The attention you can give is a
finite quantity, like your wealth.
Only the inverse. There's a
lot of it available at the beginning of your life and not much at the end. It varies directly with energy. Where it is most like wealth is in the
need for good management.
When you're young you have so much
energy available that you can honor every little claim on it. Watch me, Daddy, look at this, Daddy, what's
that, Daddy, why, Daddy. When
you're older your child will answer his teacher's Father's Day question (what's
the nicest thing you can do for your Daddy?) with this: "Leave him alone." He's learned that what you have left
after doing the income tax is just enough to get the evening newspaper read. When you're a lot older you get
somebody else to do the tax, serve on the committees, and write the reports —
so you'll have energy to answer your grandchild's questions. That's good
economy.
Thoreau's economizing is the model
for the slow shutting down required of the elderly. "Simplify, simplify, simplify." Do it right, be sure the fringe stuff
you're letting go is really fringe stuff.
"Confront only the essential facts of life." That will come close to the end, down
to the essential satisfactions.
Picture a cabin somewhere.
Aging, at the end, is an effort to get to Walden Pond.
But I'll tell you, in the 21st
century it's a struggle.
We've got these MacBooks and iPhones. And we can't give them up. They give contact with children and grandchildren and music
and baseball scores.
Essentials. But they also
give Steve Jobs, or his ghost, contact with us. And Steve Jobs wants money from us. He wants to keep it coming. A revenue stream. And by God he doesn't care if it runs
through Walden Pond, if it drains the
place, or not.
All I want to do is find out how
the Reds did. Before I get
back to the New Yorker on my porch
with my coffee. But no. There's a pitch for the iWatch filling
the screen and no way to get it off.
No way I can see. (The bastard knows what a dufus I am at
navigation; it's been in one of my cookies for a long time, I'm sure.) By the time I get help I've forgotten the point Menand was
making, my coffee is cold, and I've lost my morning chance for peace of mind,
an essential.
This is not White Whine. It is not forgetfulness of complexity
and the need for trade-off that octogenarians are famous for. I know that the system that brings me
baseball scores and grandchild cuteness has to be paid for. I long ago accepted, as fringe, the
hucksterism that went with capitalism, the essential commitment of my
country. You wouldn't believe the
hokum I have been willing to put up with, as an alternative to Marxist
hokum. I just want you young,
energetic people to know that your marvelous technology has this down side.
So that you can do something about
it. I don't have the energy even
to suggest what it might be. But I
can say, in the metaphorical way that comes easy to weakened minds, what it
might look like: a cleared path through the woods.
What you young will first have to clear
away are all the opportunities for accidental, clumsy hits on a screen, all the
fat-finger, hovering bursts of extensions, alternatives, enrichments,
modifications, and refinements that cool computer cats know what to do with,
and bring up by intention, but that us old dogs bring up by accident and don't
know what the hell to do with.
And, worse, leave us not knowing how to get back to the simple path we
were on.
Then you can bend aside some of
the updates. I know, as Jobs tells
us, that they nearly always give "greater stability and security,"
and I have to accept with that the revenue-enhancing adjustments to my cookies
that they're probably really for, but can't you, if you're really good with
cookies, take out the insistence that I update all programs? And that
if I don't they'll be back on my screen in an hour, or that afternoon, or, at
the latest, tomorrow. There are now no
other choices. I'm with my friend
in 80's Moscow, waiting for a late-night knock on the door.
What complicates life is stuff you
have to keep tending. A good
economist asks, "Is it worth the
tending?" When Thoreau found
out that the paperweight he'd gotten needed dusting every day he threw it out
the window. That's the way I feel
about apps and programs. I'll bet
that for contact with my offspring and my team and a few friends and scholars I
need about a tenth of the stuff Jobs keeps wanting me to attend to. If you could just put that in a
cookie. "This customer is content
with A, B, and C, and he's ready to throw the rest out the window. If you don't want the whole laptop to
go, keep that in mind."
No, that's too crude, and the
bluff is obvious. How about this
for the cookie, counting on Jobs to be a reader of Thoreau: "This customer would rather sit on a
pumpkin, and have it all to himself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."
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