If You Make Things, You Are My Brother: The Tailor

Sometimes things are only different. Other times they are plain worse.

Fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. Even people, who are at least 14 percent smarter than fish I’ve known, don’t think much about the air around them while they’re passing through it. Culture is a form of atmosphere. You pass through it, but it yields so easily that you ignore its effects. Then one day there’s a hurricane, or a drought, and you notice it all of a sudden. No one thinks about the Interstate Highway System as a concept while they’re driving on it. Well, no one but me, I gather.

If you like novelty, you can easily be persuaded that plain worse is better. If you dislike novelty, you can easily be convinced that anything novel is plain worse. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a world with only these two types of people, and it’s driving me to distraction.