A Computer Is a Hammer
I'm not a mechanic. I don't ever want to be a mechanic. I'm not at all interested in the way cars work. I gladly pay someone to do maintenance on my vehicles and when they break, I know a guy that I trust to fix them. It's always expensive and I hate it, but it is what it is. What I am is a computer guy. I wanted to be a computer guy pretty much from the moment I bought my first one in 1993. I taught myself how to use that IBM PS1 Consultant 486/33SX and I haven't stopped learning about the things since then. I was able to get literally out of prison (where I was a guard) and later off the factory floor into the server room. I forged an entire career working on different aspects of personal computers and network infrastructure and in retirement, I still do IT support because I enjoy it and it gives me meaning.
I want to tell you that a computer is a tool, similar in may ways to a hammer. When you buy a hammer, you intend to use it to hit stuff with. When you buy a computer, I hope you intend to use it. I understand if you have a relationship with you computer the way I have one with my car. You don't want to break it, so you follow the guidelines. Good for you. But know this, short of physically damaging the thing by pouring orange juice over the keyboard or repeatedly dropping it, you are not going to ruin it. Whatever software woes you encounter can be fixed, maybe at some expense to you, but it can be fixed.
But, I'm not really talking to the technologically challenged here. I'm actually talking to the people who own a modern, fully equipped machine and stress over using the "wrong" browser because it might use "too many resources." I'm directing this at the people who refuse to install useful browser extensions on the brand new M3 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM because browser extensions "affect performance." Are you one of this people who carefully monitor their machine so they don't get too many programs running at startup and thus miss out on productivity enhancing tools like clipboard managers, menubar managers, app launchers and the like? Some people monitor their computer's resources like they might have a gun put to their head any minute while being forced to make it edit video or do statistical analysis. It's just weird and unfortunate to me.
You own this amazing piece of hardware that is capable of doing an incredible amount of work and yet you limit how you use it at every turn so as not to overburden the poor thing. You install amazing software like Obsidian, an extensible note taking app with over 1600 available plugins and then you don't install any of them and take pride in your Spartan setup. The flip side to this are the people who learned terminal based editing programs half a lifetime ago and insist that "all I need is emacs and vim". Yeah, and you could ride a horse to work too, or maybe scratch notes in the dirt with a sharp stick.
My philosophy is simple. I bought my Mac to use it to the very limit of it's potential. I intend to try every single application that interests me. If I think a program will make using my computer more enjoyable and make me more productive doing things I like to do, I am going to install it and run it. I will use the programs I like all at the same time until such a time as I decide that something isn't working the way I want and then I will make adjustments. I will not stress over my CPU and RAM usage unless something isn't working correctly. I will just about fill up my 1TB hard drive and then and only then will I offload some stuff to the cloud or an external drive.
I get asked for computer advice every single day of my like and I don't mind a bit. I want people to enjoy technology and I declare a pox on those of you who neurotically discourage people from using cool tools or experimenting because of the boogeyman of "it might slow your computer down."
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