Old Books Do Not Get Updated
A developer’s day begins with update notifications. iOS, libraries, and development tools release new versions every day. We habitually press the update button and scan the release notes. In the software world, an old version is a security vulnerability. It is technical debt that must eventually be paid. We obsessively chase the latest version because the fear of becoming "legacy" keeps us tied to a running treadmill.
But we should ask ourselves a question. Is the latest version of our life truly the most perfect?
The bestseller section of a bookstore is a battlefield of newly deployed "Beta versions." They are packaged with flashy marketing but have not yet been verified. In contrast, classics are "Stable Releases." They have passed QA tests by billions of users over hundreds or even thousands of years.
Nassim Taleb called this the Lindy Effect. The theory suggests that for perishable things like food or bodies, life expectancy decreases with time. However, for non-perishable things like information or books, the longer they have survived, the longer they are likely to continue surviving.
I majored in Russian literature in college. I spent my twenties with thick, old books. I read about the madness of humanity in Dostoevsky and the absurdity of life in Tolstoy. Now, as a developer wrestling with hot servers all day, I sometimes miss the chilly and damp air of those novels.
Technology has developed exponentially, but the OS of human nature has not been updated since our hunter-gatherer days. The anxiety, jealousy, and relationship problems we face are not bugs that the latest iPhone can solve. These are problems that our predecessors already perfectly Debugged on the snowy fields of Siberia or in the squares of ancient Greece.
We often search through random blog posts about the latest trends while the "Official Docs" are sitting right next to us.
When coding, if you declare all values as variables like var or let, the program becomes unpredictable and eventually breaks. Logic only holds when there are Constants—the const points that never change.
Life works the exact same way. The world is full of variables. Stock prices fluctuate, jobs might disappear, and people’s minds change constantly. To find balance in this shaking world, I must have a few constants embedded within me.
Classics provide those constants. They offer values that remain undamaged even when trends change. They represent robust logic that does not throw errors in any runtime environment. History, philosophy, and great literature are the constants that have pierced through time.
The book I am writing now, The Rational Optimist, also aims for such constants. I hope this book will age on someone’s bookshelf for ten or twenty years rather than becoming an immediate bestseller. I want to share essential messages that do not change over time, rather than updates that simply ride the current.
Learning the latest technology is a duty for my survival as a developer. However, I sometimes want to escape from that breathless speed.
When everyone else is anxious about AI and the latest trends, quietly reading old sentences is not falling behind.
It is the act of recovering my most powerful Root Permission.