Change and Advancement

Why is advancing to new things so hard? Gosh do I want to talk about it...

After reading Andrew Smith’s recent post on the QWERTY keyboard format, I started thinking a lot about change. Change is a natural advancement both personally and on a societal scale, but the resistance that follows is just as natural as the change that comes before it. At the time, my exact thoughts were as follows…

It's really interesting hearing discussions over comfort/tradition over efficiency though. I often wonder if these are the sorts of things that stop a lot of big advancements... though the question remains, is advancement necessary if the thing we're comfortable with is working just fine?

Well, that’s certainly a fun question to ask (that I wish I had worded better), but I think the answer to my thought is a lot more basic than it is profound: 

It depends.

Yup, that’s it. Thanks for reading, see you next week…

Okay, that’s not an entirely fair answer. Except, it is true. I remember a class on evolutionary biology in my undergraduate, and the professor once said you could answer any question in the class with ‘it depends’ and finish with a passing grade.Now as funny as that is, it isn’t the most satisfactory or complete answer, so let’s parse it out a little. 

(Disclaimer: I’m tackling change on a personal level, mostly because the confounds and influences on a larger scale are a bit outside of my wheelhouse.)

When I was 12, I wrote my first novel - it was probably more of a novella actually. I wrote it by hand on college ruled paper (I had a disdain for wide ruled most of my life) with a pen. Everytime I finished a page, I’d fold it into a little rectangle and put it with the rest under a clip. It’s sitting right near me as I’m writing this now… in a box… that will remain unopened.

When I finished it, I had this amazing idea: I should type that story out. Yes, the science fiction thriller of a 12 year old’s mind needed to be made into a manuscript for other 12 year olds to read, of course! My dad let me use his work computer on a weekend and his printer and off I went on Microsoft word.

By the end of the weekend I had struggled through typing the first chapter. The first grueling chapter. I remember being so proud of myself. Maybe I’d email it to a publishing company and they’d think I was a genius and decide to buy my amazing book. I printed it out, put the pages in a sleeve, and then (and only then) did I begin to read the fruit of my weekend’s labor.

I’m sure many of you can already see the problem already.

My heart deflated. I noticed spelling errors, grammatical irregularities, and dialogue so clunky, so terrible, that I didn’t even finish reading it. I remember being so upset and thinking I’d never type a story ever again. No. From then on, I wrote by hand, and if you couldn’t read my handwriting, that wasn’t my problem. I think it is fair to point out that most of the issues weren’t the computer’s fault at all, but a much younger me would’ve disagreed.

Who needs computers anyways? The words come easier by hand. I can see it better in my mind when I write each letter down. There I was, a young child rejecting modernity and embracing the great tradition of writing by hand.

That was until my sophomore year of highschool. I had an English teacher who required us to use google drive for our final paper. I spent months submitting hand-written papers. Hiding from that advancement forward, dreading the final project.

But in the end I knew I had to do it. 

I stayed up late the week before it was due. I forced myself to type. Back then, my typing skills were miserable. I typed with one finger at a time, slowly parsing out each letter. Yes, for all the typing classes I had taken in my adolescent years, I never quite took to it. I struggled and struggled and struggled, but gosh by the end of it… I actually started to like it. 

Could you believe it? When I had a reason to adapt, I adapted beautifully. I needed time, and yes my typing skills were still lacking (they developed somewhere along the way), but I started to realize how much better it was for me in this particular situation.

So, what’s the point of all this? Does comfort and tradition tend to hold back advancement? It can, yes.

BUT I think good advancement is situational and dependent. I found the cloud system of google drive extremely helpful and useful in the future beyond being required to use it for a class. Not only that, but I’ve found it amazing to use while working on my own personal projects. But sometimes from an emotional perspective, I want to feel every word, I want to write out something that I can scratch down and experience as I let it pour onto paper (also for those interested in learning and memory, your brain codes information better when you write by hand rather than type).

