Steve and Me

When Steve Jobs died of cancer a couple of weeks ago at 56, he was eulogized worldwide as something of a secular God—the electronic genius whose inventions and vision did much to shape the world in which we live today.

I felt some sadness that he’d died so young, but otherwise was a complete bystander to the global canonization. While you can’t spell either my first or last name without an “i,” there are no “i” products in our house—nary an iMac, iPhone, iPod or iPhone to be found. Not because I favor competing labels, but because I’m pretty much a Luddite. Yes, I know the ship of change has long since sailed, and that I must come to grips with the inevitable death of everything from newspapers and radio to mystery and intrigue (since every question now can be instantaneously answered by a Google search and any entrancingly mystical figure from one’s past can be made mundane and contemporary on Facebook). I know those things, but I don’t have to like them. And I don’t. (Except when I do. Like when I use a search engine to decipher in an instant some long-vexing song lyric, or to find out who that guy was in that movie. I don’t claim to be consistent.)

So, anyway, let’s just say there’s a lot about the world Steve Jobs helped create that I don’t like. For that reason, while others mourned his passing with much the same passion that I imagine earlier generations felt at the deaths of such historical game-changers as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, I regarded it with the shrug one might direct at Pandora’s box long after all the chaos within it had escaped.

I suppose the one thing Jobs’ disciples and I always had in common was seeing him much more as a symbol than a man. To the faithful, he represented the happy interconnectedness of today and the possibility of a future in which no gratification whatsoever will be delayed. To me, he embodied the end of the heretofore familiar and the certainty of ever-escalating levels of noise.

But then, in this morning’s print Washington Post (ironically enough), I read an article about Steve Jobs, the newly published biography that the very private i-con of the Internet Age had authorized, and for which he’d granted author Walter Isaacson more than 40 interviews. According to the book, Jobs had handpicked Isaacson, whose biographical subjects have included Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, because he wanted his children to know why he “wasn’t always there for them” and “to know why, and to understand what, I did.” (Jobs is survived by four children. And yes, I Googled that.)

Today’s article brimmed with facts I hadn’t known about Jobs—not that I’d known much of anything. It humanized him and made him relatable to me. I discovered, for instance, that folk singer Joan Baez had been among his pre-marriage lovers, and that a college friend of Jobs thinks the major draw was her previous relationship with Bob Dylan, who Jobs revered. I found out that Jobs had been adopted, that he'd both praised and treated shabbily his adoptive parents, and that angst over his birth origins had fueled a vague but lifelong spiritual quest that had manifested itself in a pilgrimage to India, extreme diets and even primal-scream therapy.

The book, according to the article, on balance lauds Jobs, who nevertheless had no editorial control. But Isaacson also concedes that his subject often was a bully and a jerk. He “largely abandoned” his first child for the first 10 years of her life. He cheated Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak during one of their first business ventures. He had a mean streak even close friends couldn’t understand or reconcile.

The secular deity also spent years studying Zen Buddhism, and is quoted by Isaacson in the book as having said, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.”

It’s not like I felt, after reading all that, that Steve Jobs and I were soul mates who never met. I still neither know nor care much about his life’s work, and I probably won’t buy the biography because the i-stuff figures to loom large in the narrative. Spoiler alert: I never bedded Joan Baez. I never had kids with whom to have problematic relationships. I never had to wrestle with my own adoption. (Although every time I compare my parents’ beliefs and worldviews with my own, I wonder how we possibly can be blood.)

Still, I like knowing these things about Steve Jobs. It isn’t as if I ever thought he was an automaton, or that he didn’t put is pants on one leg at a time just like me (unless he’d perhaps programmed a robot to perform that task). But neither had I imagined that he and I had such big and small things in common as theological skepticism, struggles with civility and a soft spot for 1960s folk singers. If I’d ever taken the time to give Steve Jobs’ personal life and beliefs a single thought before reading that article—and I hadn’t—I guess I’d have assumed he’d died a never-married or divorced childless atheist, who’d found only his work sustaining and only the promise of perpetual technological advancement spiritually satisfying. If he’d listened to music at all, I’d have assumed he was into electronica created not by musicians in a studio but by some masterful melder of computer-generated sound. (A subsequent Web search revealed that Jobs in fact had been a huge fan of the Beatles. You think maybe "Apple" should’ve been my clue?)

Which isn’t to say that Jobs’ work wasn't the driving force in his life. But, like everyone else on the planet, he was much more complex and multifaceted than his CV would indicate. Well, duh! Except that, until today, I hadn’t really internalized what was an intellectual given.

There's this, too: Nothing humanizes any giant like death—whether that outsized figure is a visionary like Steve Jobs, or the late madman megalomanic Moammar Gaddafi, or King of Pop/Peter Pan/space alien Michael Jackson. The Big Sleep truly is the great equalizer. We're all ashes and dust, destined to return to same.

So, where is Steve Jobs now? If he lives on in any sense other than our collective memories, given what he told Walter Isaacson, he’s half-surprised to find himself there. Wherever “there” is. He may or may not still be wearing that black turtleneck with the black jeans, or sporting those ubiquitous wire-rim glasses. Maybe he’s been reincarnated as another person, or a dog or a horse. Perhaps he’s part of an energy field currently zipping across the universe. Who the hell knows? He didn’t. I don’t.

That, and all the other things that made him human, have changed how I look at Steve Jobs. Now I need to similarly reassess my attitude toward the fruits of his work and his societal legacy. Because I know I must, sooner or later, come to terms with that world. It’s not going anywhere. And it won’t be the death of me.

Something will be the death of me. Perhaps it’ll be the Big C, in which case my man Steve and I will have shared something pretty major. But whatever ends up snuffing me, it almost surely won’t be the i-Anything. And I do objectively know that all those devices he created have their uses. I understand, for instance, that you can download pretty much the entire Bob Dylan and Joan Baez catalogs on one of Jobs' portable music-player gadgets.