I recently cleaned out my most dormant of closets. There in the back, under an Indiana Jones–like layer of dust and cobwebs, was the Macintosh Plus I bought in 1989 and used as an undergrad and grad student.
I wonder...
I plugged the museum piece in and heard the distantly familiar grunting of its external hard disk. Soon, I was looking at a time capsule from 20 years ago. I raced downstairs to see how valuable this machine is now. (Answer: not.) I got distracted with some work, but the relic upstairs beckoned. I wonder what kind of a pretentious twit I was in my 20s? The evidence is in suspended animation, right up there. Since investigating involved a flight of stairs, it took me several hours to get curious enough to look.
The first thing I fired up was a grammar tutorial I created in grad school called Wrangling Modifiers. (That last phrase is, in fact, a misplaced modifier, an irony I have elected to keep.) I'd programmed it in primitive old Hypercard, which I thought would be good for a derisive snort or three. And so I looked at my work of 20 years ago, eager to mock my own youthful impudence and pretenses.
What I saw floored me. Frankly, it's taken me several days just to come out of the fog of depression and write about it.
It was brilliant. I was brilliant. In a way I haven't been in a very long time. I don't even remember being this capable, so long ago it was. The program itself was amazingly sophisticated, given the medium, and its content was best-in-class. I could see the months of copious pedagogical research, lab testing, and meticulous execution.
Two feelings crush my soul:
- I haven't done anything approaching this quality in the 20 years since this project I had just randomly opened.
- I am no longer capable of this quality of work. Not even a little. My younger self was staggeringly brighter and more competent than my present self.
I'm not sure what do do with this feeling. Sure, I'd like to blame Microsoft for 16 years of plopping me into meetings about increasing organizational visibility. Sure, I'd like to blame the intellectual ravages of age. But I suspect this is my fault. Here was the proof before me; I've suffered a truly staggering intellectual fall. And I don't think I was pushed. I think I leaped.
Cue the self-loathing. Right after I power down the Mac and watch The Amazing Race 24.