Hammer Spammers

To a hammer, everything looks like something that could potentially be hit with a hammer.

Don’t get me wrong—hammers are incredibly useful for the very specific task they’ve been designed to do. Tens of thousands of years of trial and error gradually sculpted hammers into something resembling the modern shape while they were still being made from stone.

Since then, thousands more years of blacksmithing evolution have gone into this marvelous device. This simple tool just hammers things so well.

Everyone has a hammer or two.

In jiu jitsu, it has become fashionable to talk about spamming a move. This means hitting the move over and over and over again when you’re rolling, so your partners mainly experience you going for that move repeatedly, and little else. Honestly, this can be a fantastic way to learn, even if it might drive your partners crazy.

I almost surely did this with various types of leglocks—submissions where you isolate and threaten one of the joints in the leg. Yet, leglocks are hardly always the answer, and you can really see this at high level no-gi jiu jitsu competition.

What else can you spam, in this sense?

There’s certainly the tendency to overuse technology when trying to solve every single problem. I think there’s a tendency to just ask a question that you could probably reason out yourself, but the answer is right there. You probably don’t want to prompt an AI agent to make a phone call for you when picking up the phone yourself and tapping a couple of times does the job, but if you’re a hammer spammer, you just might be tempted to go the circuitous route.

Or: once you learn about a tendency or diagnosis, everything that might fit into that diagnosis is automatically in. Everyone in the world is suddenly bipolar or autistic or… you name it. The spam hammer smashes all the other potential diagnoses.

Narcissism probably takes the spam hammer cake here. Everyone who disagrees with you is a narcissist, eventually. Or maybe I’m thinking of communists or fascists.

Writing every day is certainly a hammer for me. I write so that I can express ideas to you and hear what you think, but I also write so that I can satisfy my own curiosity. I have things I want to learn, understand, or experience, and it’s a bit of a two-birds, one-stone idea.

I also write because I’m compulsive, but that’s another story.

What are your hammers?