original

I was involved in quite a few discussions related to Steve Jobs somewhere on the Internet, and people were once again waxing poetic about him in another post.

He didn’t actually create the technology, but he drove people who did. He was also not known to be a nice person at times, though all of that is anecdotal. I didn’t know the guy. Some people say he was nice. Mostly, though, they talk about how he pushed things forward.

He did. To think he alone could have done it, though, seems a bit more of a deification than much else.

In a world absent of Steve Jobs, do people really think we’d still be using scientific calculators? No. Someone else would have used the stuff from Xerox PARC, very likely, or reinvented it. Someone else would likely have pushed technology usability forward. In fact, the world is filled with technology that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with.

Yet some people study Steve Jobs and think emulating him is a good thing. That, by itself, is not bad – certainly, he had an eye for integrating things and pushing people, and he was effective at the time he was in. Would he be able to do the same now? Maybe. Maybe not.

In the grand scheme of things, he was a person who did contribute to the PC Revolution, and he did push the mobile revolution forward. Apple still charges way too much for what they sell (my opinion), and they are one of the longest standing vendor lock-in companies out there all the way down to the charging cables.

I’m not going to smear him. We’re all human. The point is that when looking at what he accomplished, some people use some of his less pleasant behaviors as excuses for their own when he was Steve Jobs and they are… not. In a world swimming in personality traits, tests, and a surge of advice on dealing with narcissists for some reason, emulating other people should be about taking their best qualities.

So often I hear things like, “Well so and so did it!”. Very good. You’re not original, and you can’t improve on that which you place on too high of a pedestal.

Do something original. Be better. That’s what Steve Jobs did, as far as I can tell.

There are days where I think I am diving into the depths from the mundane seeking some form of sustenance, some form of meaning from an original thought that may be straying through the depths of this continuum. It’s as if I were a solitude whale, diving into the depths to find… something.

And every now and then whale song resonates, if only for a moment. A harrumph in the distance of someone doing something similar, an echo of an echo, and you wonder if it’s you’re own echo. In the depths, you are alone, the silence interrupted by your movements as you interact with the outside world.

It’s pleasant. Serene. Quiet. People go to classes for such things, twist their limbs into positions that someone else teaches them. That was forced on me as a teenager, and people pay for it now. But then, people pay to be spanked and have hot wax dripped on them, too. The world is strange among those that live in the air. They chatter among themselves about things that largely do not matter, only so that they don’t feel…

Alone.

Alone scares people, the depths of who we are a scary place for those who believe that they are something that they are not. Validation. Existence. Emptiness does not give those things, the depths where the pressure is greatest force against the self, hardening what at the surface is so soft. Things flit around down there. Things about yourself. Things about the world, the detritus of above always finds the depths. The depths, the dark depths with the deep currents that run to and fro say more about what is important than the practicing karaoke choirs above – busy singing the songs of others, poorly.

And there it is. And there it went. A roll, a twist, a push toward the surface where the noise is… a glance backward.

Soon.

RealityFragments.com

Personal scribblings of Taran.

The Whale