Learning to spite

"I learn to spite those who punish it. If I can suffer and learn and build systems that prevent others from experiencing that dysfunction, then the suffering becomes valuable. If I die with the knowledge, the systems never get built, and the dysfunction repeats."

Bad experiences with institutions - education that punished curiosity, workplaces that valued compliance over competence, systems that extracted more than they gave. These leave marks.

The question is what to do with them.

The reframe

Spite is underrated as motivation. It's sustainable in ways that pure altruism isn't. "I will learn this thing specifically because someone said I couldn't" carries you through the 3am debugging sessions that "it would be nice to help people" doesn't.

But spite alone is corrosive. The trick is combining it with documentation. Learn, build, then share so others don't have to suffer the same path.

The dysfunction becomes data. The suffering becomes a case study. The spite fuels the work. The documentation makes it useful to others.

Applied

Every tool I build comes from a specific frustration. Context gets lost between sessions - uroboro. Systems require too much from the user - local-first design. Corporate software treats users as products - privacy-respecting alternatives.