On Abstraction

Abstraction is the process of compressing broad, deep structures into something simpler. Something you can operate from with speed, clarity, and confidence. It gives you the option to forgo details when you can function without them.

This, however, is fallible. From the outside, abstraction looks similar to superficiality. Both appear to skim the surface. To someone used to operating superficially, the two are indistinguishable. But the difference becomes clear when you look at what lies underneath, depth versus shallowness.

Depth gives you freedom. When you truly understand something at its foundations, you can move fluidly between raw detail and high-level thinking, choosing whichever the moment demands. Superficiality locks you in one place. You are confined to whatever process you were handed, playing the same game everyone else plays, with predictable effort and predictable reward. We gravitate toward this because it is less taxing, and comfortable, but it is also a ceiling. And because superficiality is ultimately an avoidance of reality, it starves the mind of variety. The brain rewards novelty. A shallow operator, deprived of that richness, burns out earlier than you would expect.

The cook versus the chef captures this well. A cook follows a recipe. A chef breaks everything down to ingredients and chemistry, reasons from first principles, and solves from there. The cook can only reproduce what a process prescribes. The chef looks at a pantry and sees possibilities instead of constraints. That shift, from following to seeing is what abstraction makes possible.

This is also where abstraction becomes powerful - in connecting things that don’t obviously connect. Analogies are one currency of abstract thinking. But good abstract thinkers don’t just generate analogies; they know how to test them. When someone compares building a startup to raising a child, you have to ask if the underlying assumptions actually map? Where does the analogy hold, and where does it mislead? The ability to select and reject analogies, to sense when two things share deep structure versus mere surface resemblance, is what separates abstraction from pattern-matching.

None of this comes easy though. Operating well with abstraction demands constant awareness of your own assumptions, what you have compressed, what you have left out, and where your map might diverge from the territory. Without that discipline, abstraction quietly degrades into the very superficiality it was supposed to transcend. The tool becomes the trap.