Top 1% of My Connections

Queens #853 went down this morning between the shower and getting dressed. Phone in hand, still half-damp, the little board of colored regions waiting on me. I look for the smallest region first, because that's where the crown has to go, and everything else falls out from there. Follow the rules. Don't guess early. If you drop a crown in the wrong square in a five-region board, you'll spend the next minute backing out of a hole you dug in about four seconds.

Under a minute on Queens. Card pops up. Swipe.

Top 5% of all players. Swipe. Top 1% of my connections. Swipe. Smarter than 99% of people named Kenn. Post button underneath.

That's a year. Every day. Five games in the same order every morning: Wend, Patches, Zip, Queens, Crossclimb. Ten minutes, give or take. I did not miss a day. I almost missed twice, which I'll get to.

The card

The middle card is the one that got me. Top 5% of all players is a number. It's abstract. It could be bots. It could be my mother-in-law. Smarter than 99% of Kenns is a joke, and I laughed, because there are dozens of us and apparently I'm sharper than most of them at placing crowns on a grid before 6:30 AM.

But top 1% of my connections means people I actually know. Or people I sort of know. Or people I connected with because a colleague of mine moved from California to Oklahoma, worked with me for a bit, moved back to California, got recruited into a new job by a guy who then asked to connect with me because he saw the mutual, and now that recruiter and I trade positions on a leaderboard every morning without ever having spoken. My brother-in-law is on there. A woman I got connected to through some investment thing I can barely remember. These are the people who might read this essay. The same network.

LinkedIn shows you three reference classes on a swipe because it doesn't know which one will land. It won't let you out without offering all three. And underneath them: Post.

I didn't post it.

I did show it to someone. Not the card, exactly. I screenshotted it for the hero image of this post, which is the closest I've come all year to sharing one. That admission belongs here because otherwise I'd be pretending I've been above the whole thing, and I haven't. I've been in it. Every morning, in it.

What the pull actually is

I think about mimetic desire for fun. Girard is one of my hobbies. I've read Pageau, I've thought about the fractal trap of imitation, I know that trying to be original is just imitating the people trying to be original. Knowing this does not exempt you. The best you get from knowing is that sometimes, while it's happening, you can name it. That's the ceiling. Not immunity. Just recognition.

So here's the recognition: I like being first. When I open the puzzles at 5:45 AM, most of my connections haven't played yet, and I'm at the top of the little leaderboard by default. I do not go back at the end of the day to check whether I held the position. That would be too interested. But when I do play later in the day, when eleven connections are already through and I'm still number one, I notice. I notice the recruiter. I notice my brother-in-law when he beats me, which he sometimes does. When someone beats me I say "good job, you did it" in my head, and I can afford to be magnanimous about it because I win most of the time. I suspect the magnanimity would evaporate if I lost most mornings. That's worth knowing about myself.

None of this is noble. It's a little embarrassing. I'm a 43-year-old enterprise architect pumping his fist over placing crowns faster than a guy in Sacramento I've never met.

Georgia and Colorado

Once I was coming back from Georgia, the country, near the Black Sea, visiting a friend. The trip itself was fine. Traveling home is what almost killed the streak. LinkedIn doesn't let you catch up. There's no backlog to clear. There's the day, five puzzles, and a local midnight, and if you miss it the number is gone. I got home late, exhausted, ready to fall over, and realized I had to solve all five before midnight or lose the year. So I sat on my bed and did them. Not because I wanted to. Because I didn't want to lose the number. Which is, again, ephemeral, meaningless in the grand scheme, a value in a table somewhere on a server in Redmond or wherever LinkedIn runs. I did them anyway.

The second time I was camping on a mountain in Colorado. No service on the way up. Service at the summit, weirdly, but I wasn't going to pull out my phone at the top of a mountain to play LinkedIn games. That would be ridiculous. I planned around it: solved right before losing signal, solved again right when we got back down. What was supposed to be a two-day trip got compressed to one, which is the only reason it worked. Next time, if the timing is worse, I might actually have to bring my phone to the summit. Which would also be ridiculous. I'll probably do it.

What resets

Here's what I've come to. The puzzle satisfies because it closes. There's a board, there are rules, there's a solve. When the crowns are placed correctly, the app tells you so. Green check. Card. Swipe. Done. The problem is completely solved, permanently, in under a minute for Queens and not much longer for the rest, and there is nothing left to think about.

The rest of my day does not work this way.

I'm a software architect. People hear that and think I design buildings. I design software. The hard part isn't the diagrams. Everything in architecture is a trade-off, and the difficulty is that you're making trade-offs whose stakes can't be adjudicated to the stakeholder standing in front of you. There is no objectively better in all ways. There is a measuring stick, and you pick the stick, and you make the trade, and the person asking wants to know which choice is correct in the way a compile error is correct. It isn't that kind of question. Articulating fifteen years of judgment calls in a room that wants a yes or a no is not a puzzle. It does not close. You settle on a workable thing and move on and next quarter someone will want to relitigate it.

Then there's theology. I've been going to an Orthodox parish for about six months. A month or so in I met with the priest and asked what I should be doing, and he told me to take up a prayer rule. Morning prayer, evening prayer, said reverently, at a set time, every day. Fixed. Simple. Not complicated. But joining an Orthodox parish is not a checklist. It's not "complete these seven modules and receive your membership card." That's a Protestant frame, and it's the frame my brain is wired for, and it is not how this works. It's a process. Indeterminate. You arrive when you arrive. Holy Week this year had a Bridegroom Matins service that gutted me in a good way. The choir, the whole shape of the week. But there's no scoreboard. There is no card at the end that says top 1% of catechumens.

And then co-parenting. Three kids, one with significant needs. I got very lucky. My co-parent is a wonderful person, we work well together, we've both heard the horror stories and we're both grateful we don't have one. So I'm not going to pretend there's some hard-won grace narrative to extract here. It's just ongoing. Two households, two schedules, a kid whose care doesn't fit any of the shapes the world hands you. There is no version of this that ends with a green check. It's a treadmill in the sense that treadmills are: you keep going, and it's fine, and there's no finish line, because a finish line would mean the kids stopped needing parents.

Architecture, theology, co-parenting. None of them hand you a win screen. All of them are the actual work.

The deal

A year of Wend, Patches, Zip, Queens, Crossclimb kept me able to come back to work that doesn't close. The scoreboard is the part that keeps you coming back, and the solve is the part that lets you leave, and both mechanisms are the same mechanism. The appetite reset every morning before the previous day's solve was cold because the work I came back to never satisfied in the way a Queens board does, and the Queens board would not satisfy either if I could skip it. That's the deal. That's why I sat on the bed after eight time zones and solved five puzzles I did not want to solve. That's why I planned a mountain around signal windows. The thing pulls because the other things don't.

I screenshotted the card for the hero image of this post. The post about the card. Which means the thing I've been not-posting all year is now the top of a page I'm publishing to the same network the card was ranking me against.