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Altoids by the Fistful

"In evolution, a maladaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more harmful than helpful, in contrast with an adaptation, which is more helpful than harmful." I went to Wikipedia to look that up, not a large language model.

I had a litany of command-line switches that I never used for anything, HTML character entity names for writing systems I couldn’t comprehend, and tales of tweaking settings deep inside the Windows 98 Device Manager just so I could brag about having been in there in the first place. Everything—from the doors in the house to the stripes cut into the front lawn—was always level, plumb, square, centered, polished, dust-free, squeak-free, fingerprint-free… He even demonstrated meticulous care in breaking down cardboard and filling up the waste bins at the curb. All that stuff Younger Self struggled with—the self-superiority, the sense that I had to be the one who did it if it needed to be done correctly, the derision and borderline abuse I gave others—that was all just a big dogmatic ball of caring a whole lot about quality and craft, being rolled around by a kid who didn’t understand what to do with it.

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