“The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.”
--Charles Darwin
“He’s playing old tapes.”
“I preferred being a caterpillar...”
Without a doubt hardware is very important. Big brains, opposable thumbs, and an innate insatiable curiosity are three reasons Sapiens have been such a resounding success. But this machinery would be nothing without the software that runs on it. The software is the extraordinary ability of the human being to adapt to change. It’s allowed us to inhabit nearly every environment planet Earth has to offer.
For several decades, I’ve enjoyed offering my friends and family free technology support (as long as it is for an Apple device). During the pandemic, I moved largely to providing guidance by phone or FaceTime. I helped several friends and even my mom’s friends to back up their phones, buy a new one online, and restore their data, all over the telephone. It’s what I used to do at the Apple store but without being able to see the customer’s screen or touch the device.
Rarely does a week pass that I am not called upon by a friend or a family member who is frustrated by something on their phone or computer that not working as it should or at least as they THINK it should. To be honest, my motives are not completely altruistic. I am an Apple shareholder (albeit a very minor one) and so I have an interest in making sure the customer is satisfied. Perhaps more important, providing tech support helps me keep my skills up-to-date and helps me feel useful.
But when a major update to MacOS or iOS comes out all hell breaks loose. Inevitably, features change, buttons move or disappear, or something that worked before stops working. That is when I start getting messages. “What happened to…” and “that… thing stopped working.” I help as best I can. I explain the new feature and why it is an improvement over the old way it used to work and try to help the person see that Apple is just trying to make their life better. That’s when I usually hear it: “Why can’t they just leave things alone. I liked it the way it was.”
Here’s an example. In the most recent major iOS update, Apple moved the address bar in the web browser Safari from the top of the screen to the bottom. The reason made sense. The screens have gotten larger and the fingers now need to travel farther to get to the top of screen. Moving the bar to the bottom gets it back into easy reach. Many people hated this change. Even the technology editor of the Wall Street Journal decried it and told readers they should change it back, which you can do in the settings. I have not seen such outrage since Apple removed the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Remember the headphone jack?
Apple understands this resistance to change and usually provides a path back to the old way with a settings switch or a hardware solution that gives us the time we need to get used to it. But sooner or later we usually succumb because, well, resistance is futile. When Apple dropped the headphone jack in 2016, it provided a dongle in the box with each phone for a few years allowing traditional headphones to be plugged into the phone’s lightening port. The adapter quietly disappeared from the box a few years later with no fanfare and little notice.
My approach to these changes is this: I give it a week. If after a week, I still hate it or find it irritating, I change it back. Usually, I find after a week I usually no longer even notice the change and if I do, I see the value. After a month, I don’t remember that it was ever different.
Isn’t this so often the way change works in our lives? Something alters and our first reaction is to hate it, to wish that it would go back to the way it was before. Not because it was actually better but because we were used to it. Soon we get used to the new way and can’t remember that it was ever otherwise.
We like things static because that allows us to live mostly on auto-pilot. This is not a completely bad thing. Putting our routines on auto-pilot may allow us to use the power of those large brains for things that require creativity or innovation or to experience the things that are extraordinary.
However, there is a deep downside to auto-pilot. When we are on auto-pilot we are not really paying attention. We are missing the extra of the everyday ordinary. Change is life’s way of reminding us to see what is going on. Do we truly prefer things as they were, or is this new way just fine, maybe better in some way? And if it is not better, we are challenged to find a path forward. Because, unlike changes to your phone software, life rarely has a setting or a dongle that can set things back to the way they were. We must adapt.
Sometimes we adapt by accepting a different kind of life than we had before. Sometimes we problem solve. Sometimes we even figure out a way to get it mostly back to the way it was before because we just can’t accept the change.
I can attest that the older you get, the harder it is to adapt. That is why when I am presented with change, whether in my phones operating system or plans run aground on the shifting sands of Covid, I try to ask myself if I can see this as an opportunity to learn, to change, to keep my mind flexible.
Most change is neutral. It is neither good nor bad; it just is. Every change embodies both loss and opportunity. Which you see depends on your personal settings. But resistance to change is largely futile. The change doesn’t care whether you want it or not. What we can control is our response to the change. We can try to demand that ‘they’ put it back to the way it was before or we can look to see how the new reality can make our lives more fulfilling or at least more interesting. It’s all about your software, how it allows you adapt, and how long it takes. Check periodically to make sure you’re not running an out-of-date version of you.