I spoke with Andrew of

Goatfury Writes

a little more and he was kind enough to share some of his thoughts with us:

LL’s resistance to typing might seem trivial, but it echoes a timeless skepticism towards new technologies. Let me give you a couple of examples of this from history. 

Once upon a time, a philosopher angrily railed against the invention and adoption of writing. He said it would erode human memory, leading to dumber people, and that face-to-face interaction was the only sort of communication worth doing. 

This fellow’s name was Socrates, and he is revered today for his contributions to philosophy and human wisdom. 

Was he entirely wrong? Probably not–I don’t know about you, but I have a very hard time remembering anyone’s phone number these days, and any time I need an answer I might otherwise have committed to memory, I’ll usually reflexively reach for my phone. I also tend to avoid in-person meetings for almost all communication, although I do agree that in-person is the best way to communicate important things. 

Fast forward a couple of millennia: the Luddites of the 19th century might be the most vivid example of this concept. They resisted technological progress, first and foremost, because they were steadily losing their jobs to it. This is a natural knee-jerk response, but who among us would prefer to live in the days before automation and industrialization? I wouldn't. 

Was it worth the trade-off, though? You bet it was. 

This is the very nature of progress: you have to leave something behind in order to gain something else, and it’s up to us to take the time to understand these trade-offs. 

These historical anecdotes underscore a poignant truth: the value of change is often only appreciated in hindsight. The trade-offs seem steep when we're in the midst of them, but history has shown us that adaptation often leads to unanticipated benefits. What feels like a loss in the short term may be the foundation for a leap forward in the long run.

Awesome insight! If you’ve spent any time in the Substack writing community then I’m sure you’ve read Andrew’s stuff, but if you haven’t then definitely check him out! The historical insight into this is absolutely fascinating and profound, and I’m really thankful that Andrew was willing to carry on some of this conversation in our little collaboration here.

Now that we’ve talked a little about personal and historical perspectives, there’s one last thing I want to note. In neuroscience, there’s a great phrase that people who have taken any neuro-phys course has probably heard at least once in their lives, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” What’s this mean? Well to put it simply, when a collection of neurons all act at once they ‘fire’ and then once they get used to firing together, they’re more likely to fire together again - they become ‘wired’ to each other. So, when I learn to do something - let’s say typing - there’s a collection of neurons in my brain having an absolute rave in my head firing off together, and the more they do that, the more comfortable they get together. They fire and fire and fire, and then they wire - and what do you know?

That’s a memory.

That’s an action.

That’s the beauty of the brain doing something in tandem, and deciding “Okay, this is the thing I’m doing from now on.” When you remember a moment in time, that’s the same neurons from that experience firing all over again, reminding you of that distant memory. When you pull out a pen and write down a letter you’ve written a million times before, the same neurons start to fire for that action as they did when you were learning how to write those letters all those years ago.

Here’s the amazing thing though, when you find an easier way to do it that takes less work and less energy? The brain likes that more. Neuroscientists like to joke that the brain is the most selfish organ in the body. It consumes the most energy out of any organ, and everything you do is because that hunk of meat is firing off electrical impulses just for you. This is of course all hypothetical, but I think part of the reason that advancement doesn’t always stick for us is because it doesn’t always consume less energy compared to actions that are already hardwired… at least not at first.

Neurons wired together don’t want to rewire for a new task if the original task works fine… unless it takes less energy.

So, friends, learning new things is hard. Replacing new novel things with the most comfortable things is even harder. Of course, I’m using the perspective of writing on this because that’s what I’m here for, but I think personal experience, historical insights, and some basic neuroscience can show us that advancement is hard on a personal level, but not impossible. And sometimes we don’t need it but sometimes we do…

It depends.

Thanks for reading, friends! Stay tuned next week for more Trials of Astra. I’ve been loving writing here on Substack and I couldn’t be more thankful to the community here and the lovely people I’ve met so far.