When I learned that Steve Jobs had died, it was in a manner absolutely devoid of technology–I overheard one co-worker whisper the news across a desk to another. But, in testament to how technology has conditioned us, I didn't join their conversation to ask about details but instead rushed to Google, seeking confirmation. After several minutes of fruitless searching–and just when I thought the report might have been another Twitter hoax (of which I learned there had been several)–I had a thought to check the Apple website and found their solemn homepage.
I had an immediate sensation–physical and sinking–and I realized that I was feeling genuine sadness at the news. And–don't get me wrong–I wasn't exactly sure why.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":688898,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"gbunfiltered,","session":"D"}']Of course, I have experienced the common human empathy at learning that another human being is gone forever, even one who is a total stranger. But the news about Steve Jobs' death felt like news that, if not about a friend, was at least about a regular acquaintance. Someone who might have sat at a desk next to me. And this was obviously not the case. I had never met him, never seen him in person or–until viewing a YouTube video a few months ago–never even heard the sound of his voice.
I assumed that some of my emotional reaction might have been a result of personal coincidence and projection. Before law, I had worked in and taught web design, which meant that, by trade, I had been a devotee of Apple even when Apple was faltering (and, believe me, I still regret not buying shares). By chance, the director of my department had also volunteered for a pancreatic cancer foundation and had told me the grim statistics of the disease. So when Jobs made public his diagnosis and that his form of pancreatic cancer was (relatively) curable, I knew the bullet he had dodged.
At 56, Jobs was also not much younger than my father, also a thin, balding man sporting a greying beard and an affinity for comfortable shoes. So Jobs' death obviously accentuated my father's mortality and consequently my own. It also reinforced that my own worries about dying "before my time" had begun shifting away from the selfish fear of losing the world to the fear of leaving my own children behind in it alone and unprepared. With respect to Steve Jobs, I'd had flash of that empathy a few months back, after he resigned from Apple, when I read that he'd named one of the early Apple computers after his first daughter Lisa. I wondered what legacy I'd eventually be leaving my own.
And this is what I didn't really understand about my reaction, because–and, again, I don't mean anything critical–Steve Jobs is not typically the kind of person who would have touched or inspired me. I don't aspire to entrepreneurship, don't really follow the business world except in passing. I also generally don't think of myself as feeling personally connected to those whose work I admire. When I consider the artists and other strangers who have affected me, the list is short and seems to stem mostly from being exposed to their work at a time that, only serendipitously, matched up with the concerns of my own life. I don't know, for instance, if I had read the "tragically romantic" Hemingway for the first time as a man in my thirties rather than my teens, whether I could have thought of him as anything but dour and self-absorbed.
But, unlike an author from whom I may have read a thousand hard-wrought pages, I don't feel like I know what Steve Jobs thought about anything. And, from what I have seen reported of him as a person, he was not someone I would have liked very much. He was apparently temperamental, harsh, and arrogant. After his death, I learned that he had even spent years in court denying that Lisa was his child.
But I was sad to hear of his passing, and that sadness was honest, and it came from somewhere. And the nearest I can figure, it is because he helped create a lot of the things that allow us to share moments with the people we do know and love, the people who are not strangers. The other day, I copied the entire contents of my wife's iPhone onto our computer. She'd carried it with her everywhere, and it had hundreds of photographs and movie clips of our daughters growing up. In a few keystrokes, I was able to sit beside her and watch a time-lapse slide show of the last two years of our lives.
Steve Jobs' company gave us many of these things, and–though it is probably unfair to all of the others who worked there–he was the public face of that company. I don't know them, or him, but because of them I know my own girls a little better.
And that seems a fair legacy.