Category Archives: Famous Overthinkers

Taking a byte out of Steve’s apple

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Close your eyes, if you will, and imagine a world without ITunes, IPhones, IPods, IPads, IPots, IPans, IPigs – somebody, stop me! Whew. Anyway, if you were one of the two people who in imagining such a world sighed deeply and thought it would be IPfree Paradise, you would have had your world had I been Steve Jobs’ mother, teacher, employee, friend or guru.

Had I been his mother, I would have grabbed him the minute he came within reach, and locked him in the bathroom until he came out smelling like a garden after a spring rain, so that he would have learned that cleanliness is as much about being cognizant of the sensibilities of others as it is about hygiene.

Had I been his teacher, I would have taught him that winning the race, or demonstrating a superior intellect is but momentary glory, as true fulfillment comes not by engendering envy and awe, but by earning respect.

Had I been his employee, I would have documented, notarized and tucked in a vault everything I ever produced for him or suggested to him, if necessary to be used in a court of law, to make him aware of the rights of others to their own ideas.

Had I been his friend, I would have asked him to step outside his ego, and use his keen powers of perception to see the world from another’s point of view, to tread lightly on the feelings of others, as vulnerability is our common bond.

Had I been his guru, I would have had him meditate on the thought that cruelty is the path to torment; peace comes only through an unconstricted heart, and that we are all chosen, each with our own part to play in the advancement of the human spirit.

The implication is that had Steve Jobs not been allowed to exercise his narcissism, he could not have created an empire that helped take communication a quantum leap forward.

And where would that have left us?

I don’t know, for me, with more questions than answers.

Could Steve Jobs have accomplished what he did without his narcissism? Were cruelty and remorselessness and irresponsibility and his distortion of reality vital to his success?

Was Steve Jobs the only person who could have taken technology to the point of providing trillions of megabytes of both helpful and inane information first to our homes, and then through our phones?

Does the fact that we have to play by his rules, use his Genius Bar, rely on Apple in order to find out what’s wrong with our I Anything, even as simple as needing a new battery in an IPod, mean that Steve Job’s is still exercising narcissistic control of us from his grave?

Was Steve Jobs a technological Messiah or a mere mortal?

Did that apple from which he ate fall from the same tree as Adam’s?

Becoming Emily Dickinson

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I’ve started skimming the front section of the newspaper of late, in the same manner that I watch suspense flicks. I quickly avert my eyes when they alight on images or words that I don’t want stuffed into a brain already overcrowded with unwelcome thoughts that I’m very good at forming without any outside assistance.

The whole “News You Need to Know” thing is highly overrated. Yes, as members of the human tribe, it is important to keep up on world events, but when God created Man, I don’t think She took WiFi into account.

I really don’t need to know every grave error in judgment public figures make. (We eradicated Small Pox, isn’t there somebody out there who can do the same for the Kardashians or John Edwards? I mean that figuratively, of course. And no, I don’t think incarceration will lighten the media onslaught, for any of them.)

I really don’t need to know about the tragedies and anguish of people who should be permitted to grieve in private. It is the kind and respectful thing to do.

I really don’t need to know about every conflict in every corner of every continent. It’s overwhelming. There is only so much data a body can absorb before its circuits overload and start misfiring. And in our 21st Century, we are far past our limit, heading to the danger zone.

This brings me to Emily Dickinson. Now there was a woman who knew how to keep the world at bay. She spent most of her adult years famously outfitted in white and wandering her garden or ensconced in her room. She had what you would call an active interior life – translation: she was definitely an overthinker, and the product of those thoughts was over1800 poems, only a handful of them published in her lifetime.

I think that she liked her little garden world – her poems indicate that she was certainly enamored of nature, even with her limited exposure. Yes, she was a tad obsessed with death but, hey, what poet is going to be taken seriously without dabbling in the morbid?

I would argue that hers was, for the most part, a contented life, and certainly a productive one. It turns out she was far ahead of her time in her writing style, her genius unrecognized until the 1950s. And she did it all without Internet access, or because of it.

Yes. At times Emily’s life sounds mighty appealing, but then it occurs to me that white is really not my color.