It’s often hard to find “misfits” when I’m thinking about general forms. My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

— Andy Matuschak, In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023, 2024-01-02 (via)