There are few more grating genres of writing than LinkedIn's "Here's what losing a limb/stubbing a toe/getting divorced/being outed as a famous serial killer taught me about B2B SaaS." We're all the product of the various things that have happened to us, and careers are a big part of who many of us are, so there's some logical sense to it. But it feels like part of the broader genre of glurge, vaguely inspirational stories whose details are just a setup for an inspiring lesson about how it all works out in the end. There's zero information content other than: something bad happened to me, and I want to post about it on LinkedIn.

All that is to say: over the weekend I fell a little weird and now one of my kneecaps isn't quite where it's supposed to be, and the tendon that connects it to the rest of my leg… doesn’t connect it any more. The mechanical upshot of this is that I can't extend my left leg, the neurological upshot is that it's very painful to contract it, so the practical result is that I have one working leg for a while, and another one that has to be straightened out at all times. (Current prognosis there is: surgery in a week, probably walking again in a few months, and probably a full recovery in a year, where "full recovery" means things like running, biking, heavy squats, etc. So I'm spending a semester studying abroad in the land of disability, but I don't pretend to be either a native, nor do I intend to be a permanent resident.)

If you see someone on crutches, your natural reaction is that it's a slow and inconvenient way to get places. Which is true, but not the biggest inconvenience. The first annoyance you'll notice if you use crutches all the time is that you can't carry things, at least not without some effort. If you want to drink a cup of coffee, you're probably doing it while standing in front of the coffee machine and leaning on a crutch. You're just not likely to maneuver a hot beverage around with zero hands. You definitely aren't preparing much food, at least until the cooking process is designed around a single stationary prep cook or heating things up in the microwave qualifies.

There are many products you can purchase to make the limping life a little easier. One problem you'll quickly notice about them, if you live in a typical single-family residence, is that they probably get delivered on the ground. And the ground is hard to access from crutches, especially while keeping a leg straight. So you're either playing a very tedious game of crutch-soccer to get something up a ramp, or asking for help, at least until you get a grabber tool.

The last big issue is clearance. A fully-extended leg is pretty long (it's been a short enough period since the injury that my instinct was to get up, grab a tape measurer, and determine exactly how long, but that's now a long and uncertain project). To get into a vehicle, you need to be able to swing the leg in some kind of arc that doesn't hit an obstacle like a door. Depending on the car, and the leg, this can lead to some awkward setups (my default right now is either stretched across the back seat without a seatbelt, or possibly crammed into the middle seat, leg extended to the well of the all-the-way-forward passenger seat).

So far, I haven't gotten stuck anywhere, but this is bound to happen some day soon. So yet another constraint is that you want a phone with you for emergencies, but you probably also want loose-fitting clothing. (A phone case with a wrist strap is probably the ideal here, or maybe this is the killer app for Meta smart glasses or their rumored AI pendant.) This means thinking about even more dimensions and angles, at what is already a pretty contortive point in one's life.

All this is a bummer but could be vastly worse in many ways, But what's interesting about it is that it's a reminder that we're all operating so close to peak capacity! There is nothing quite like having to use a grabber to pick a food wrapper off the floor to remind you that, absent that ability to manipulate our environments, we'd all have access to a lot less stuff; we'd be worse at making it, consuming it, and cleaning up after.

And it's also a good reminder of complex supply chains. There's a lot you could amputate before writing this newsletter becomes infeasible, if that's literally all I'm doing. And yet, at this moment, "go upstairs to grab that book" has gone from trivial to something that risks serious injury. The most important part of a supply chain is, in general, whatever part is missing right now.

But another important part of a supply chain is what's available, and there's room for gratitude there, too. I got injured during a child's birthday party (at one of those play places where you sign a waiver beforehand—I think they know the natural result of having people with the energy of three-year-olds being chased around by other people with middle-aged joints), but it's an injury I could have easily gotten tripping on the stairs at home. Fortunately, this play place happened to be literally across the street from a Walgreens, and the Walgreens had a website that displayed exactly what was in-stock. It's just an unimaginable convenience to be crawling towards a couch with one hand while using a smartphone in the other hand to find the nearest place to get crutches.

Setting aside the physical discomfort, this feels most similar to the experience of using a programming language that forbids something other languages allow by default and never even describe as something you might, in certain situations, rationally prefer not to do. In Rust, for example, if you're going to do something to a variable (say you have a list of names and you're writing a function to count how many of them start with a given letter), if you're going to store that running total in a variable, you need to warn Rust that its contents could change, or it simply won't let you. This is very annoying, briefly, until you get used to the idea that code is safer and more predictable if you're careful about what is and isn't mutable, i.e. what variable can be treated as fixed and which one needs to be checked before use every time. In Rust's case, the goal is to run the most efficient programs possible, which is not quite analogous to my recent hobbling-around. But it does illustrate that if you get rid of a few shortcuts, most of what you had can be replicated, sometimes at great cost and sometimes pretty trivially.

The human body, and the environment we build around it, is subject to selection pressure to operate close to the limit. Our world is built to get the most out of our senses, mobility, and ability to manipulate objects. The world doesn't feel ruthlessly optimized to get the most out of what you have until you temporarily have a little less.

The Diff has covered this territory before, at least in an abstract sense:

• We've looked at the efficient frontier of automation, and how it's easier to make progress in AI when there's a single variable to target.

• Other kinds of evolved optimization include the ways modern platforms monetize.

• You can model the market as meta-efficient in that people are constantly adjusting their view on how much to invest in the research that tells them which prices are optimal ($).

• A weird market that doesn't clear in the way one would expect, but that works surprisingly well, is the market for selling ideas on stocks to sell short ($). This is a timely topic ($).

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