Things We Don't Need to Do Anymore
A Frosty Tale
It’s 1960.
Picture a 15-year-old standing by one of the ramps that leads excited fans up to their seats at a sunny Fenway Park. The 15–year-old is selling candy bars and chips at a counter. The 15-year-old makes money, learns the art of selling things to people, makes small talk about the game, and takes home enough money to buy a new pair of socks, with some left over to put away to save up for a bike someday. Fans look the 15-year-old in the eye when they make their purchase. They notice the 15-year-old’s accent and compliment the 15-year-old’s friendliness and tip the 15-year-old for a job well done.
It’s 1990.
Picture a box—about 6 feet tall and about 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep—situated right by one of the ramps that leads excited fans up to their seats at a sunny Fenway Park. The “box” is actually commonly called a “machine”. More specifically, it is known as a “vending machine”. The machine is plugged into the electrical outlet in the wall because it needs energy to both brightly illuminate what it is selling and to operate the motors that automatically dispense the candy bars and chips that it sells. The machine makes money for Fenway Park, the Red Sox, and the producers of the candy bars and chips.
The machine doesn’t learn or interact or take anything home with it—the machine is already home and it will spend that night and every night thereafter in the same spot it was during the sunny day that the park was filled with more than 30,000 human beings. The fans don’t think at all about the box that they call a machine, unless it fails to mechanically follow orders or the selected snack gets stuck and remains dangling just at the edge of its slot. When this happens, the fans shake the machine, hoping to disorient it enough to cough up the snack they paid good money for. The machine is made up of glass and wires, and microchips and metal coils, and lights and motors, components that may be costly, but just for a moment. The machine’s hourly wage is the cost of the electricity needed to run it.
With the advent of vending machines, 15-year-olds no longer needed to stand behind counters for hours each day.
Should this development be seen as a relief for those teenagers that were doing taxing physical work? Or as a loss of complex and valuable human interactions, replaced by an efficient, yet soulless, mechanical process?
It’s still baseball season, the lingering heat meaning that many people have at least one flavor of ice cream stored back at home in their freezer. As late as the 1970s and ‘80s, most apartment-dwellers and homeowners were still performing an “ancient” ritual that would have a direct affect on that ice cream. It was as annoying as it was laborious: “defrosting the freezer.”
Back then, the mini igloo that holds the refrigerator’s topmost position would slowly build up layers of ice on all sides, the frost eventually expanding into a thick wall, preventing the freezer door from being able to close—it would then be time to “defrost.”
Defrosting in this era felt something like carving a statue out of marble.
After removing the contents of the freezer and placing a bath towel on the floor in front of the fridge, boiling water was carefully poured into a wide pan and placed in the freezer to allow the slow melting process to begin. The blocks of ice surrounding the freezer would eventually start to thin a bit, indicating it was time to start chipping away at the edges with a screwdriver, Norman Bates-style, but without the shower curtain. You might need a break now and then as hands start to freeze and muscles start to ache and as the towel on the floor screams out for a good wringing.
This process was repeated—chip-chip-chipping, replenishing the hot water, re-wringing the towel—until your patience and/or the ice grew thin enough to call it a day. Hopefully, you stuck with it for long enough so that you wouldn’t have to do all of this work over again in a few months.
Millennials and Gen Z’ers “dodged the bullet” on the freezer-defrosting ritual, along with many other tasks and chores that had all but disappeared by the 1990s—activities that were once woven into the fabric of daily life.
By the 90s, most people had purchased what was called a “frostless refrigerator” for their kitchen, likely unaware of the hardship inflicted on their ancestors by their kitchen devices. By the 21st century, frostless fridges had so become the norm that manufacturers went back to simply calling them “refrigerators” again.
Also by the ‘90s, if you needed to raise the window of your car to keep the cold out, you no longer needed to lean over and stretch your arm out as far as it could go to rotate the handle in circles over and over again until the window sealed itself into place; instead, tangles of electrical cables running from cute little window buttons over to electric motors inside the doors could take care of the work for you.
