Never anyone but the end user

We love technology

We love to make it, work with it, work in it, roll around in it, play with it, even worship it.

We love technology in its purest forms because…well, I don’t know why anyone else loves it, but I love it because of how it not only solves some of our most life-threatening problems but also makes the life we save even better, worth living and dare I say happier.

Sometimes this isn’t true but, often enough, it is.

Virtually no one else cares

What I’m about to write will win me very few friends and may even alienate some parents who once thought of me as a friend. But it has to be said for sake of argument.

Here goes:

If you are a parent, please know: no one loves your children as much as you do, and no one ever will.

Your children may be lucky to have been raised well enough to find someone with whom to grow a sustainable, long-lasting love. They may get married, or not, and in any case stay with someone for 40, 50, 60 years or more.

But it won’t be, can’t be, the same sort of love, nor as consuming, intense and blind as the love of a parent for a child.

What are you getting at, you ogre?

Back to tech.

We do not have a parent-child relationship with the abstraction called “technology,” but we do have a loving relationship with it. We love it for its own sake, like an artist loves art for its own sake.

We find something in our work with, in and around technology that excites and sustains us. We think it’s “cool!” when our app is downloaded a million times, when we acquire more customers, when more people love our technology as much as we do.

But they do not love our technology as much as we do

To them, those people out there, those ingrates, those end users, our beautiful technology is nothing more or less than a tool. Like a toothbrush. Or a butter knife. Or a broom.

They don’t think about it most of the day. Even when they use it, they just expect it to work.

If it works, they continue to ignore it. If it doesn’t, we hear about it soon enough.

They have their own day-to-day love affair

They have their own thing that keeps them getting up in the morning.

We’re only invited into their lives to facilitate.

They do not love our technology as much as we do, and they never will.

But we need them to keep using it in order to continue living our day-to-day love affair.