Inevitable

There are a lot of common arguments that fail to hold up to scrutiny. And I'm not even talking about the controversial ones--that if we are descended from apes via evolution, then that gives us permission to be totally uncivilized like apes--but ones we all know and hear and use every day. 'I wouldn't have done that' might seem like a reasonable thing to say but when it comes down to it, you don't know what you would have done in any given situation unless you were there at the exact time under identical circumstances because any change at all could result in a totally different outcome.

But the one that holds the least amount of water for how common it is isn't really even an assertion at all. It just states that your life would be less fulfilled without a particular very basic object or concept. 'Without Person X, we wouldn't even have Invention Y!'

To be fair it's perfectly true. Certain people invented certain things and without those people we wouldn't have them. But it's not as big a deal as people think and the implication that your life would be somehow harder or less fulfilling easily falls apart when you consider a few basic facts.

First of all, you can't miss something you don't know exists. How many of us thought our lives would be radically transformed by cell phones fifteen or even just ten years ago? We got on just fine without them even though a lot of people today can't function if they don't have theirs, as evidenced by the number of people who completely lose their shit when they misplace their phones. Without some feature or other, life would be different but you wouldn't feel deprived because you would have no basis for comparison. I'm not saying things wouldn't change, I'm just saying you wouldn't notice it.

Secondly, there's nothing inevitable about anything. Especially human inventions. This is the bigger point. What no one stops to consider is that every single manmade object in the world first had to be specifically thought of and developed somewhere at some point by somebody. They may seem perfectly natural and some are quite intuitive--for instance, shoes make perfect sense--but others don't seem to have any real practical application--like hats. Who thought of hats? Except for maybe keeping you slightly less damp in the rain, they don't serve any obvious purpose, so why think of them in the first place?

There's also no guarantee that if something hadn't been invented when it was, it would have been invented at all. Because, again, nothing about life is inevitable. If someone didn't specifically come up with it, it probably wouldn't occur to anybody to do so. Particularly when you consider the sheer number of world-changing inventions that were initially shunned or believed useless. The telephone, the single most valuable patent in the history of the US Patent Office, for the first few years was regarded as insignificant and a passing phase that would have no future with mankind. Edison himself said the telephone was 'just an electrical toy'. But then, Thomas Edison was completely shit at working out what inventions were going to be successful and which were going to fail spectacularly. He invested significant amounts of money and many years of his life to concrete houses, which failed on every conceivable level to make any kind of cultural impact. Which is also why you've never heard of them until now.

I'm hardly making an argument here against modern inventions. They're just a part of life adn I'm grateful for all the ones I use on a daily basis and sometimes take for granted. All I'm saying is that neither my life nor yours nor anyone else's would be significantly negatively changed without them. And even if they were, you wouldn't realize it. If nobody invented the wheel, it probably wouldn't occur to anyone to stick a round solid object beneath a heavy load for ease of transport.

What it all comes down to is you can't miss what you never had, a sentiment that in the end sounds way more poignant than I actually mean.