When you lost interest in the TV show you were watching, there was no longer a need to get up from the couch, walk over to the set, and rotate the dial until you found better entertainment, hovering for a while if a commercial was on; remote controls quickly put a stop to all of that.
More recently, we’ve been relieved of activities like traveling to an office to attend in-person workplace meetings or to the nearest store to buy books, socks, groceries, stereo equipment, or clothing. “Reading” a book can be done without buying a physical copy and with one’s eyes closed and headphones on. Many bike riders no longer need to use their pedals to get from point A to point B. You can even make new friends without having to leave your house.
Clearly, each of these innovations have handed us some kind of a gift, whether it be time saved, money saved, energy conserved—or some combination of all three. But is it possible that we’ve lost something as a result of each gift that we’ve been given?
Let’s first admit that we are not the first generations to go through this process.
By the 1920s, thousands of car owners were thankful that they no longer needed to turn a crank to start their car, with the adoption of the electric starter motor which removed that strenuous and somewhat dangerous task from the joy of going for a drive. The same transition happened around that time with airplanes, alleviating the need to go to the front of the plane and spin the propellor to get the engine started. Bicycle riders must have been relieved when climbing a hill no longer required them to flip their rear wheel to access their second-speed gear, the invention of the derailleur making dozens of gears available at the flip of a wrist, without even slowing down.
Going further back in time, people were thankful that they no longer had to wait weeks or months to hear a reply to their written communication (telephones to the rescue!) or gather around the piano for their only source of music (radios and record players!) or write out each book by hand (the printing press!) or craft each nail individually (automated factories!).
All of these changes—from the printing press to the starter motor to the TV remote control and the frostless refrigerator—removed a task from our lives and replaced it with one that required little to no effort. Washing clothes, starting a car, playing music, changing the channel, getting groceries—all formerly required physicality on the part of a human. Each process was, in a way, part of being human.
While it’s true that as each machine takes over a physical task for us, we lose a little more of our human connection to the physical world, I don’t think people lament the fact that our socks were made by automatic knitting machines or that the nails we buy in the hardware store were never touched by human hands. Are there people that would prefer to get out and crank their engine to get it started or to take a short walk just to raise or lower the volume on their television?
Would that 15-year-old Fenway Park worker have preferred to have time frozen in place, gifting them an eternal summer job with countless human interactions? Would they prefer that the thickening ice-walls of time neither melt nor give way to the relentless chipping away of human invention?
The Last Paragraph
What’s Going On Inside the Writer’s Mind:
The idea for this essay came to me quickly, while thinking about how my family once needed to put heavy storm windows up whenever winter approached. The writing then led me by the hand, through the dark—with no hint of where we were going. I had great difficulty finding the proper ending to an essay about things we don’t have to do anymore. I rewrote it many times, but I couldn’t get the ending right.
It still doesn’t feel right.
Should I have ended by summarizing the important things we lose every time the physical gets replaced with the mechanical?
I didn’t want to be be preachy or be that “the old days were better” guy.
Should I have surprised the reader by claiming that there are no real downsides to all of these technological changes?
That might risk of coming off as being contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian.
Should I leave the reader with a series of unanswered questions?
Aren’t I doing that right now?
So I leave it up to you. If you’ve gotten this far and you have thoughts, click the COMMENT button below to tell this newly-minted writer if he went wrong somewhere or what he could have done differently or how you would have wrapped up this story in a neater bow than I feel I was able to.
Thanks,
Anthony
PHOTO CREDITS:
I felt like this essay was heading towards a critique of artificial intelligence. It needs some sort of portal to the present time to wrap it up.
You wrote:
"Should I have surprised the reader by claiming that there are no real downsides to all of these technological changes?
That might risk of coming off as being contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian."
Is no (or little) downside.. unthinkable?
People often seem oddly unsatisfied with the comforts, conveniences, and straight-up advantages of modern life. Compared to the past, we *may* need more therapy, but *definitely* have better teeth.