BY RIGO TESORO
STAFF WRITER
Isn’t it funny how the primary colors look significantly better if you slightly nudge them away from being primary colors? I can’t be content with pure red, green, and blue; I gotta make it too complicated for myself—coral, scarlet, seafoam, cerulean, indigo, exact hex codes, PANTONE color designations, what kind of color is “puce” again? I refuse to tell you how long I’ve spent getting a headache squinting at subpixels imperceptibly but precisely changing as I periodically struggle to increment a slider by a single unit at a time. The pure, simple colors don’t look right. It has to be overcomplicated.
The QWERTY keyboard. All of the letters are out of order. Either you know it or you don’t. Why couldn’t we be content with just ABCDEF? We didn’t have to make it so hard for the poor hunt-and-peckers. And even if you ignore how unnecessarily unintuitive it is, it’s not even very efficient. T is the second most common letter in the English language. Why must I awkwardly crane my finger over so far to reach it? My T key should be in the center, so I can barely see the letter anymore, not on the bottom left corner, eroding ever farther out of my reach. And don’t even get me started on the numbers. Six is the bane of my existence. I thought typing was supposed to fix hand cramps.
The phone icon. Why is it that whenever I want to call someone on my cell phone, I tap on the icon of a wired-into-the-wall telephone from more than half a century ago? Why can’t the traditional phone icon be a picture that the average person today will recognize as a phone? And why does the camera on my phone make a sound when I take a photo? There are no noisy moving parts in the lens. I know I pressed the button. The screen even flashed to remind me. The last time cameras went k-tvvvt like that, you had to put 35mm film in them. Why can’t we adapt? Why can’t we accept that cameras are silent now or that phones no longer look like malformed bananas? They already changed decades ago.
Taxes. Everyone hates taxes. (Especially rich people who can easily afford them.) It’s a simple idea. Citizens of a government pay money into government funds; the government can keep running smoothly and gives infrastructure in return. Pay money, get thing. So why is it so complicated in practice? There’s no reason for it to be. The IRS knows dang well what our taxes evaluate to. They couldn’t audit us if they didn’t. Why on earth do they refuse to tell us? If they did, they wouldn’t need to audit us in the first place. Just check if we paid the money you charged us. Other countries do it like that! No more all-nighters poring over a mess of dimly lit papers and spreadsheets and checking tiny little ink numbers with an unreasonable number of calculators. And then there are so many overly specific tax categories. There are so many exceptions and so many rules. Why is it like this?
I could keep going. This goes for everything. Doesn’t it? Why does humanity like to make everything so complicated for itself? Why is it that every single time it tries to make things easier for itself, everything gets so much more involved instead? Why did we invent cities, only to have barely-one-room apartments cost thousands of dollars a month? Why did we invent math? To end up with a curriculum with too much homework, too little support, and no practical uses explained? Why did we invent steam power? Was it to destroy the environment with it? Why did we invent farming? To ruin and overuse our land? Why did we invent the wheel? Just for people to keep getting run over by them? Why did we invent society, only for people to be oppressed, wars to be fought, and great empires to fall?
Except we can’t live without any of these. We can’t live without cities; not everyone can afford a suburban townhouse over an apartment. We can’t live without math (believe it or not); it’s behind almost every innovation made since the 20th century and most innovations before that. We still can’t live without steam power; our dependence on fossil fuels builds upon it, and almost every kind of electricity plant uses it. We will never be able to live without farming; all consumer-available food comes from it. We can’t live without the wheel; every land vehicle imaginable and every device that moves uses it. We can’t live without society; it’s what propelled Homo sapiens into its frontmost position on the planet thousands of years ago.
So what happened? Why did we ever advance beyond vague grunting echoing on the dank walls of caves? Homo habilis didn’t. Homo erectus didn’t. Homo neanderthalensis didn’t. Indeed, none of those species of us made any meaningful insight or innovation over their entire evolutionary existence. Why do we innovate? Why do we innovate so hastily that everything piles on top of itself? Why do we build everything upon something else, just to end up with the heaping mess of backstory that is the modern world? Why do we decide to thrive on this complexity?
But not one of these questions has any one correct answer. Everyone has their own opinion and their own answer. And if you start asking “why?” as we have for the past 935 words, you just might find it. It’s your job to find your reason. So get out there and start asking questions. You might find the answer you’ve been looking for your whole life.
Ask why.
Cause why not?