that with everything.

The psychology of tool fetishism

Why do people go shopping instead of gitting gut? It’s classic displacement: hoping the talisman makes the hard part easy. Oh, the talisman didn’t work? Better get another one. Two weeks research, fifty browser tabs, a few hundred dollars, results stuck at zero.

As a tool-using species, it’s tempting for humans to get fixated on the tool to the exclusion of the using. The tool-fetishist’s signature move is getting the best possible tool, and then not doing it anyway.

Because we’re also a lazy species, and excuse-seeking species, the search for the magical perfect tool is plausibly deniable avoidance and procrastination - and few excuses are more impenetrable to criticism than “I need the right tools for the job“.

“I’m not procrastinating, I’m preparing”. I’ll do the homework once I have a snack. And clean my desk. And figure out faster than light travel.

The anatomy of the psychological trap is like this: An activity has a simple component (tool selection and procurement - no judgment or pressure, still feels like progress) and a hard component (actually doing the thing - hard work, possibility of failure). The temptation is to hide in the simple part beyond any reasonable point of diminishing returns, never quite getting to the hard part, but in a plausibly deniable way that can be passed off as progress - “you wouldn’t want me to do it unprepared, would you?”. So people get stuck in endless ephemera only tangentially related to the task at hand.

It’s trying to get the tool to do the hard work. With power tools, it works that way. With productivity tools, it doesn’t. Notionableslackasana isn’t a pneumatic drill, it’s a novel way to scroll your phone while jerking off to the idea of productivity.

Even useful tools that objectively add to your workflow (or whatever) can be so high-maintenance, and require so much time and attention to operate, that you’d be better off with a simpler, less helpful but less cognitively demanding tool.

It’s forever sharpening your spear, never using it - feels like progress, but unlike real progress, it is “safe”, to the degree that never getting anywhere is safe. You’re never faced with the actual bottlenecks - skill, discipline, actually wanting it hard enough to do it.

You, only you will ever be doing the real work - the tool is a tool. Most of the time, you don’t need a particularly complicated one.

Tool fetishism is trans-optimization. Definition: procrastination and avoidance that identifies as optimization.

Sanity checks and counterexamples:

• Martina Sablikova, the multiple Olympic gold medalist and world speed skating champion, trained on bumpy frozen lakes, because Czechia didn’t have sports infrastructure.²

• Peter Thiel still used an iPhone 8 as of 2021. Whether he upgraded since, doesn’t change the point.

• Again, half the world’s top athletes started with ratty gear on dirt roads.

There’s a Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago dynamic very much at play.

The tech scene’s obsession with new programming languages and frameworks that mostly contribute only bloat is notorious for this.

This is partly because techies are often autistic tinkerers, and therefore by nature tool fetishists - enjoyers of nice toolboxes, always on the lookout for a cool new spanner. That’s on balance a good thing -our fondness for neat kit is among our greatest strengths, yet it has a counterproductive and expensive failure mode - both in terms of money and, well, not getting shit done while scouring the internet for the mythical perfect tool.

Do the thing. Fuck the tool. The tool is secondary at best, procrastination at worst.

You (only you) do the real work. Don’t let gear distract from facing the actual bottlenecks.

Beware trans-optimization: it’s avoidance in drag.

1. Heck, you can go analog - 20 minutes with pen and paper a day is a legit life-hack. Your brain works differently when actually physically writing. Try it.

2. Further proving sports infrastructure isn’t wholly necessary, and usually entails massive corruption.