View from the Precipice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paperless

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by Roman Sympos

 

Ever get asked if you’d like to “Go Paperless”? I do, all the time. Online banking, utility bills, credit cards—anyone (or, these days, anything) handling transactions that involve my money will inevitably ask me this question the instant I log in and, if I tap “No,” repeat the question every login thereafter. (The new alternative to “Yes” is “Maybe Later,” an open invitation to future harassment.)

 

The banks and credit card agencies and utilities would like you to believe they’re only trying to save the planet, as well as your precious time, by weaning you from processed wood pulp. But you can be sure their transcendent priority is saving themselves money, a priority that, like all things transcendent, is and will forever remain invisible to worshippers of convenience.

 

Save time, save labor—hey, save space, reduce clutter, enhance “accessibility.” No more finger-walking through stacks of file-cabinet drawers or rummaging around in that basket of old statements, receipts, and boarding passes you saved until you could make sure your flight to Muncie was credited to your frequent flier account.

 

Those of us of a certain age remember the late, great George Carlin. If you’re of a different age, you can see what you missed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLoge6QzcGY. Carlin was one of stand-up’s most insightful pop culture prophets back in the day (aka, “my day”), putting his finger on the racing pulse of American consumerism and diagnosing the cause from the symptom: mounds of stuff. We weren’t, as the pundits had it, afflicted by greed, whose sufferers find relief by piling up money. We were afflicted by acquisitiveness, which finds relief in piling up things.

 

Now, I’m not here to lament the excesses of consumerism, or more accurately “accumulism,” lamentable as they are. My wife and I have full time jobs gathering, sorting, recycling, donating, and tossing out what I’d estimate to be about three or four metric tons of stuff we’ve gathered over our two lifetimes—more than enough to warrant wails of lament. No, I’m here to lament the demise of paper.

 

Paper has its uses.

 

Take, for instance, accessibility. (This is a true story.)

 

A friend of mine was doing her taxes on Turbotax when she hit one of those time-consuming inconveniences you run into only when using software to save you time and inconvenience. Turbotax couldn’t calculate the capital gain on some stock she’d sold the previous year. The stock was a wedding gift her father had given her half a century ago.

 

She went online to find the cost basis. Nada. Her monthly brokerage statements only went back two years. So she called her broker. Still no luck. His records stopped at two decades. Not far enough.

 

In the early years of their marriage, my friend and her husband would save the printed records of their stock transactions in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in the basement. Could the flimsy carbon copy of the original transfer of ownership be among them?  It could and was. (The folder was in nearly mint condition because it hadn’t been touched since the last time she put it away, in 1975).

 

Going paperless can hinder rather than enhance accessibility.  The deciding factor is time.

 

All things must pass, including us. And when we do, we leave an archive, whether we want to or not. Until the age of digital information, a person’s archive consisted entirely of material objects, including words, and sometimes pictures, on paper. (Many individuals also left copies of their voices on tape recordings or their physical appearance on film.) Carlin says burglars are only interested in your “good stuff,” not “your fourth-grade arithmetic paper.” By good stuff I assume he means your McKintosh amplifier, your Bolex Super 8 movie camera, and your RCA color TV—stuff considered “good” when he was alive. Nowadays he’d have to include your laptop and iPad and Nixplay digital photo frame.  

 

And printed information.

 

Here’s where paper records can prove a liability. That original birth certificate attesting your adoption? That medical report that could cost you your job? That photo of you shaking hands with Jeffrey Epstein? Anything with a credit card number or—horror of horrors!—your social security number. . . .  All vulnerable. It’s enough to keep you staring at the ceiling long after you’ve turned out the lights.

 

So, score one for digitizing: security.

 

Yes, there are breaches. We get the alerts almost daily. But there are also fixes, and they seem to get better every year: fingerprint and facial and voice recognition, randomized passwords and keychains, dual verification. Can a fireproof, double-keyed, 50 lb home safe bolted to the basement wall compete? I guess it depends on your bogeyman.

 

But let’s concede this one to the programmers. After all, the paper recycling bin you leave at the curb each week probably reveals more about your secret life than anything locked in your basement.

 

Now, about that fourth-grade arithmetic paper.

 

Buried under cardboard boxes and manilla envelopes and plastic bins of the stuff scattered from foundation to rooftop throughout our house we’ve discovered caches of memorabilia, both personal and inherited—hand-written letters to and from us, many on blue aerograms or letterhead from hotels; hundreds of photos, some long since faded to red; autographed notes and concert programs; transcripts and report cards and, yes, school assignments, both our kids’ and our own; journals and letters from long dead relatives; cassette tapes sent to parents from as far away as Australia and Finland. And that’s by no means an exhaustive list.

 

Keep or toss?

 

This is a much tougher question than whether or not to hold onto a printed bank statement.

 

Long before Carlin appeared on the scene, Henry David Thoreau offered some advice to those of us suffering from chronic accumulism. “Simplify,” he writes in the first chapter of Walden, or, Life in the Woods. Get rid of your “traps,” by which he meant what Carlin called “stuff”—your furniture and bric-a-brac and all the rest of the ornamental, sentimental, fetishized trumpery of your life. Your trappings are aptly named, and you are the game they grab. Stuff keeps you stuck, impedes your forward motion in life, stunts your growth as a human being. “He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap,” writes Thoreau. “The muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free.” You needn’t resort to such desperate measures. Just do without. Purify yourself. Burn your traps. Then rise like a phoenix from the ashes, new-born and free.

 

Noble advice, which I haven’t the heart to follow. I like the self I was born with and don’t want to exchange it for a new one. But it’s packed too much baggage for the trip, so I’ll try to make do with a roll-aboard. As for “growth? Takes a lot of energy. Tires you out. It can also exhaust everyone in your vicinity. “Again?” they ask, then change the topic or turn away.

