What if all the old things were new?

When I was a kid, maybe in third grade, I got my first pair of glasses. I hated them, hated that I had to wear them, hated that they made me look like the nerd I suspected I was. (I was.) This was a long time ago, and things like Lasik were still very new, but I had read about it (like I said, nerd), and I wanted it.

That was never going to happen for a lot of reasons: My parents didn’t have any money, ethical doctors would be disinclined to perform experimental treatments on children, your eyes are constantly changing during childhood so whatever they did wouldn’t stick anyway—but still. I wanted it.

Instead, I took my frustration out on my lenses. I was a little shit—I can’t imagine how my parents, who didn’t have a lot of disposable income, felt when they saw that I had used the metal edge of his spiral notebook to scratch up the lenses of the glasses they had gotten me.

None of it, obviously, made me see better. And at one point my mom went ahead and asked the doctor about about the fancy surgeries, just to help me understand why that would not be happening, why I would be stuck with glasses (and eventually contacts, although we were still a few years away from cheap disposables). And he said something that stuck with me. He said that if laser surgery had been the only way to treat poor vision over the years, and then someone invented glasses, people would be thrilled. They’d finally be able to stop committing to expensive surgery and instead have an easy, convenient, affordable way to see better.

I don’t think that made me feel much better about my glasses. (Eventually, about five years ago, I got the Lasik anyway.) But it’s something I think about a lot, this idea that the value of things isn’t tied to their newness, that if we can remove the context of what’s new, or what’s traditional, we can see things in a way that might tell us more about what we actually need and want.

A few years ago, armed with an Alexa thingy I’d been handed as a promo at SXSW, I replaced a bunch of the lightbulbs in our house with smart lights. I’d bought a couple, they seemed neat and useful, and I started going room-by-room. I could turn on all of the lights as soon as I walked in the door, just by speaking the words aloud. I felt like a magician.

There are moments when that’s useful—say it’s dark out and you’ve got two armfuls of groceries—but mostly, if that had been the only way to turn on the lights I’d ever known, and someone invented a switch on your wall you could flip to make everything work without first having to talk to a fucking robot, I’d have signed up for that, too.

“What if the new thing were old, and somebody just came up with the old thing today” is a useful device. Sometimes it shows you different things than the lesson of the lights and the Lasik!

Let’s apply it to health care policy: “What if everyone were on the same insurance plan they paid for with taxes, and then someone introduced a new health care system where you got your insurance through your job, and they could change which doctors were in your network and what it covered every year, and if you stopped working there you wouldn’t know what would happen if you got sick” doesn’t sound like the one most of us would pick.

“What if every communication you had with your friends and family, even things you didn’t ultimately send to them, were constantly monitored by a company that created a detailed profile of everyone that they used to sell them both products they didn’t need and, more insidiously, belief systems that furthered the aims of authoritarian governments, and then someone invented, I dunno, the fucking postal service?”

(Now might be a good time to add that I’ve deleted my Facebook account, finally, after a year of telling myself that I wouldn’t post from it anymore, but that I needed to have one for work.)

I try to remind myself to think about things this way when I can, both because I’m attracted to new and shiny things, and because it’s useful for me to realize that the world we’ve built isn’t the only way things have to be. A lot of the things that make up our world are just things someone created, and if someone had created different things, the world would look differently. I don’t remember a lot of the things adults said to me when I was in third grade (I didn’t even really pay attention to it at the time, mostly), but sometimes, things just stick with you.