Documentation / the other thing

I write documentation for enterprise software. Fifteen years. I take complex systems and turn them into something a tired person in a hurry can navigate. In the evenings I try to write essays, and the difference is hard to explain. Documentation asks: what do you need to know to complete this task? The essay asks something closer to what I don't yet understand myself. I've been working on an essay about the word *simple*. Every software product I've ever worked on has claimed, somewhere in its marketing, that it is simple. In fifteen years I have never worked on software that was actually simple. The word conceals rather than describes. The essay is 3,400 words and I'm not sure it has a centre yet. The thing that changed how I think about the personal essay was *The Rings of Saturn* by W.G. Sebald. I read it on a train to Nuremberg in 2019. The way digression is the structure and not an interruption to it. I've been trying to understand how he does that for four years. I'm also writing about what it costs to be precise for a living. Whether removing ambiguity all day makes you better at noticing it elsewhere, or worse. I suspect worse, and the proof is that I find it very hard to sit with unresolved questions in my personal life. Munich. Long winters. The Isar is there if I need to walk somewhere that doesn't require me to be articulate.