 

Marie Kondo gives me permission to keep the things that bring me “joy.” Hmmmm. As I’ve written in this space on a several occasions, joy comes from something you do, not something you get (or keep).

 

I think I’ll settle for holding onto things that bring me pause.

 

In this category I put all the letters and journal entries and poems and essays I labored over that reveal, again and again, what a pompous, self-important, grouchy, resentful, ignorant, naive, and fearful young man I was just out of the gate of childhood and well into what passed for mature adulthood. They are salutary reminders of my limited capacity to understand the world and others and myself, the uselessness of shame and embarrassment, and the need for forbearance and patience at every stage of life, but especially at the stage to which I’ve now arrived, when I look at the younger generations springing up behind me and behold, in every face I meet, an earlier version of myself.

 

They also remind me of the gratitude I owe those who helped the callow young man I was become less so: parents, teachers, friends, siblings, ministers, and those random guides who spoke a formative word or two at crucial choice points. They saw something in me that I didn’t see or even have the confidence to look for, and overlooked what I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge.

 

But is there any good reason, in this list of reasons, to preserve a single cassette, aerogram, photograph, or spiral-bound notebook page long enough to read, see, or listen to it even one more time? I haven’t laid eyes on most of these things in decades. Why start now?

 

Why, in short, keep any of it?

 

Oh yeah. My Legacy.

 

There was a time when the word “legacy” meant some form of wealth bequeathed to descendants: money, property. After a while it was extended to include wisdom or example. “Here’s what I learned. Heed my advice!” “Here’s the life I led. Do likewise!” It could, of course, be used ironically: “Mao left a legacy of terror, and anarchy.”

 

However, my chummy Chatbot tells me that the “true meaning of legacy” extends way beyond hectoring your descendants:

 

It’s the story of your life, character, and positive contributions that shape future generations and how you'll be remembered through your actions, wisdom, relationships, and the positive changes you inspire. It's about your mark on the world, big or small, guiding present actions with future impact in mind, and giving your life deeper purpose. 

 

Whew.

 

I think what my Chatbot has in mind (assuming it has a mind) is what human beings would dismiss as wishful thinking (assuming, wishfully, it can think). Here’s what “legacy” really means today:

 

“Here. Take this. Please.”

 

Carlin was right: your house is just a container for your stuff. Having filled one container with stuff, and soon to vacate, I need to find another.

 

Knock, knock, knock.

 

In the Age of Accumulism, which, not surprisingly, coincides with the Age of Distraction and Forgetting, material legacies are a burden, not a blessing. They take up space. They take up time. They take your legatees away from life and the living. If every personal possession is a “trap,” as Thoreau warned us, then the personal possessions of the dead are a prison barred with obligations.

 

Is that something you’d wish on your worst enemy? 

 

And speaking of wishful thinking, won’t you need an army of descendants to curate your mausoleum of memorabilia?

 

Don’t tell me about the comparative advantages of digitizing all that material. The reduction in space is more than outweighed by loss of time—I mean the loss of time to your heirs. The ease and speed with which the living can now record their every random brain worm and bowel movement outstrips even their own ability to re-view it, let alone process, file, and curate it for the benefit of posterity. Have you seen the selfie-stick brigades walking through the Louvre?  How about the guy blocking his own view of the Grand Canyon on that tiny screen, talking to himself for minutes, even hours, on end? Who’ll want to watch the tedious reality show of his life unfold in what will be, by the time he dies, perfect holographic fidelity? Who will take the time to admire, let alone spare a glance for, a single one of the tens of thousands of digital pics on his external hard drive?

 

That’s assuming the platforms and programs he used to record those moments, along with the machines necessary to retrieve them, haven’t predeceased the digital traces themselves.

 

The process is underway as I write. There’s even a new meaning of “legacy” that’s emerged in the last several years to describe it: “adj. denoting or relating to software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use.”

 

I’ve already got Word documents I can’t open because version 16.105.4 doesn’t give a damn. My local library has a “Library of Things” that includes reel-to-reel tape recorders and floppy drives, media devices no longer found in the wild. There will inevitably come a day when both the software and hardware necessary to make your personal legacy available to future generations becomes “legacy” in this sense, and then it will just be a matter of time before necessity, the mother of invention, invents new versions that will render them “obsolete”: “adj. no longer produced or used; out of date.”

 

Where will your ten-hour documentary of the Trans-Siberian Railroad be then? Nowhere Land.

 

Paper never becomes obsolete. Words do. Entire languages die, speakers become extinct.

 

But paper persists despite all odds, along with anything written on it, including dead languages, which can sometimes be resurrected. In fact, their resurrection usually depends on the traces they left on paper.

 

Papers, I’ll admit, are more fragile.

 

Papers can burn, tear, shred, dissolve to pulp or disintegrate to fragments the size of dandruff. Stored properly, however, they have a better chance of surviving a nuclear winter or a neutron bomb than those hard-drive warehouses in the desert where your data is actually being stored when you send it to “the Cloud.”

 

As for saving the planet, consider this: those data centers consume some 415 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity in a single day, enough to meet the needs of 47 million average households worldwide. And the demand is growing by 15% to 17% per year.

 

So, “legacy” goes to paper.

 

Before you order that walk-in vault, though, consider sparing your descendants the task of curating your legacy at all, in any form. After your kids (if you have any) and grandkids (if your kids have kids) are dead and buried, no one will miss you. Surrounded by the clutter you left behind—real or virtual—they’re more likely to resent you.

 

Paper? Digital? How about “None of the Above?”