Our national crisis isn’t just about people who are overtly involved in hatred and violence. We can be passively involved in other peoples’ suffering. The number of people who feel hated is dwarfed by the number of people who feel forgotten or marginalized.
But we can be a part of the solution by reaching out to people who might feel cast aside. Say hello to that friend you haven’t seen in a while. Take a coworker you don’t speak with very often out for lunch.
This is what love looks like. It isn’t about chocolate hearts and roses. It’s engaging with other people, and making them know they’re important. I’ll part with a quote from one of my personal heroes, you know him as Mr. Rogers:
Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.
So far, I feel as though everyone having the discussion about the iPhone ditching the headphone jack for “lightning headphones” is missing the point. It’s not about jacks and ports, it’s about the wires.
Wires are a bad user experience. Having wires hanging out of your computer/tablet/phone/etc. is a mess. You trip over them, they’re in the way, they’re ugly. Down with wires. Whether the iPhone ships with lightning headphones or not, the long term future of headphones doesn’t have wires in the equation, and Apple knows this.
This idea led me to an interesting thought regarding renewed reports that Apple is developing a new display with GPU. Maybe it’s not just an attempt to power a 5k display sending minimal data across a cable, maybe it’s an attempt to skip the cable altogether.
Killing off an entrenched port like the headphone jack seems a little like something Apple would do, but I’d bank on them trying to serve the more noble goal of removing cables altogether.
Update: Some further thought on the topic yielded the following tweet.
And John Gruber, taking it a step further:
Plug them in to the device you want to pair them with, click “Pair”, and you’re done. Easy to charge, too.