The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Do you ever find yourself asking: Why does this crap (whatever crap you are dealing with) have to be so hard?

I know I do, and see it all the time in others.

Another way to put the question: Why does life have to be so hard?

This is not just a question for poor people or those lacking a college education. Have you ever dealt with rich people? They seem just as conflicted and depressed as everybody else, maybe more so.

Just for the heck of it, I performed a Bing search with this question in a private Safari web browser window to see what would come up. This article from Psychology Today magazine popped up high in the search.

5 Natural Reasons Why Life Is Hard: We’re selfish, emotional hypocrites. But somehow we get by.

So according to this overly simplistic pop psychology article, life, work, dealing with modern technology and other humans is hard (to paraphrase and summarize) because people possess a selfish gene passed down through evolutionary psychology over deep time, we’re all hypocrites, believing we all have free will is wishful thinking, we’re all full of emotions including anxiety, and we are competitive beings who have a hard time getting along with others.

But does this really explain why some people find it so hard to make a computer slide show work on a projector? (It’s a PC, stupid, built for geeks. Spend more and buy yourself an Apple-Mac).

Or find their way to a live music performance at a bar on a complicated system of roads, even with a smart phone GPS mapping system that talks (hey Google, you suck)?

Or to fix a problem with a car engine controlled by a computerized brain (why can’t we go back to the days when cars were simple)?

Or to run a political campaign for the House or Senate to defeat a right-wing fascist fool (Hey Dr. Oz, why did you pose with Hitler’s car if you are not a Nazi sympathizer)?

Or why readers find it so hard to find facts from reading information on the web or from listening to the radio or watching television (or an idiotic social media feed designed by hackers and programmers, not journalists)?

These are just some of the quintessential questions of our time.

Sure there is an evolutionary basis for some of this, but that’s not all.

The more complicated a system becomes, and the longer a bureaucracy surrounding it develops, things should become simpler and easier to use. But this does not seem to be the way things work.

The more effort that goes into building a complicated system (a system of roads or computers and networks) the more complicated and hard it seems to be for human beings to figure out how to use them.

Just ask Vladimir Putin why the old Soviet Union bureaucracy collapsed. Socialist Communism was supposed to make life easier and more fair for all people. But a capitalist system somehow found a way to provide more food and other goods for people to use and survive on, making them more happy, if not sublimely so.

Can’t we just all settle on the fact that we need both? A market economy with a social safety net?

No, some politicos have to say. It’s either a democratic republic or an authoritarian dictatorship.

Some countries, notably the British, found a way to build a basic democratic society and have their kings and queens too. That’s not working out so well these days, so they may soon have to find a way to modify their system.

The United States of America has gotten by for nearly 250 years with a semi-chaotic democratic republic with no kings or queens or dictators (at least before Trump came along), but this country faces a constant crises of confidence these days. Half the people in the country want to keep trying. The other half seem ready to give up and hire a dictator, mob boss, rat king to run things.

I would just like to know why the oil pressure gauge on a Dodge, Roadtrek Media camper van keeps dropping to zero, even though the oil pressure is clearly not zero. It still runs great, even when the gauge says it should die.

Or why something about the engine keeps blowing computers, what mechanics call a CPM?

Why a mechanic trained by Roadtrek says the propane system is working fine, yet the stove, water heater and other natural gas appliances only work for a day or two when the propane tank is filled to the brim?

I want to scream and pull all my hair out. But that does not seem to hold the solution to finding out the answer to any of these questions, which have stumped mechanics from Mobile, Alabama, to North Carolina, Tennessee and Thurmont, Maryland?

HELP!

When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started Apple Computers, they vowed to make things work easier and prettier. Bill Gates stole the idea and did the same thing on the cheap, making things far more complicated for users and more profitable for hackers.

When Mark Zuckerberg first built Facebook, he made it simpler for average nobodies to put up a web page for themselves. But Steve Bannon and Donald Trump came along and used it for evil.

Google made searching the web easier, and to post a video and share it on YouTube.

But have you ever seen the back end of a Google interface? This is a system totally built for geeks, hackers and programmers in the Bill Gates tradition.

Many of the things people find so hard to deal with these days, of course, were built by these geeks, programmers and hackers. Most people are simply not wired for this. It’s simply too new to be part of our evolutionary psychology. Cultural influences will influence our evolution over time.

But how much time?

Can we figure all this out before our time on planet Earth is up?

I’m having serious doubts.