High-Functioning Idealism

This article contains spoilers.

BBC’s modern re-telling of Sherlock Holmes had me hooked. Here we had Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) meeting in the smartphone era. Instead of sending telegrams from Baker Street, Sherlock flung texts from London Black Cabs. He used social media to sway cases to his advantage, the Internet to do his research.

And in one of the first episodes, we heard Sherlock profess, with how today’s world labels oddities like him, his psychological condition.

(I won’t spoil it for you until further below.)

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The Accountant stars Ben Affleck playing a certified public accountant with autism. As a child, he grew up thinking he was limited, until his father took up his upbringing with decisiveness. His father refused the box his son had been put in.

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Once, when I worked at a startup, our group of software engineers went out for lunch. The COO, who was paying the bill, looked at me with puzzled eyes as I was having a heart-to-heart moment with a coworker, discussing matters of family and life. He had been trying to box me into a Myers-Briggs profile for days, along with others in the team, and had finally found the profile for me. INFP is a profile that’s not supposed to be good at engineering, usually for STJ’s. He brought me aside and said to me “you’re an idealist”. He was disappointed. He didn’t know what to make of me nor his realization. I didn’t seem to fit in, and now he was able to draw the picture for why.

Spoiler alert: shortly after, I left the company.

Profiles can be looked at as boxes with borders, or as a platform from which to grow. You have to replace, when you spot it into your mind, the words “I am a” with “I have a”. Not “I am an idealist” but rather “I have a tendency to idealize”. This uncouples the ego. You have to make a decision to see your kit, your mix of skills and preferences, as a garden full of saplings that need tending and pruning. Starting points, suggestions, free gifts. You be the caretaking artist.

I had known about my Myers-Briggs profile for now a few years by the time the COO made the same prognostication, and I knew well the ramifications. It’s true: I wasn’t supposed to be a good engineer. Not even a good UX designer for that matter. Regardless, I had a family to feed and I made the decision to own my kit, to make the best of it. Skills can be learned, and so I decided to get good at them.

The goal is to be high-functioning. One foot in the world, able to survive, the other foot, comfortable with your self. For that, you have to find a scenario where your abilities (in my case, for idealism, but also for abstract ideas, discernment and emotional nuance) can add value to others.

You’re a software engineer? You have the abilities to engineer software. You can learn sales, empathy, design. You’ll be able to create your own products and services. You’re a marketer? You have the ability to make a case for a product and to put it on the market. You can learn some software development skills. You can overlap your engineering peers on some capacity, and add more value to those projects on which you collaborate. Surpassing yourself isn’t a lack of focus, rather it’s an act of maturity.

If you’re an idealist, you have to be comfortable with the tension of straddling the line where your intolerance for what the world is meets your vision of how it can be. Not only are you going to survive, but by firing the ego who was just meaning to protect you, you’re going to surpass the boundaries of the box you thought you were in. When I surpass myself, I not only help bring my ideals to the rest of the world, I help the rest of the world live its own ideals too.

There was, in the end, a box with hard borders. It wasn’t so much the COO (he had a job to do) nor the one he drew for me. It was the company itself, apparently too small a box for me.

So I gave my notice and left. I started freelancing, took stock of more of my abilities, pruned a few and invested in growing a few others. It paid off and I found my footing.

I set out to put my idealism to good use, elsewhere. I set out to be high-functioning.

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So for the spoilers:

Sherlock Holmes professed being a “high-functioning sociopath”.

The Accountant also describes his condition in the movie: “I have a high-functioning form of autism” (he has a form of autism, he developed himself to be high-functioning) “which means I have an extremely narrow focus and a hard time abandoning tasks once I’ve taken them up.” This inability to move on from incomplete tasks is a central character trait in the movie. We saw a flashback of him throw a tantrum when he had to move on from an unfinished puzzle. Under the careful discipline his military father forged in him, he found a mix that worked for him, and loosely, we could say he turned out good. Through rituals, a regimented lifestyle, and a personal mission to balance the “sheets” in all spheres of society, we see the adult version of himself serving the victims of injustice. Introverted accountant by day, armed vigilante by night.

As for me, I don’t like the label of idealist, even when I’m high-functioning. If I’m going to give myself a label, I much prefer this reframing: I am a reformer.

Update April 4, 2024: Tweaked the notes from The Accountant after rewatching the movie.